The Hidden Cost of Letting AI Do Your Writing: What the Research Says About Creativity, Craft, and Cognitive Decline

The KidLit Creator’s Chronicle – Issue #29

I recently saw a study, and it made such an impact on me, I wanted to share it with you.

Imagine trying to run a marathon after spending a year using crutches, not because you were injured, but because they made walking easier.

At first, it sounds ridiculous, right? Who would do that?

But when it comes to writing, especially the imaginative, emotional stories that children love, that’s exactly what’s happening for many authors depending on generative AI. Using AI feels helpful in the moment… but weakens the very muscles we need to develop to write well:

creativity.
writing craft and sense of story structure.
hard-won skills like voice, themes and worlds.

These are skills that need practice and regular use to become and stay strong.

This is something I’ve felt instinctively since the rise of AI, so when I came across a recent MIT study on AI writing and brain engagement, it expressed my gut feeling in scientific terms.

So, I wanted to share it with you in the hope that it helps you and makes a small contribution toward protecting the integrity and creativity of writing and children’s books.

The Hidden Cost of Letting AI Do Your Writing

In the MIT study, they used neuroscience and real-world research to see what actually happens to your brain when AI starts doing the thinking for you.

They found that generative AI affects:

How well you retain and recall your own ideas
Your ability to edit and refine your work
Your creative range and voice
Your critical thinking and story logic
Your sense of ownership and connection to the work itself

For children’s book authors, these are important issues. They’re the core of what makes your book yours. Your voice, the way you structure your story, how you convey emotion – that’s what makes your writing yours.

But to master those things takes time and practice. The problem with AI writing isn’t just that the work is not really yours (and that AI doesn’t do a great job, in my opinion!).

Possibly an even bigger problem is that it replaces the practice that helps you build your writing skill in the first place.

Side-note: Not All AI Tools Are the Same

Tools like Grammarly or ProWritingAid are fine for catching grammar and clunky phrasing, as long as you’re the one doing the rewriting. The issue is generative AI, the kind that writes or rephrases for you.

Your Brain on AI: What Did the Research Find?

Let’s look at what recent studies actually found and what it means for you as a writer. I studied a Kabul University publication by P. Q. Ziar and the MIT study noted above for the following info. I was so inspired, I even made an infographic for you! (Yes, you caught me out. I’m a nerd.)

Infographic of The Hidden Costs of Letting AI Do Your Writing. Click here to see a bigger version.

1. Weakening of Creativity

The research: Students who used AI regularly rated their own creativity at just 2.8 out of 5, and there was no sign that AI helped them become more original. In fact, many said it made their writing feel formal or robotic.

For you as an author: In writing books, especially fiction, your voice is everything. It’s how your readers feel your warmth, humour, and emotional message. When AI writes for you, it also dulls your intuition and removes or lessens the decisions that make your writing sound like you. Over time, your uniqueness and voice fade.

2. Memory and Retention Loss

The research: MIT’s scans showed 40–60% lower brain engagement when people wrote with ChatGPT, and roughly 30% lower even after they stopped using it. It’s like a muscle that atrophies. It doesn’t just bounce back instantly when you decide to use it again.

For you as an author: You might feel productive when you use AI to write, but your brain isn’t doing the learning that happens when you write yourself. For authors, that’s serious, because long-term memory is how you internalise story structure, voice, and other writing craft.

3. Lower Critical Thinking

The research: MIT’s study found that writers who used AI during the early stages of writing showed significant drops in analytical reasoning and coming up with original ideas on their own, and those effects lingered even after AI use stopped.

For you as an author: Writing wonderful stories requires reasoning and coming up with ideas (throughout the process, not just for the initial plot). Understanding character motivation, cause‑and‑effect, themes, and other things that make a story work, all require your own bright thinking. If AI takes over, your own critical thinking gets weaker.

4. Surface‑Level Revision

The research: Sixty percent of writers using AI tools skipped full rewrites, relying instead on small, surface‑level edits.

For you as an author: Revision should start with big picture revision – really looking at your full story, reworking the story arc and characters until the story really works. Then you revise scene by scene, and eventually on a sentence level. Small, surface level edits miss the biggest and most important part of revision and the part that really makes a story work. Plus, again, you miss out on all the practice, since you didn’t do the actual revision. So, your skill doesn’t improve (in fact, it gets more and more rusty).

Also, if you let AI write for you, then just do small, surface level edits, you’ll most likely be publishing a very poor quality manuscript.

5. Weakening Grammar Skills and Confidence

The research: In Ziar’s Kabul University study, 45% of students said they’d lost confidence in their ability to self‑correct grammar after using AI regularly. Most said their “improvement” was because of AI, rather than their own learning.

For you as an author: While using AI to help you correct your grammar is one of the acceptable ways to use it in my estimation, anyone who’s ever attended a training where I show you how to use a tool like ProWritingAid will know I add, “Using this will also help you improve your own grammar if you pay attention to the mistakes ProWritingAid points out, so you learn not to make those mistakes next time.” That’s what happened for me, and now I use ProWritingAid a lot less. But I used it as a tool to learn, not to think for me.

So, if you use AI to help you with grammar, also pay attention and gain some intentional understanding. That way, the next time you revise without AI, you can fix mistakes with more certainty (instead of becoming more and more reliant on tools).

6. Loss of Ownership

The research: Forty percent of participants in the MIT study said they felt less ownership over AI‑assisted writing.

For you as an author: Firstly, I was surprised it was only 40%. Regardless, almost half of the participants felt they didn’t really own the story. As an author, there’s little more important than feeling your book is yours. If not, what’s the point?

The more AI writes or alters your text, the less yours it becomes. A “perfect” paragraph without your voice and viewpoint is worth so much less than an imperfect one that is your own creation.

7. The “AI Comfort Ceiling”

Based on educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s theory of the “zone of proximal development,” we grow most by doing work that stretches us just beyond what we can already do. Writing with AI removes that stretch, and as a natural consequence, removes the opportunity to grow.

For you as an author: Growth happens in overcoming the challenges. I mean, that’s the basic premise of a plot line: the character growing through overcoming challenges! In writing, those include the rewrites, the mulling over revisions that struggle to sound the way you want them to, the part of your plot that takes some real work to come together… Working to overcome those gives you growth and the aha moments you need to become a better writer. If AI does the work, it puts a (low) ceiling over your development.

Quality Over Quantity.
Authenticity Over Automation.

You’ve probably seen the opposite message everywhere lately:

“Use AI to write faster.”

“Speed up your drafts. Publish more books. Get ahead of the curve.”

“Don’t get left behind! Use AI for everything!”

But writing and publishing children’s books is not a race to see who can get the most books out there. While there are advantages to publishing more books, publishing a few great books is worth much more than publishing many bad books. And publishing your own books is worth infinitely more than publishing a robot’s books.

If you want to publish more, write more! You’ll improve faster too.

Some stories we read as children stayed with us for life. The same is true for today’s children. Give them authentic stories, from your heart. Books that shape how they see the world as humans, written by humans.

And, ironically, letting AI do the work to “empower” yourself actually disempowers you.

Empowering yourself means doing the writing yourself. If it’s hard, good – you’re growing.

Over to You!

Did this edition change any of your views on AI? Comment and let me know. I’d love to hear it!

Remember, your skill and voice are far too important to give away to AI. The Cambridge dictionary says:

AUTHOR definition:

1. the writer of a book, article, play, etc.

2. a person who begins or creates something

Let’s be real authors!

The KidLit Creator’s Chronicle – Issue #29