Rebecca Winthrop, What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity:
Increasingly, many people I talk to — from students to teachers to peers — tell me that they think it’s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the “real work” of writing.
But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking.