The Debate Society at VIT published an essay on Medium in December 2025 that asks a question many in tech have stopped asking: will AI suffocate imagination or help it flourish? The piece, by Ishani Majumder, runs through the familiar arguments — AI as threat to human creativity, AI as equalizer, AI as co-author — but it lands somewhere more interesting than most commentary on this topic. It refuses to pick a side.
That refusal is the story. Most coverage of AI and creative writing is a binary: the technology is either destroying culture or democratizing it. Majumder’s essay, written for a university debate society, presents both houses of argument without settling the score. House A says AI dulls the desire to imagine. House B says AI is a brainstorming partner. The essay ends with a question, not a conclusion. This is rare in a field where every product launch comes with a manifesto.
The essay contains a useful data point from 2020. A research paper had 80 US citizens try to distinguish GPT-3 generated articles from human-authored ones. Mean accuracy was barely above chance at 52%. Majumder’s own informal survey of 32 participants found that people confidently misidentified AI passages as human and could not confidently identify a human poem as such. These numbers are from 2020 and 2025, respectively. The gap has only narrowed since. If readers cannot distinguish, the essay asks, does that diminish the value of human creativity?
The piece is honest about the class dimensions. “When English is the most common language in workplaces, divisions naturally creep in,” Majumder writes. “People in India who have never had English as their first language or come from remote areas have not had the same resources.” Generative AI becomes an equalizer here: a pen for translating ideas. Data cited in the essay shows AI helps neurodivergent people, people with ADHD, dyslexia, and chronic mental illnesses to communicate and organize better. This is the strongest argument for the technology, and it is one that Silicon Valley product managers rarely make in their launch notes.
But the essay also surfaces the contradiction. If AI is an equalizer because it masks imperfect grammar, what happens to the value of learning to write well? The high school assignments on drafting letters and emails “almost seem moot,” Majumder writes. That is not a neutral observation. It is a description of a world where a core skill — the ability to articulate thought in prose — is being outsourced before it is learned. The essay does not resolve this tension. It presents it.
The piece references Stephen Marche’s 2023 book Death of an Author, written using AI, as a demonstration of human-machine fusion. It mentions David Cope’s EMI program from the 1980s, which composed in the style of Mozart to overcome composer’s block. These historical parallels matter. The anxiety about machines replacing creative humans is not new. What is new is the scale: generative AI has integrated into daily writing faster than any previous technology, according to the essay’s own timeline. GPT-3 launched in May 2020. ChatGPT 3.5 debuted in 2022. By 2023, Gemini, Copilot, Meta, DeepSeek, and Claude were all in the market. The acceleration is not debatable.
The essay’s most provocative section comes near the end. It invokes Roland Barthes’s argument that once published, authors turn their works over to public interpretation. If readers may borrow, reinterpret, and transform a text, does AI training fall under the same umbrella? The essay answers its own question: “AI is neither human nor sentient. However, the rest of the point might stand.” This is a genuinely interesting frame. It shifts the debate from plagiarism to interpretation. If human writing is always already influenced by previous authors, what makes algorithmic pattern-matching categorically different?
The answer, the essay implies, is intent. “The words might be AI-generated but their intent is original,” Majumder writes. This is a fragile claim. Intent without execution is just a wish. But it points to a possible future where the role of the writer shifts from crafting sentences to directing them. The essay cites a University of Florida study showing that people rated AI-labelled stories poorly regardless of quality, while human-labelled stories were received more positively. Bias cuts both ways.
The piece ends where it began: with a question. “So, will AI suffocate imagination or help it flourish? The answer depends on how creatively it is used.” That is not an answer. It is a dodge. But it is a dodge that reflects the actual state of the technology. Nobody knows how this plays out. The Debate Society essay does not pretend otherwise. That honesty is its strongest feature.
For AI builders, the takeaway is uncomfortable. The technology is being adopted fastest by people who were excluded from the old system — non-native speakers, neurodivergent writers, students without access to elite education. That is a genuine good. But the same technology is being used to generate content that floods the market, making it harder for human creators to stand out. The essay does not resolve this tension because it cannot be resolved. It can only be managed.
The most concrete observation in the piece is buried in the middle: “Uniform sentences with perfect grammar, perhaps too perfect grammar, like the use of em dashes and Oxford commas might be an indication.” AI writing has a tell. It is not the content. It is the polish.