When AI creates with you

AI has made inroads into our daily lives, significantly changing the way we think and work. Is it a collaborator making our work better or is it shrinking our creativity and empathy?

- Avantika Bhuyan

Last June, Radha Saxena, a Lucknow-based homemaker, found herself struggling with her seventh grader’s summer homework.

The 12-year-old had to create a pamphlet on two English authors, R. J. Palacio 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 alliteration? “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 her child's English homework, she uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) 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 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. Al emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”