In June, Radha Saxena, a Lucknow-based homemaker, found herself struggling with her seventh grader’s summer homework. Twelve-year-old Kanav had to create a pamphlet on two English authors, William Wordsworth and Ruskin Bond, and the use of figurative language in their work. Saxena, 36, was at her wits’ end—where and how to start? Was it possible to skim through so many books to find examples of similes, metaphors, hyperbole and alliterations? “What is even metonymy!” wondered Saxena, for whom English is a second language. That’s when she turned to Open AI for the first time and got help not just with the examples but with layouts and presentation styles as well. It’s been six months, and whenever she gets stuck with Kanav’s English homework, she uses AI tools to simplify concepts, and present assignments creatively.
2025 is being hailed as the year of AI. In the past year, what started as tinkering with new technology became a full-fledged preoccupation for adults, children and adolescents, in professional, academic and work situations. It is no wonder then that Time magazine has declared “Architects of AI” its Person of the Year 2025, as it has “reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”
Beyond policy and power, however, AI has made inroads into our daily lives in both subtle and obvious ways, significantly changing the way we think and work. From answering emails and writing social media captions to choosing outfits for the day and planning travel itineraries, Artificial Intelligence tools are making their presence felt in the everyday. In the past year, Lounge has looked at this impact in a myriad ways. From how teens and young adults are turning to AI chatbots for companionship in the face of growing urban loneliness to looking at “grief tech”, in which AI versions of those who have passed are recreated to offer succour to the living. If you thought AI was only writing resumes, it is now also designing and customising dating profiles to the last detail. From the obvious to the tangential, Artificial Intelligence is impacting every sphere of our lives.
Sabrina Habib, associate professor at College of Information and Communications, University of South Carolina, has made this her field of study, having recently co-authored a paper, titled, How does generative artificial intelligence impact student creativity? Every new invention or advancement is approached with the apprehension that it will wipe out older creative forms. In her view, history shows the opposite—photography didn’t kill painting, radio didn’t kill writing, and AI won’t end human creativity. “However, AI introduces a fundamentally different dynamic. Unlike earlier technologies that functioned as tools, AI can serve as a collaborator and a co-creator. Its ability to generate content autonomously requires more attention to how we foster and practice creativity,” she says in an email interview.
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal, founder and managing trustee, Neev Schools, Bengaluru, noticed students between grades 6-12 approaching AI a lot more late last year for help with tasks, from generating ideas, curating research sources and problem solving to articulation or even simple grammar checks. Over time kids have become smarter about cognitive impact, or simply being caught out, and are using AI tools in a more constructive way. She shares an example of an adolescent using AI in a positive manner. grade 11 students were asked to debate whether computers can think. A student generated analysis of the debate using AI tools, which served as a useful tool for reflection on learning outcomes.
R.B., a 40-year-old Gurugram-based IT services professional, too, sees value in using AI at the workplace. It is employed to craft presentations and pitches, generate minutes of the meeting, and more. “It is especially helpful to those members of the team who struggle with written communication skills or for whom English is not the first language. They are using our in-house large language model (LLMs) for help. Even developers are using AI to generate a base code, which they build on later themselves,” she shares. At home, she uses AI tools to generate travel itineraries. She planned a two-week trip to Japan with its help, complete with details on must-visit ramen and breakfast joints.
Use of AI is not confined to certain demographics or those hailing from a space of privilege anymore. Google, in collaboration with Kantar India, an AI-native marketing data and analytics business, recently conducted a survey with over 8,000 respondents, aged 18-44, across 18 cities, including five tier-2 ones. They found that people were turning to AI whenever they hit roadblocks in their daily tasks at work, chasing creative endeavours or communicating their thoughts clearly. 75% of the respondents wished for a tool like Gemini to help them navigate complexities, and said use of AI tools allowed them to maximise productivity while also pursuing creativity through hobbies and side hustles.
Glenn Fajardo, who has been active in the Stanford d.school teaching community for the last 11 years, has been researching the impact of AI on creative expression. For him the real potential isn’t just about “more stuff, faster”, but it lies in the chance to widen who gets to create, and to make experimentation cheaper and less intimidating. “I’ll underline here that I believe people still need to make choices around those three things: deciding what matters, what feels true, and what they want to say. If you’re cranking out AI outputs without making any human choices on those, I’m a bit dubious on the creative potential of that,” he says.
So, here is how it should work: With AI in the mix, some of the labour of drafting, rendering and iterating can move outward into the AI tool, which can free up more of our limited mental bandwidth for judging, noticing, and making meaning. “But that only happens if we use AI intentionally, not just to hit ‘auto-complete’ on whatever is most statistically likely. Right now, a lot of AI-generated work is in that ‘early cinema’ phase. We’re pointing a very powerful new tool at old forms and asking, “Can it write a short story? Can it compose a song? Can it mimic this visual style?” That’s understandable as a starting point, but it’s not where the really interesting potential lives,” explains Fajardo.
For those like him watching this space, AI gets exciting when it brings about a shift in creative decision making. He wonders, instead of spending all your time wrestling with the mechanics of production, you can spend more time making higher-level choices: What if this scene were quieter and more intimate? What if this melody felt like dusk instead of noon? What if this story unfolded differently for different people? You can try those variations in minutes instead of weeks.
“AI can become less of a content factory and more of a ‘variation engine’ that lets you explore a whole landscape of possibilities you might never have had the time or tools to reach if people are actually applying their judgement, their discernment, their taste as they try out different things,” elaborates Fajardo.
At the workplace, people can use it to summarise long email threads, draft status reports and rephrase the message to different audiences. This can free up time and cognitive energy. A team could use AI to sketch five different ways to frame a proposal, and then have a human conversation about which framing is most aligned with their values. “That’s a healthier use of everyday creativity if people actually spend effort on the substance… Again, all this has to be paired with human attention, human intention, human discernment, human choices,” he says.
Overreliance is a word that both Fajardo and Habib use a lot, warning that if human discernment is not used then there is a danger of losing one’s own unique voice, complete with its quirks and humour. If every email or draft is “polished” by the same model, they start to sound similar and generic.
AI still can’t match the contextual judgement that humans bring to creative work. R.B. shares the example of her 13-year-old daughter, who has a penchant for writing short stories and poems. Earlier this year, she started basing her writing on AI-generated ideas and concepts. “I noticed she was struggling to finish as the concept didn’t reflect her inner voice. This year, when she went on a school trip, without any gadgets, she wrote a beautiful story that came from within, which she was extremely proud of,” she says.
Zarna Sanghrajka, who looks after student wellbeing and heads the counseling department of the Mumbai schools at Akanksha Foundation—a not-for-profit working in the education sector for children from low-income groups in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur—shares an example. When a group of students were asked to write a script for a school showcase, they turned to AI for support. While the process became quicker, Sanghrajka encouraged them to revisit the script and infuse it with their own context, imagination and lived experiences before finalising it. The revision wasn’t easy for everyone—some students grew impatient, others found the task challenging.
“AI can be a useful tool for research,” she says, “But even then, information needs to be verified. What truly matters is the ability to think, question and make meaning—those capacities have to be developed within.”
There’s also the challenge of domain knowledge. In Habib’s opinion, without a solid base of understanding, people may struggle to judge AI’s output, which tends to be homogenised—it has a typical look, tone, and content because it is trained to find answers in patterns. Recently, I was a judge at a school debate at which participants had to discuss the pros and cons of open prisons. One of the grade 9 students liberally peppered his speech with the “reformative theory of justice”, “recidivism” and “reformative potential”. During the rebuttal, when asked to elaborate, he faltered and later confessed to having referred to AI without understanding the terms. As Habib explains, the impact on originality depends entirely on timing: students who think first and use AI second tend to stay inventive, while those who reverse that order risk getting boxed into AI’s default patterns.
Dr Chandni Tugnait, a Delhi-based psychotherapist and life coach, is seeing the adverse effects of overreliance on AI play out. Even the simplest of tasks, which earlier required some personal effort, are now being relegated to AI. Her younger clients take the help of a tool to draft longer messages to friends. This changes how the brain engages with everyday creativity, she says. Cognitive skills such as emotional expression, critical thinking, brainstorming, and language formation rely on frequent use. When these tasks are outsourced repeatedly, the brain’s natural creative circuits become passive. One of her clients, a young marketing head at a firm, was once travelling for work to an area with poor network connectivity. She had to send an urgent message, but without access to her usual AI tools, she had no choice but to draft it herself. When she read the message, it felt stiff and unlike her natural way of expressing herself. That made her realize how her reliance on AI had quietly disconnected her from her own authentic voice.
The role of educators and counselors becomes even more important. There are some basic signs to watch out for. “The antenna needs to go up if children resist reading or an unwillingness to read long pieces, or can’t get over the initial writer’s block. One has to be vigilant against cognitive offloading and avoiding heavy lifting. It is important for educators to know the kids well. When we see a certain quality being repetitive, or a complete argument, without adequate evidence in a child’s voice, we can spot the bot,” says Sabharwal. Schools, universities and workplaces both in India and abroad are drafting policies on ethical and responsible use of AI. At Neev Schools, for instance, this AI policy is being drafted by the learners themselves—they are exploring nuances of ethics and safety when it comes to AI tools.
An over-reliance on AI can lead to a loss of empathy and connection, which also feeds creativity. Rhea Chopra, 28, from Bengaluru had to recently send a condolence message to a friend who had just lost her mother. She generated a message using AI and moved on to finding an outfit for a date later that evening. “When I came back, it hit me just how casually I had moved on. By delegating the task to AI, it felt like I did not register the emotion underlying the event. There was nothing like grief or concern that I had felt at that moment. It was a task, which I simply had to do. I have now made it a point to frame messages for loved ones on my own,” she says.
Ultimately, how people use AI will determine whether it strengthens or weakens their creativity. “AI does make it tempting to skip the messy first steps of creative work. Creativity grows through the struggle of forming, refining, and testing ideas, and when a tool provides an instant answer, it’s easy to let it take over. When people remain in the driver’s seat by using AI to expand ideas rather than generate them from start to finish, they stay engaged, confident, and original,” says Habib.
Fajardo tells all his students as a rule of thumb: Don’t get caught in a pattern where AI is constantly telling you what to think. For him, in everyday creativity, that might look like the difference between hitting ‘generate email’, skimming it, and sending it versus asking AI for three radically different ways to frame the same message, then noticing which one actually feels true and why, and iterating toward what you really mean. “That’s where deepening everyday creativity comes in. You can use AI to generate alternative metaphors, surprising examples, or different tones, and then use your own judgment to curate and combine them,” he says.
It remains to be seen the many ways in which AI will manifest itself in our lives in the near future. I would like to believe that it will unfurl its full potential only when powered by human ingenuity and imagination, and not the other way around. Creativity would not really function without the human touch.
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