I am a big fan of technology. I\u2019ve blissfully given over my spatial reasoning to Google Maps. I use artificial intelligence to chase down articles, do research, fix my grammar mistakes and whip up last-minute school-night recipes.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve recently drawn a sharp line in the sand: no A.I. for writing. I\u2019m not talking about expense reports or routine emails. I mean actual writing, and the creative brainstorming that precedes it to explore different perspectives or develop novel insights. Increasingly, many people I talk to \u2014 from students to teachers to peers \u2014 tell me that they think it\u2019s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the \u201creal work\u201d of writing.<\/p>\n
But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that\u2019s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.\u2019s 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<\/a> ideas \u2014 what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.\u2019s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories.<\/p>\n The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.<\/p>\n For the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT. In one study<\/a>, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more \u201ccreative\u201d by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.<\/p>\n In a separate study, the team found that human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas<\/a> than those produced by A.I.<\/p>\n