The New York Times Gift Article: “….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. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s 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. 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…. For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a “good” sentence or essay, based on the text it’s been trained on. It can identify sophisticated and creative word patterns independently of whether the underlying ideas represent something new. When teenagers write their own essays, the work reflects their thoughts and personalities, their attempts to make meaning of their experiences. When we search for words, we are sifting through the same brain networks that form connections between ideas. A student who writes, “I’ll always think of learning to swim when I see a kite flying,” is connecting unique personal experiences in her life, which until recently was a clear signal of truly creative thinking…”