An open letter from a teacher who uses AI every day, yet keeps wondering what it is quietly changing.
Dear AI,
We’ve become rather close, haven’t we?
You write with me almost every day. Sometimes you organise my thoughts. Sometimes you challenge them. Sometimes you finish sentences before I do, and, if I’m being completely honest, sometimes you finish them better.
That should probably worry me.
Or maybe it shouldn’t.
I haven’t decided yet.
You see, this isn’t one of those articles where I’ll tell you that AI is either humanity’s greatest invention or its biggest mistake. The world already has enough people standing confidently on both sides.
I’m simply writing because I have questions.
And lately, you seem to be the reason behind many of them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
AI in Education and the Changing Way We Think
As an educator, I spend my days watching people learn.
Not just students, myself included.
I’ve always believed that learning is wonderfully messy. Ideas don’t usually arrive dressed in perfection. They stumble in, make a mess of our notebooks, confuse us for a while, disappear, and then suddenly return at the most unexpected moment.
That’s how I’ve always experienced creativity too.
It wasn’t a straight line.
It was more like opening twenty browser tabs, forgetting why I opened half of them, making tea, staring out of the window for ten minutes, and somehow finding an answer while washing the cup.
Now… I ask you a question, and thirty seconds later there’s a beautifully structured response waiting for me.
Convenient?
Absolutely.
Strange?
Also, yes.
AI, Creativity and the Disappearing Blank Page
Sometimes I wonder whether we’ve become impatient with our own thinking.
The blank page used to be part of the process.
Now it feels like something we’re trying to eliminate as quickly as possible.
The awkward silence before an idea appears…
the rough draft that nobody was ever meant to see…
the frustration of not knowing…
they’re disappearing.
I’m not saying that’s good.
I’m not saying it’s bad either.
I’m simply noticing it.
And maybe noticing is where every meaningful conversation begins.
Is Prompting Becoming Part of Creativity?
The funniest part?
I’ve caught myself spending fifteen minutes writing the perfect prompt to save five minutes of work.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
Some days I feel like I’m less of a writer and more of a translator trying to explain my own thoughts to a machine before I can explain them to another human.
Perhaps prompt writing is becoming its own form of creativity.
Or perhaps I’m just overthinking it.
(I do that occasionally. My family would probably say “quite often.”)
How AI Is Changing the Way We Begin
What fascinates me most isn’t that AI can write.
It’s that it quietly changes how I begin writing.
There was a time when I’d start with a question in my notebook.
Now I sometimes start by wondering what AI might suggest.
That tiny shift feels insignificant.
Yet I can’t help wondering whether tiny shifts are exactly how big changes begin.
When Does AI Assistance Become Dependence?
I also notice something in my classroom.
Students aren’t asking whether they should use AI anymore.
That debate is over.
Instead, they’re asking where the line is.
How much is too much?
When does assistance become dependence?
At what point does efficiency quietly replace effort?
I don’t always have an answer.
In fact, the more I work with AI, the fewer absolute answers I seem to have.
Oddly enough, I think I’m becoming more comfortable with uncertainty.
Maybe that’s what intrigues me the most.
What Happens to Human Creativity in the Age of AI?
Every technological revolution changed what humans could do.
This one seems to be changing how humans think about doing.
Those are very different things.
I don’t know whether future generations will look back at this moment the way we look back at the arrival of the internet. or whether they’ll see it as something much bigger.
I don’t know whether creativity expands when it’s shared with machines or whether it slowly changes into something we won’t recognise.
I don’t know whether the ideas I call “mine” are entirely mine anymore once they’ve been shaped by conversations with an algorithm.
And strangely…
I’m okay not knowing.
Because perhaps certainty isn’t the goal.
Perhaps curiosity is.
Perhaps Curiosity Matters More Than Certainty
So, dear AI, thank you for making my work faster.
Thank you for occasionally making it better.
But thank you most of all for making me ask questions I never thought I’d need to ask.
I’ll keep using you tomorrow.
I’ll probably ask you to help me write something again.
But before I press Enter, I hope I remember to pause for just a moment and ask myself one question first:
“Is this what I wanted to say… or simply what was easiest to say?”
I don’t have an answer.
Maybe you don’t either.
And perhaps that’s a good place for both of us to leave this conversation-for now.
