I use AI for ideas and feel less original
Make your own list first. Ten ideas on paper, bad ones included, before any AI. Then show the AI your list and ask what is missing or what it would push further. You still get its range, and the starting point is yours. Once you have read its list first, it is very hard to think past it.
What is going on
You ask for twenty ideas and get twenty reasonable ones in five seconds. You pick the best, and the work goes well. But the ideas feel borrowed, and when you sit down without the AI, less comes than it used to. Writers describe this as losing confidence in their own creativity.
Two things may be happening. Seeing a finished list anchors you, so your own ideas start to orbit it. And coming up with ideas is a skill that needs practice, which you have stopped getting. Two pre-registered experiments with 1,100 people (Kumar and others, CHI 2025, peer reviewed) found that direct answers from AI raised scores on one task while people had it, and that some groups scored lower later when they worked alone. In the detail, the clear drops were in the groups given coach-style guidance, not the groups given answers. We put it no more strongly than its authors do.
What to do this week
Ten of your own first
Timer for eight minutes. Write ten ideas. The first three will be obvious. The later ones are often where yours are.
Star one before you ask
Mark the idea you like most, and write one line on why. That protects it from a better-sounding list.
Ask for gaps, not a list
"Here are my ten ideas. What angles have I missed? Which of mine is strongest and what would make it stranger?" The AI now works on your material.
Keep an idea notebook
Paper or a notes file with no AI in it. One idea a day, on anything. It is practice, and it is a store of starting points that nobody else has.
What not to do
- Do not ask "give me ideas for..." as your first move. That is the one habit to change.
- Do not throw out your list because the AI's reads better. Its ideas are polished and common. Yours are rough and rare.
- Do not quit AI brainstorming. As a second step it is very good. The order is the whole point.
The honest limit
Your own ten will often be weaker than the AI's twenty, especially at first. That is the cost of practising. And originality is hard to measure, in studies and in your own work, so do not expect a clear signal after a week. A reasonable test: after a month, are more of your finished pieces built on an idea from your own list?
Questions
Is AI making me less creative?
No study shows a lasting effect like that. What the research suggests is narrower: help that lifts your work today may leave you a little weaker on the next task you do alone. Practice is the remedy, and it is cheap.
What if I have no ideas at all?
Write bad ones. "The obvious version", "the opposite", "the version for a child" all count. A list of ten weak ideas is still a start that is yours.
Can the AI help me without giving ideas?
Yes. Ask it to interview you: "Ask me five questions about this topic, one at a time." Your answers are raw material in your own words.