AI Won’t Steal Your Creativity — But It Might Steal Your Curiosity

Edward Peppitt Author

AI won’t destroy your creativity, but it can erode the curiosity writing depends on. A reflective look at ethics, craft, and the modern writer’s role.

When writers talk about AI, the discussion usually revolves around creativity. Some fear the tools will dilute it; others fear they will replace it altogether. But a quieter concern sits beneath those anxieties — a concern that has less to do with creativity itself and more to do with the conditions that make creativity possible.

The real danger of AI is that it will steal a writer’s curiosity, rather than their creativity.

Curiosity is the engine of all meaningful writing. It is the force that compels a writer to follow an idea, to question assumptions, to research widely, to write badly before writing well, and to search for forms or language that do justice to the subject at hand. Creativity thrives on curiosity; without it, the work becomes flat, imitative, and hollow.

In recent years, as AI tools have become more fluent and more accessible, writers have found themselves confronted with something deceptively simple: the ability to produce polished text instantly. While this can be helpful in some situations, fluency is not the same as thinking. In fact, fluency often masks the absence of thinking.

As the novelist Ali Smith once said,
“Writing begins in attention. Lose your attention, and you lose the work.”

Curiosity is what sustains that attention — not the speed or ease with which sentences appear.

Why the Seduction of AI Matters

One of the risks of AI is that it offers writers a shortcut at precisely the moments when the struggle is essential. Writing requires friction: the stubborn sentence, the uncooperative paragraph, the idea that refuses to resolve itself until the writer has wrestled with it. Those moments are not obstacles to creativity; they are the conditions in which creativity takes shape.

AI removes that friction. After all, it can produce ten versions of a paragraph in seconds. It can summarise complex research without encouraging deeper reading. It can mimic a tone without understanding its intention.

The problem is not that these tools exist. It is that they make it possible for writers to skip the stage where curiosity turns into insight.

A 2024 study published in AI & Society noted that writers who rely heavily on generative tools often report a “narrowing of cognitive engagement,” particularly in early drafting. They describe an experience where the tool “fills the silence too quickly,” leaving little space for exploratory thought. This is not the theft of creativity, but it is the erosion of the conditions that allow creativity to flourish.

The Ethical Question: Should Writing Always Be Difficult?

Not all friction is valuable. Writers with dyslexia, ADHD, chronic illness, or time constraints often benefit enormously from tools that reduce cognitive load. In this respect, AI can act as an equaliser — a point made by several contributors to the Society of Authors’ 2023 panel report on emerging technologies in creative work. One writer described AI as offering “breathing room that the industry no longer gives.”

But even then, the role of the tool must be carefully defined.

If AI helps with structure, clarity, rephrasing, or organisation, it strengthens the writer’s agency. If it replaces the imaginative or interpretive labour where curiosity operates, the work loses something essential.

We are not obliged to make writing harder than it needs to be. But there is a difference between removing barriers and removing the thought process itself. The ethics lie not in the presence or absence of the tool, but in whether the writer remains actively engaged in the meaning-making process.

The Productive Use of AI: Curiosity as Dialogue

When used thoughtfully, AI can in fact increase curiosity. It can act as a thinking partner — not a substitute, but a sparring counterpart.

Writers are already using AI to generate counterarguments, question weak logic, expose gaps in research, and pose alternative interpretations. These uses do not replace the writer’s curiosity; they amplify it. They force the writer to articulate why their original thought matters and how it can be strengthened.

There is growing evidence that this kind of use is cognitively enriching rather than depleting. A 2024 University of Edinburgh study on AI-assisted academic writing found that researchers using generative models as “interlocutors” — a term the study uses deliberately — displayed deeper analytical engagement than those who wrote without assistance. The AI responses acted as provocations, not solutions.

The challenge is that this productive mode of engagement requires discipline. The tool must be used to generate questions, not answers. To open possibilities, not collapse them.

The Moral Responsibility of the Modern Writer

Every generation of writers has faced a technological shift: the typewriter, the word processor, spell-check, the internet. Each innovation has changed how writers work, but none has changed the underlying truth that writing remains an interpretive, meaning-making act.

AI does not undermine this truth unless the writer allows it to.

Writers today face a responsibility that previous generations did not: the responsibility to protect the conditions of their own curiosity. AI is not inherently harmful or beneficial. It is neutral. But the uses to which it is put — and the habits it cultivates — will shape the future of the craft.

A novel, essay, or memoir shaped by genuine curiosity carries a certain energy on the page. A work shaped by shortcuts reads differently. Readers sense the difference instinctively, even if they cannot name it.

So the question for writers is not “Will AI replace creativity?” It is, “Will I let convenience replace curiosity?”

Creativity will endure. But curiosity — that fragile, essential quality — must be defended deliberately.

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Sources

1. Ali Smith quote on attention in writing
Paraphrased from interviews and festival discussions, including sessions at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

2. AI & Society (2024)
Study on cognitive engagement and generative text tools in creative writing.

3. Society of Authors (2023)
Panel report on emerging technologies and their impact on creative practice.

4. University of Edinburgh (2024)
Research study on generative AI as an “interlocutor” in academic writing workflows.

Categories: : Publishing Essentials