How AI can fuel a brainstorm and spark new ideas

Some people think you ask it to write yourself write you a science fiction novel and you hit enter and a novel pops out. And that’s not how it works. Even if you could get it to write a whole novel in that way, it wouldn’t be a novel that anyone would ever want to read.

The way you write a novel with AI is much, much, much more interactive. Aliza, you’re a published author and we’re about to talk about AI and writing. I I’m curious for like your take on this.

I I have like two minds about it and most of it is about the parent side of it of like you still need to learn how to communicate through writing, but I also know that if I plug in something for AI to write for me, I would never be able to use that without changing it drastically. And I’m not so worried about that sort of creative part of writing once you’ve learned. What worries me more is like if you don’t know how Yes, 100% to that.

The hardest part about writing anything is not getting the words onto the piece of paper or onto the electronic document. It’s actually figuring out like what do you want to say? Like what is your perspective?

What is your opinion? I find that whenever I try to use it, like a I spend way too much time trying to get it to sound like I want it to sound. And then even then it generally feels hollow because I realized that all that time I spent trying to like prompt engineer the AI should have actually been spent trying to digest like what is it that I have to say that’s like unique and authentic.

I mean in the same way that we saw lo-fi low-tech videos on TikTok totally beating the really polished like corporate videos because like there’s this huge premium on authenticity. You know, I’d rather someone write something that doesn’t isn’t structured perfectly and just sounds like them as opposed to like the "perfect crafted essay." But in the short term, I also think in a school setting, for example, if somebody had a kid had an essay, I don’t know that the adults are quite there yet, or the kids maybe are quite there yet to be able to distinguish between what’s hollow and sus as the teenagers would say. Yeah, "sus" is a good encapsulation for all this.

And that’s what we’re going to dig into on this episode of Raising Kids in the Age of AI, a podcast from aiEDU Studios, created collaboration with Google. I’m Dr. Aliza Pressman, developmental psychologist and host of the podcast Raising Good Humans. And I’m Alex Kotran, founder and CEO of aiEDU, a nonprofit helping students thrive in a world where AI is everywhere.

Today on the pod, we’re talking about AI as a writing and learning partner. Can it help us spark new ideas, or are we taking away our ability to maintain critical thinking in that process? And what does it mean in the context of being a writer?

Later in the episode, we’ll hear once more from Maureen Heymans, VP of learning at Google. Maureen joined us in our first episode to talk about exploring interests through AI and she’ll return to the pod to share her insights around using AI as a brainstorming tool and a learning aid. But first, we’re going to hear from Amit Gupta.

I’m Amit. I’m one of the founders of Sudowrite and we make AI tools for authors. Early in his writing career, Amit wrote completely by himself and then he got into a writing group and he would workshop his latest project with them.

But as with so many parts of life, the pandemic put the kibash on meeting up in person and it opened the door to an early introduction to large language models that began to shift Amit’s approach to writing and brainstorming. The first time I tried AI was in late 2020. That’s when we actually got early access to it.

We just started playing with it as kind of like this fun toy to play with words. One way we were using at the time was like, "Oh, I’m stuck. I’ve written this like I’ve written this chapter and I just don’t know what’s supposed to happen next.

And in the past, I’d just be like thinking and thinking and thinking and maybe it would take me a month of like just walking around and like not working on it so that I like eventually just come up with the idea. And with AI, I will just like put in everything I know about the story, random like thoughts I have, random like bits of dialogue, maybe this I have this like backstory or this snippet I want to use. Just throw it all in like the brain dump and then I can talk to it.

I can have it like create a synopsis. From the synopsis I can be like ah that’s not quite right or like oh there’s an interesting idea here but the other stuff isn’t working. So it’s almost like a a thought partner for what this the core of the story is and then it just like it flows out much more easily for me.

I can just start writing it. You can definitely ask the AI to reflect back what it’s seeing that you’re missing. So, like I’ll still show stories to other writers to get their feedback, but I’m probably going to show it to the AI first because it can help me resolve kind of the obvious mistakes and the the silly things that I don’t want my friends to waste time trying to fix for me.

I want them to focus on kind of the higher level, deeper stuff. I think one of the things that I do a lot is I’m like very precious with my words. So, I spend probably too much time in the editing process and I’ll often know that like the phrase I’m using or the word I’m using is not like exactly the right word.

It’s like close, but it’s not it just doesn’t have the right flavor. And so, I’m often using AI to like just change a single word like trying to figure out like given this whole story and what this character cares about in this moment, like why is this word wrong or like what are some other words? Writing is thinking like that.

At its core that that’s what you’re doing. To get something onto a page, you really have to understand it. But I think having a conversation is thinking, too.

So, when you’re having conversation with someone about an idea, you’re also figuring out what you really believe and you’re being challenged by the other person’s point of view and kind of processing what they think and responding to that. So for me, like the hard things, the things that I struggle with are that like initial spark, like how do I go from the idea for the world to like the core conflict, the inciting incident that’s going to make it come alive, I I would love to be able to do it myself, but I can’t. And if I’m going to spend like months just like nashing my teeth, I’d much rather like either it’s a conversation with other writers, if I can if I can find those writers and they’re willing to talk to me about it and they unlock it, or it’s a conversation with the AI that gets me through it.

If you are getting started today as a writer, the problem you’re facing is no different from before AI. Like you still need to find your voice. You still need to find your perspective.

And I think you are more likely to get past kind of the structural issues and like the technical issues more quickly and then you can focus on your voice and I think really create something special that’s yours. I think one of the most frustrating things with AI is that it sounds like AI. Like it just sounds like the most mid version of anyone that’s ever existed.

And it like makes sense because like you add every color together and it’s just drab brown or whatever. And this is just adding every like word that’s ever been written together and it just comes out like paste. And I think that that’s been like one of the chief complaints people have had.

It’s like magical. It’s amazing they can do these things, but why doesn’t it sound like me? It sounds like some something else.

I think it pushes everyone to be better. And I think you’ve seen this in every creative space where like the technology has made it easier. Like a lot of painting before photography existed was just portraits.

You’re just trying to create like a photorealistic-like memory of what this person looked like. And that doesn’t exist as a job anymore because you can just go like this and it’s done. But photography is still an art form cuz anyone can take a perfect picture, but not everyone can create art using a camera.

And I think the same is true of anything else that AI lets you do today. It’s going to it’s going to push artists to be even better, to really like stand out. I really loved what he said and I think it it perfectly kind of captured the worry about using AI as a writing partner and the benefits of using AI as a writing partner.

Like and to his point about kind of mixing all the colors together, you get this brown every time. But if you have this human being authentically creating their voice and figuring out how to express themselves, is there a way to use AI to really elevate your humanity and then I think it could be very cool. Yeah, they call their analogies brilliant.

I guess pun intended but this idea of like writing is thinking you know I think we just need to keep coming back to that and that’s really I think maybe a good heuristic to to take when you’re when you’re trying to ask you know is this a good or a or a bad use of AI is it is it enhancing your thought on the topic there’s myriad examples of how someone could be using AI to like sort of like develop their own perspective and and thought on a topic On the converse, if AI is displacing that that process, you know, I think that’s where you start to run into some red flags should go up. Alex, those are like that is a really simple way for parents to assess support. Is it enhancing or is it displacing?

And I think if we can just ask those two questions and really get those questions going in our children’s minds as they’re interacting with AI, it can be incredibly protective. Yeah. And just to delve a bit into some of some of the research, the research is truly all over the place.

There’s lots of studies that show AI is, you know, incredibly valuable in teaching and learning settings. There is one study that looked specifically at writing. They took brain scans of of students who were writing I think it was like SAT essays and what they found is that the students who were let’s say overreliant on AI is that the parts of the brain that normally yeah light up during sort of like these like deep metacognitive critical thinking tasks they weren’t activating as much small sample size things there’s like 54 subjects but it it’s it’s a reason to be thoughtful about this most people don’t necessarily have a writing coach that they can turn to.

And I think going through that sort of Socratic process of, you know, sort of like being introspective about what you’ve written, is there a better way for me to say this point that I made? I don’t know, Lisa, what’s your take? I mean, to me, that doesn’t raise the same alarm bells as, you know, just sort of like plug-and-play.

Exactly. Because you have to use your own critical thinking skills in order to do that iterative process. I think the risk would be the kid who is like wee like I just asked this question and out pops my essay and I’m done.

And of course that you can absolutely see could just turn the light dimmer down on those fMRIs. We need to focus a lot more on the process than ever before because AI is going to make it such that you know anybody can come up with a really cool output. Yes, and you know even an output that doesn’t look perfect might actually be a much better learning experience if it includes you know this sort of process of learning and exploration that we know is actually sort of like driving learning in kids in general when we talk about learning and growth mindset.

We talk about focusing on the process not the outcome. That’s something that helps kids learn no matter what we’re thinking about. It’s no different with AI.

Up next, we’re going to hear again from friend of the pod Maureen Heymans, VP of learning at Google. She talks about how AI can be a useful tool to improve your writing, but she started by sharing something that Amit also talked about, how any writing exercise is ultimately an exercise in thinking. You need to know your material before you write about it.

So, Maureen talked about how even before the writing begins, AI tools can help a student fully grasp the concept behind the assignment. I think AI is also a great way to to kind of explore concepts, right? You can you can ask questions, you can ask clarifying question to really understand something that you you it’s hard to grasp just with text, right?

But now if you can start putting that in images and in simulation and videos, you know, it starts becoming much more digestible for a lot of of people, right? So I think that’s one way that AI can can really help you understand any concept and also digest a lot of different information in different formats. So there is this tool called notebook lm that enable you to upload contents about some topic and then will automatically generate a bunch of ways to consume that content.

It will let you create a summary but they will also create some Q&A and like illustration of those concepts and then it will also even generate completely new format like podcast and some people might understand better concept if they listen. So at Google, we have been thinking a lot of how we can use AI to really evolve how people learn, right? Consuming content, whether this is reading a website or or watching a video, can sometimes feel pretty passive.

And so AI has the opportunity to to really make it much more interactive first through a conversation. And so you start putting the person really in the driver seat of of of the learning because they start interacting with that knowledge. Once you really understand the material, it’s time to write the essay.

But this is the part of the writing process where it’s easy to get bogged down what exactly to say or how to say it. Maureen likes to call in AI tools for getting unstuck. AI can be amazing for brainstorming.

Often people might have an idea but they don’t know how to express it or they might be a little bit stuck. And so firstly I can be that springboard right really get the creative juice flowing right it’s and really you know start you know brainstorming about lots of different ideas and then you know we can actually provide you feedback that you get this you know judgment-free 24/7 feedback tool right that is going to be super constructive that can be targeted to you and can really help you refine your ideas and and suggest perspective that you hadn’t thought about, right? But you want to be creative yourself, right?

You want to generate your own idea and be in charge of that creativity. After going deep with the material and brainstorming what you want to say about it, it’s time to actually write. But Maureen cautions, don’t turn to AI first.

You need to stay in the driver’s seat. When you use AI tools, it’s super important that you don’t offload too much of the cognitive exercise to those tools, right? You to really want to empower your own thinking first or if you want to do some creative writing you know first write a first draft before you go back to AI so I think it’s important that you know we generate our own point of view before we turn too quickly to AI it can be messy you just you know write down all your ideas you know your personal thought from your experience you know what you are trying to express and then after that you can use AI to refine what you are trying to express in a way that might be more digestible, right?

Especially as someone that is not a native speaker in English, right? Sometimes I’m I’m afraid that what I say might be misinterpreted. But if I if I really spend the time to write down all my notes, you know, even if it’s messy and what I’m trying to convey and then use AI as a companion that can make sure that I express this in the most efficient way, I think it can be really powerful.

So, I think a lot of people think of AI as a way to save time and and it’s like a big productive boost, but I think it’s important to also think of how it can really push forward your your thinking, right? So, we should acknowledge it helps you save time, you know, but most importantly, I think it can elevate the quality of of your of your thought. You have to be able to write the first draft before you go back to AI is a theme we’ve heard before and I think it’s going to continue to be a really important takeaway.

I’m just thinking of one of the parents that I work with told me that his daughter wrote a text that was like really thoughtful and organized about, you know, a request that she had, but it was so clearly AI generated. But he was at first so impressed with the way that she asked the questions and her proposal that he was like about to bend on a serious boundary because he was like, "That’s such a good argument." So, I just think I was thinking, did she write a first draft first? I don’t think so.

I mean, maybe we can even game out like a parent’s reaction to receiving a text like that. So, I think it’s important that you don’t immediately just make an assumption. I mean, like it like it could be the case that there actually was a lot of back and forth and thoughtfulness that went into like, hey, here’s like what my parents are like and here’s what I need help with.

So, so to me the the response could could look something like this. This is a really well-written text. Like, can you show me?

I mean, I’m pretty sure you used AI. I don’t no judgment, but like I just love to see like how did you actually do that? Like, what was the process of getting to this final text?

Yes. And again, back to this like question of the process. And I think you don’t have to take this dogmatic view of like if AI was used, it’s not good or if AI wasn’t used, that means it’s authentic.

But I I’m curious like, you know, because you you have a newsletter. Do you have a tried-and-true process that you use or do they kind of flow kind of randomly based on, you know, what you’re thinking at the time? Every week I take my episode of Raising Good Humans and I pull out the themes and maybe I focus on like one thing that I thought, "Ooh, I want to stretch this out." Well, to me, my first draft was probably the podcast episode.

And so, I think it’d be interesting. I mean, let’s we’ll follow up with this, but like thinking about that’s a great use of AI. Can you take my first draft of this conversation and tell me what did you take away?

What were your five takeaways? Yeah. Can I because again I want to sort of like make this meaningful for parents because maybe you know most kids don’t have their own podcast.

You know, so your kid comes to you, they’re supposed to write some essay or write something about a topic. You know, maybe instead of just saying, "Okay, go and read about it." and then like come to me back, come back to me with the first draft. Maybe what you do is you you know hit record on your phone, put it on the table and just like let’s just talk about this for like an hour and just like have a conversation and like ask some probing questions and sort of like hear different sort of like responses.

AI can quickly transcribe it for you. Wow. And from there, you know, I feel I feel a little bit more comfortable with okay, could you generate some ideas?

Maybe not a first draft, but again like you know some potential themes or maybe even outlines for a piece of writing. I think this common thread is you know not being too rigid about you know what form learning and thinking can take. You know I think for a lot of kids could be sort of the answer to how do we get them a little bit more engaged on a topic that they might not otherwise.

I actually think this goes back to really thinking through this with your individual unique beautiful child and their brain and how it works to try to decide how best to use this resource because what you just said like at first glance to me I’m like hold on that’s insane like sitting there like both both good and terrifying like but I it would never occur to me that it it was usable to sit down and have like a real deep conversation with a learner and then say let’s see if we can pull some themes from that and then from there let’s let’s grow this paper because I probably would think well that is not going to teach you how to write but actually if there’s a kid who’s not going to learn then then what if they shut down completely what if they just phone it in for their school years and now we’ve unlocked this capacity for them to believe they are brilliant and they just didn’t have a way to get deep about things before. So for some learners, this could be game-changing. It’s all so much to think about and so interesting.

Thank you so much for listening. Join us again next week as we explore how higher education is evolving with AI in mind. We’ll hear from Nick Mattei, a computer science professor at Tulane University who’s incorporating AI into the learning process.

When it was clear that they were being graded on how well they critiqued the LLM, they got a lot more excited about it instead of like them trying to hide the fact that they use the LLM from us to generate the text. And we’ll hear from Shantanu Sinha, the founding president of Khan Academy and currently the VP and general manager at Google for education. There’s not a lot of times that you look at something and say, "Let me take the hard way to do that." well there’s an easier way right here but it really takes somebody with broader judgment to say well what’s the point of I think educators can really support students to really make those those appropriate choices they’ll tell us what they think assessing learning and comprehension will look like in the age of AI and how some learning institutions are already evolving with this in mind this is such a huge topic for those of us working with or having teenagers what does assessing learning and comprehension look like find out where AI will take us in future future generations next on Raising Kids in the Age of AI.

Until then, don’t forget to follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen so you don’t miss an episode, and we want to hear from you. Take a minute to leave us a rating and review on your podcast player of choice. Your feedback is important to us.

Raising Kids in the Age of AI is a podcast by aiEDU in collaboration with Google. It’s produced by Kaleidoscope. For Kaleidoscope, the executive producers are Kate Osborne and Lizzie Jacobs.

Our lead producer is Molly Sosha with production assistance from Irene Bantigay with additional production from Louisa Tucker. Our video editor is Ilia Magazan and our theme song and music were composed by Kyle Murdoch who also mixed the episode for us. See you next time.