Brainstorm without losing your voice
A chatbot can throw out twenty ideas in a second. The trick is using them to spark your own, not to replace them.
Traffic light: amber
Brainstorming with AI is amber: fine when you choose and build the ideas yourself, and when your teacher allows it. If the task is to come up with ideas on your own, it's red.
Better on your own, more like everyone else
In one experiment, some writers were given story ideas from a chatbot before they wrote. Their stories were rated more creative, better written and more enjoyable, especially for writers who weren't very creative to begin with. But their stories were also more similar to each other than stories written without AI.
That's the trade. AI ideas can lift your work, and they can pull it towards what everyone else using the same tool is writing. The ideas worth most are the ones only you would have had.
Think first, then ask for directions, not drafts
- Write down three ideas of your own first. Even rough ones. They keep you from anchoring on whatever the chatbot says first.
- Then ask for directions you haven't thought of, one line each, with nothing written out.
- Choose, combine and build it yourself. Close the chat before you start writing.
Two traps
- !The first answer sticks.Once you've read an idea, it's hard to think past it. That's why your own three come first.
- !"Just one example paragraph" is a draft.Once the chatbot starts writing, you're editing its work instead of writing yours.
Keep going
Once you've written a draft yourself, AI can help you improve it, without rewriting it.
Last reviewed: 25 September 2026