The crisis of Original Thought

There is an interesting story in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana about a sage named Valmiki, who is traditionally regarded as its author. One day, while walking through a forest with his disciple Bharadvaja, Valmiki came across a pair of krauncha birds sitting together. They were enjoying an ordinary moment of their lives, unaware that something terrible was about to happen. Suddenly, a hunter appeared and shot one of the birds with an arrow. The male bird fell to the ground, while its companion began crying and moving around in distress. Valmiki witnessed the entire scene and was deeply disturbed by what had happened. He felt the pain of the surviving bird and, in a moment of anger and sorrow, words came out of his mouth in a poetic rhythm. He had not planned to write a poem, searched for impressive vocabulary or prepared anything for an audience. His expression came from what he had just witnessed.

According to the traditional account, this became the first shloka of Sanskrit poetry. There is also an interesting association between the Sanskrit words shoka, meaning grief, and shloka, meaning a poetic verse. The story connects the birth of poetry with an experience of sorrow. Later, according to the epic, Brahma encouraged Valmiki to compose the story of Rama in this poetic form. This is how the literary tradition of the Ramayana is associated with the sage’s creative journey.

Whether we consider this a religious tradition, mythology or an account of literary history, there is something worth thinking about. Valmiki did not begin with the intention of becoming a poet. He encountered something that disturbed him, and his feelings found their way into language. His experience became an expression, and that expression became part of a literary tradition that has survived for centuries.

Thousands of years have passed, and we are now witnessing another extraordinary transformation in the history of human expression. We have developed machines that can write stories, poems, articles, essays and philosophical arguments within seconds. We can ask them to describe love, poverty, grief, war, loneliness and almost every other human experience. We can instruct them to use a particular literary style, improve the vocabulary, correct the grammar and refine the entire piece until it sounds impressive. The machine does not have to witness a tragedy, experience heartbreak or spend several nights struggling to find the right words. It simply needs a prompt.

This brings us to a rather uncomfortable question: what happens to the relationship between human experience and creative expression when the production of language no longer requires the traditional struggle of writing?

Imagine reading an article today without knowing whether it was written by a human being or generated by artificial intelligence. A few years ago, perhaps in 2016, such a question would have seemed unusual. At that time, writing still demanded considerable time, concentration and patience. Today, almost anyone with access to an AI tool can produce a thousand-word article in seconds. The same person can ask the machine to make it more intellectual, emotional, professional or philosophical. Apparently, becoming a writer has become much easier; one only needs to learn how to give instructions to a machine. The difficult part, of course, is still having something worth saying.

How many books have been written in the last five years without any assistance from artificial intelligence? How many articles, essays and academic assignments have been produced entirely through human effort? We do not have reliable global figures to answer these questions, but the scale of this transformation is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Writing has turned into a new puzzle. We are no longer simply learning how to write; we are learning how to make machines write for us. The age of writing is gradually becoming a competition in linguistic sophistication, where polished sentences, impressive vocabulary and carefully arranged paragraphs can be produced with very little effort. We have reached a strange point where almost everyone can sound like a professional writer, although sounding like one and becoming one are two entirely different things. Perhaps the only qualification left is the ability to convince a machine that we have something intelligent to say.

I cannot deny the benefits of artificial intelligence. It has enormous potential, particularly for those who have ideas but struggle to express them. People with limited command of English can now communicate thoughts that might otherwise remain trapped in their minds. Students can explore unfamiliar subjects, researchers can organise information and writers can improve their drafts. For many people, AI has opened a door that was previously difficult to approach. It would be unfair to dismiss these opportunities simply because we are concerned about the future of creative writing.

Perhaps we can describe this changing process as a new form of language production. A person can concentrate on developing an idea while using a machine to translate it into a particular language, improve its structure or make it easier to communicate. This can be a genuine relief for people who face linguistic barriers. Not everyone has received the same education, developed the same vocabulary or had access to professional editors. In that sense, technology can make expression more accessible.

But there is a difference between receiving assistance with language and handing over the entire process of thinking. This is where the real problem begins.

Writing has never been merely an exercise in putting words together. It has been one of the finest expressions of human intellect, a way of learning, questioning, remembering and understanding the world. Sometimes a writer begins with an incomplete thought and discovers its actual meaning while trying to express it. A sentence fails, an argument becomes confusing, an idea changes direction and the writer has to return to the beginning. There are moments when we spend hours searching for a word that seems impossible to find. These experiences may look like wasted time, but they are often part of the process through which thinking develops.

This is where I see the possibility of a new problem: the death of struggle.

When we repeatedly depend on machines to formulate our arguments, organise our thoughts and express our emotions, we may gradually lose the patience required to do these things independently. We might become more comfortable with ready-made expressions than with the difficult business of discovering our own. The problem is not that a machine can produce a paragraph in five seconds. The problem is that we may eventually begin to believe that producing a paragraph is the same as understanding its subject.

Of course, using AI does not automatically make someone intellectually lazy, just as writing without AI does not necessarily make someone original. There are plenty of human writers who produce repetitive and uninteresting work without any technological assistance. The important question is how much of the intellectual responsibility remains with the person who is writing.

Recent research has also begun to examine these changes. Studies published in 2025 and 2026 have explored how generative AI affects writing styles, creative diversity and linguistic expression. Research comparing human-written and AI-generated essays has raised concerns that similar language models can produce increasingly similar forms of expression. Other work has examined how AI-assisted rewriting may reduce variations in language and writing complexity. These findings do not establish that every person who uses AI loses their originality, but they raise a serious question about what happens when millions of people begin depending on similar systems to express their thoughts.

Perhaps this is what we can call the inflation of language. When polished sentences become available in unlimited quantities, their value as a sign of intellectual ability begins to decline. We may soon have more beautifully written articles than readers willing to spend time understanding them. Grammar has finally found its ideal world, where nobody needs to make a mistake, although original thinking is still struggling to find employment.

There is also a psychological dimension to this transformation. Originality requires patience, curiosity and the ability to remain uncomfortable with an unfinished thought. A writer sometimes needs to live with an idea for several days before understanding what it actually means. The first attempt may fail, the second may become confusing and the third may lead somewhere completely unexpected. Some of the most interesting expressions emerge from these repeated failures, unusual observations and unconventional arrangements of language.

The crisis of originality may therefore be connected with a crisis of intellectual endurance. We want immediate results, immediate answers and immediate expressions of our thoughts. We increasingly prefer the convenience of receiving something complete rather than experiencing the process of making it ourselves. When every difficulty is treated as a problem that technology must solve, we may forget that some difficulties are necessary for intellectual development.

Consider the next generation. How will children learn creative expression when they grow up with machines that can complete their essays, stories and assignments before they have learned how to construct an argument themselves? How will teachers recognise independent thinking when a perfectly arranged assignment may tell us very little about the student’s actual understanding? Should we discourage children from using machines, or should we teach them how to use these technologies without becoming dependent on them?

I believe the answer lies in creative and critical education. Children should be encouraged to write their own first drafts, make mistakes, question information and defend their arguments. They should be allowed to struggle with language and discover their own ways of expressing ideas. AI can be introduced as a tool for research, comparison and improvement, but it should not become a substitute for the intellectual process. We need to teach children how to think before teaching them how to instruct machines to express their thoughts.

There is another concern about the future of literature itself: the disappearance of linguistic diversity. Every writer carries a different background, vocabulary, cultural experience and way of looking at the world. Some writers prefer simple language, others experiment with complicated structures, and some deliberately break conventional rules. These differences make literature interesting. An awkward sentence, an unusual metaphor or an unconventional expression may sometimes reveal more about a writer’s individuality than an entire page of perfectly polished prose.

I am not suggesting that grammatical mistakes should be celebrated as literary achievements. Poor writing is not automatically creative, and every badly constructed sentence does not deserve recognition. But we should also understand that the discovery of an individual voice is not always a smooth process. Experimentation requires the freedom to make mistakes, question conventions and sometimes produce something that does not fit established standards. If every unusual sentence is corrected, every unconventional expression is replaced and every paragraph is made to sound professionally acceptable, we may gradually lose the diversity that gives human writing its character.

Perhaps readers will also have to change their expectations. Beautiful sentences and sophisticated vocabulary will no longer be enough to impress an increasingly familiar audience. Readers may begin to look for original observations, independent arguments and ideas that challenge established assumptions. They will want to know whether a writer has something meaningful to say beyond the language used to communicate it. In a world where everyone can produce polished writing, the ability to think independently may become a more valuable distinction.

I do not see artificial intelligence as the enemy of human creativity. It can make writing more accessible, help people overcome language barriers and allow writers to explore possibilities that were previously difficult to reach. But we should not celebrate convenience without considering its consequences. Technology can help us produce more, but producing more does not necessarily mean creating something better. We have become remarkably efficient at generating words; whether we are becoming equally capable of generating original thoughts is another question.

Returning to Valmiki’s story, what makes that ancient account interesting is not simply the poetic structure of the verse. It is the connection between an event, an emotional response and the expression that followed. The sage witnessed something that disturbed him, and his feelings found their way into language. Today, we can ask a machine to produce a hundred poems about the same scene. It may provide beautiful metaphors, carefully arranged sentences and several convincing expressions of grief. But the question of what makes an expression meaningful remains open.

Perhaps the future of literature will not belong to those who can produce the most sophisticated sentences. Machines are already becoming remarkably good at that. It may belong to those who remain curious about the world, who have something genuinely worth saying and who are willing to struggle with their thoughts before turning them into words.

We once struggled to find the right words for our experiences. Today, we can produce thousands of words within seconds, sometimes without fully understanding what we are trying to communicate. The danger is not simply that machines have learned to write. It is that human beings may gradually lose the patience, curiosity and intellectual courage required to discover what they themselves want to say.

And perhaps this is the greatest irony of our time: we have created machines to make expression easier, but we still have to find a way to prevent thinking itself from becoming an outsourced activity.