Research shows that the spread of AI is already reducing artistic and intellectual innovation, even though supporters of the technology say humans will always remain the final arbiter of creative decisions. The volume of AI-generated content is crowding out human work online. Algorithms increasingly promote AI-generated material, which makes the internet more uniform and narrows creative diversity, so that people are more often seeing, reading, and hearing things made by AI rather than by people. Studies of generative systems also show that when models run on their own, repeatedly processing and regenerating their own outputs, they collapse toward generic and predictable themes. Researchers who linked text-to-image and image-to-text algorithms found that even highly varied starting prompts eventually produced uninspired visual landscapes, a pattern they called “visual elevator music.” As the systems recycle synthetic data without new human input, nuance and distinctiveness disappear and the digital aesthetic becomes more standardized. The same accounts extend the finding beyond artwork to human cognitive habits. Cognitive studies indicate that long reliance on AI writing and design assistants can reduce an individual’s original problem-solving capacity by up to 25 percent. The researchers’ stated remedy is that artificial intelligence should stay a collaborative tool rather than become a substitute for human imagination, if culture is not to settle into an unoriginal monoculture. [Hintze, A., Proschinger Åström, F., & Schossau, J., Autonomous language-image generation loops converge to generic visual motifs. Patterns]