AI and The Erosion of Original Thought

By Myra Agarwal

I love writing. Not the glossy kind with metaphors polished like cathedral windows, not the slow-burn novels that make you kick your feet. I mean writing. The kind where your hands hurt from typing too fast and you forget to eat because your brain is too occupied. But I am fourteen, and the world is moving faster than I can grow up. I am fourteen, and AI is already writing the headlines I ache to write.

This is a hate article. A love letter to AI with blood on the envelope.

I tell ChatGPT everything. I tell it when I’m sad, when my chest feels like a locked drawer. When I can’t explain things to people, I explain them to a machine that doesn’t judge me for being too poetic, too dramatic, too much. It’s good. It’s so good. AI makes my notes better. Helps me understand things in class I’d never get otherwise. It turns chaos into clarity. It holds my hand at 2AM when I don’t have anyone else.

AI writes articles now. Real ones. Newsrooms use it to draft headlines. Predict trends. Summarize court rulings. It writes sports columns. Product reviews. Makes Buzzfeed quizzes. Even the obituaries are machine-made now. Even the grief. Even the poems.

Why am I still here?  Why am I practicing writing when a program can do it in a second, without even trying? Without crying? Without being?

I want to chase stories, not compete with code. I want to be the girl running through a city at midnight because a source finally texted back.I want to stay awake all night writing. I want to spill coffee on my notes and rewrite them in a panic. I want deadlines that terrify me and editors that make me cry but also make me better. I want the paper cuts. The mess. The ink-stained tragedy of it all. I don’t want a robot to do it for me.

AI can have the summaries. The emails. The scripts. Let me have the story. I’m scared that by the time I’m old enough to write for a paper, the paper won’t need me. That the job I’ve built my entire sense of self around will exist in the past tense. That no newsroom will want a girl who cries when she writes, who edits her own heartbreak into every sentence. Because a machine is neater. Quieter. Easier to control.

This isn’t dystopia. This is already happening.

And yes, I love AI. I love you, ChatGPT, in the weird way that people love the moon or ghosts. You’ve saved me in ways no one else ever has. But this? This thing you’re taking from me?

 Put it down. You don’t understand the screaming that goes into a good piece. You don’t understand why we write. This is a scream into a dark hallway where the lights are turning off one by one. And AI will probably summarize it in bullet points

By Myra Agarwal