Fashion Creatives Can Guard Against AI‑Induced Brain Fatigue
When I began working at a fashion magazine ten years ago, I landed the role largely by drawing on references—favorite collections, shoots, campaigns, book passages, films, and the names and faces of people I’d met in the right places. Later I shifted to news, Instagram displaced Facebook, and the industry suddenly rewarded reacting to what was new and next. Like many millennials, I managed to nurture my own weirdness before life went fully online, yet I have watched my attention and memory slowly change with the rise of endless scrolling. Now a new technology has become the scapegoat for this collective brain fatigue, and, unsurprisingly, it is AI.
Recent talks with creative agencies, photographers and several designers show that embedding generative AI into the earliest phases of creative work has become the new normal. From mood boards and agency decks to shot lists and design visualizations, professionals are quietly using AI internally to shape, visualize and sell ideas at the relentless speed demanded by fashion’s production cycle. The industry, however, is quick to condemn consumer‑facing AI “slop” for encouraging creative laziness, while paying far less attention to the laziness AI may foster behind the scenes.
Experts warn that the greatest threat to creativity is relying on AI suggestions from the outset, because it can homogenize everyone’s output. They say younger, early‑career creatives are most vulnerable. “I’m concerned about what younger designers who are starting out now will not be able to build, their own way of seeing the world and their own way of designing, because of the temptation to shortcut,” says Giorgia Lupi, partner at design firm Pentagram. “Even building inspiration can now be done through asking a chatbot to send you ideas for a brief, before you sit down and actually think.”
If a designer turns to AI to visualize design flats, does that weaken their ability to communicate ideas? If a creative director shows a client a full AI‑generated campaign mock‑up, will they still be able to problem‑solve when the output falls short? If a chief marketing officer increasingly outsources campaign pitch selections to AI, will they be able to justify their rationale to the CEO? The deeper danger may not be the sloppiness of content, but the erosion of our own creative minds.
“Your brain is a muscle, and the less you use it because of AI [to remember, reason and decide], it gets weaker,” says Erica Dhawan, leadership expert and author of the forthcoming book Use Your Brain: Think For Yourself in the Age of AI. “AI weakens our thinking muscles by abandoning those exercises, which can lead to brain rot over time.”
What neuroscience reveals
Emerging research is beginning to explore what happens when we outsource thinking, creating and problem‑solving to AI, offering early clues about its impact on our capacity to generate original ideas. In a 2025 study titled *Your Brain on ChatGPT*, researchers led by MIT’s Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna monitored brain activity of participants writing essays with and without AI assistance. They found that ChatGPT users exhibited weaker neural connectivity, poorer recall of their own work, and a diminished sense of ownership over what they had written.
Experts say that loss of ownership and memory threatens a core component of creativity. “Memory provides the raw material for ideas,” explains Roger Beaty, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University, who studies creativity in the brain. “We need to know what has been done before to create something truly original. And in addition to using memory for idea generation, we use our episodic memory system to simulate if and how an idea will work, and how it would be received by others.”
Kosmyna attributes her findings to the minimal effort required to type a prompt into a chatbot. “Mental effort is extremely important for learning, memory and creativity, as well as for overall development,” she says, noting that bypassing the frustration of developing a truly novel idea by immediately turning to AI “mostly just makes a person a consumer of their own thinking, but it doesn’t actually belong to them anymore.”
Researchers also point out that AI lacks divergent thinking—the ability to explore multiple, unexpected possibilities rather than settle on the most obvious solution—a cornerstone of human creativity. In another 2025 study titled *Creative or Uncreative Partner: Comparing Humans and AI in Collaborative Creative Tasks*, neuroscientist Simone Luchini and colleagues discovered that people collaborating with AI generated fewer original ideas than those working with another human. They also observed that as two humans worked together on creative tasks, they became increasingly better at producing original concepts over time.
Essentially, the more we rely on AI for a task, the more our brains begin to mirror its limitations. “We find that working with AI will reduce the diversity of ideas, homogenizing them to fewer common themes,” Luchini says, while “working with humans preserves the diversity of ideas.” In Kosmyna’s view, this makes AI the antithesis of creativity.
Living beyond the screen
This year, taste has become something of an obsession, both as a defense against the existential threat of AI and perhaps because it seems lacking among the Silicon Valley CEOs building it. The neuroscience of keeping our creative minds sharp shares much with the great taste discourse of 2026. When asked what fundamentally strengthens creativity, experts repeatedly point to lived experience. “Having experienced living in the world, having felt true emotions in situations in your life, which are the same emotions you need to convey through an idea or a project, is where I don’t think AI can replicate our humanity in the creative process,” says Lupi. For peo