Romance novelist Coral Hart publishes the same number of books she did before adopting AI tools - but she no longer works seven days a week to do it. Her experience sits at the center of a growing debate about whether generative AI expands human creativity or quietly flattens it.
Hart, founder of the AI writing course company PlotProse, joined cognitive neuroscientist Adam Green of Georgetown University and Wharton researcher Lennart Meincke to discuss how AI is reshaping creative work. The conversation, adapted from the WBUR podcast "Endless Thread," comes as AI-generated books flood marketplaces like Amazon and publishers begin requiring authors to sign declarations that they didn't use AI.
For writers weighing whether to adopt these tools, the research cuts both ways: AI can boost individual output while narrowing the range of ideas across the creative ecosystem.
AI ideas tend toward the average
Meincke's research at Wharton's business school examines AI and consumer creativity. His findings point to a central tension: AI can generate ideas that sound good, but the underlying mechanics push toward sameness.
"The probabilistic nature of AI means it's always going to generate within a narrow band," Green said. "The bandwidth for each person when they generate ideas themselves is much broader. So AI can be a homogenization machine when it's the only generator of ideas."
That homogenization effect appears even when people aren't directly copying AI output. In one study Meincke conducted, crowd workers who saw AI-generated example ideas produced fewer unique ideas of their own - even when they never saw what other human participants submitted.
Green said the solution isn't avoiding AI but using it deliberately to push beyond familiar territory. "If people use AI in ways that help them to generate ideas that are different from what they could generate on their own - unusual or rare or bizarre combinations - then it can be a really powerful tool."
One novelist's case for AI as a creative accelerant
Hart started writing before AI tools existed, spending nine months on her first book while working a full-time job. She now publishes five or six books a year and credits AI with making that pace sustainable without the physical toll she previously experienced.
"Before, the same number of books but I was working seven days a week," Hart said. "And I was writing ~10,000 words a day and sick. I was getting sick a lot."
She describes AI as a support system rather than a replacement: she still writes daily, but uses the tools to brainstorm plot directions and work through practical details. The result, she said, is more creative output, not less.
"I can do more projects," Hart said. "I can put out maybe five or six books a year rather than three. But it also means I can experiment."
When asked whether relying on AI risks eroding her own writing skills, Hart pushed back. She compared it to hiring a cleaning professional with better equipment: the tool matters less than the training and judgment of the person using it.
"It's my craft and my training and my abilities that inform how I use this tool, not the other way around," she said. "I don't feel like I'm losing anything."
She also rejected the criticism that AI-assisted authors are simply blending existing work. "I've had people say to me, 'You just copied 20 years of author all into a blender,'" Hart said. "And my response is, 'Yes, that's exactly how humans learn too.'"
Individual gains, systemic risk
Green said both perspectives can be true at once. An individual writer can use AI to express themselves more fully while the broader culture drifts toward a narrower creative range.
"Societally, it may be a different story," he said. "If lots of people are using the same tools built on the same prior data, trained on the same corpus of human creative work that already exists, then, by definition, the menu of options that people are selecting from overall starts to shrink."
He compared the risk to the Ford Model T: "You can have it any color you want as long as it's black."
The concern applies to professional contexts beyond fiction. Writers in marketing, journalism, and technical fields who lean heavily on AI for ideation may produce more content while the diversity of their thinking narrows - a trade-off that's hard to notice until it's already happened.
"The human tendency is to believe that new technologies that are designed to assist thinking carry a modest risk, like atrophy of certain skills," Green said. "We don't worry much, for instance, about spellcheck making us worse spellers. But there is a real chance that generative AI will produce the intellectual equivalent of atrophy, and in ways that we may not see coming until we're already there."
For AI for Writers, the practical question isn't whether to use these tools - it's how to use them without outsourcing the thinking that makes creative work distinctive.
Why this matters for writers
For working writers, the research suggests a specific strategy: use AI for volume and speed, but protect the parts of the process that generate unusual combinations. The writers most likely to thrive are those who treat AI as an assistant for execution - drafting, research, formatting - while keeping ideation and voice firmly in their own hands.
Hart's approach offers a model. She uses AI to handle practical content decisions and brainstorming, but she still writes every day and maintains creative control over her stories. The tools didn't replace her process; they made it sustainable.
Writers should also watch the homogenization risk in their own output. If AI-generated suggestions start feeling predictable, that's a signal to step back and generate ideas independently before returning to the tools. The writers who maintain an edge will be the ones who treat AI as one input among many - not the default source of their next idea.
For AI for Creatives, the takeaway is similar: the technology rewards people who already have strong craft and clear creative instincts. Writers who understand their genre, their audience, and their own voice will get more from AI than those who expect the tools to supply those elements.
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