AI has become good at producing polished writing, answering questions, and generating ideas in seconds.

But John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of the Nostalab think tank, worries that technology could gradually displace the original, uncommon thinking that has historically driven humanity’s greatest advances.

Nosta compares human thought to a bell curve. Most people cluster in the middle, he said, while the people responsible for the biggest gains are located at the extremes, or what he called the “tails.”

“What we’re seeing is that large language models, particularly when trained with what’s called recursive data (that is, data generated by the AI ​​itself), that bell curve starts to shift,” Nosta told Business Insider.

“We lose our tail. It just becomes a big speed bump,” he said. “What happens there is that it sort of blends into a sea of ​​mediocrity.”

“Einstein was a tail. Newton was a tail. Picasso was a tail,” he added.

‘Society depends on these outliers’

For Nosta, innovation comes from unusual people willing to think differently.

“Where is the outlier? Where is the strange idea? Where is the person who sees something that no one else sees? That’s what worries me,” he said of AI.

He said recursive AI systems can gravitate toward consensus rather than originality, making it difficult for unconventional thinking to emerge.

“Those strange ideas get pushed toward the middle because the computational dynamics of AI push those strange outliers away,” he said.

Nosta doesn’t believe AI will completely eliminate creativity. He believes it could make originality rarer by pushing people toward the same thought patterns.

“Society depends on those outliers,” he said.

So far the evidence is contradictory. Some research suggests that relying heavily on AI can push users toward more conventional and homogeneous ideas, while other studies have found that the technology can enhance creativity when people use it to explore possibilities rather than replace their own thinking.

Chris Best, CEO of newsletter platform Substack, has said that while AI could flood the internet with “AI waste”, it could also usher in “a future where there will be much more creative influence” by giving independent creators new ways to produce original work.

Mastercard head of communications and marketing Jill Kramer said AI can serve as “an engine” for human creativity.

He said technology can help marketers generate deeper insights and expand the research and preparation that drives new ideas, allowing them to do things they “never could do before.”

Use AI as a partner

Nosta said the solution is not to abandon AI, but to use it as what he calls an “iterative intelligence” partner, helping people explore ideas rather than replacing the thinking process itself — an idea promoted by several prominent AI researchers, including Vivienne Ming, chief scientist at the Possibility Institute, a metascience research group.

Ming told Business Insider in March that AI is most valuable when people use it to challenge their own thinking rather than outsourcing it, creating what she calls “productive friction.”

“Iterative engagement is where we should celebrate this,” Nosta said.

For him, preserving originality ultimately means preserving human habits that AI cannot replicate: curiosity, struggle, and the willingness to think differently.

“The treasure is in the queue,” said Nosta.