I love AI.
As an entrepreneur, AI has been a game changer in my life. I use it. My team uses it. As a startup, AI gives us access to perspectives that we may not always have had the budget or resources to seek out. It helps us think wider and deliver better and faster.
But the more I interact with children, the more I find myself worrying about something else.
What happens when millions of us begin creating with the same extraordinarily capable thinking partner?
My suspicion is that we are heading towards a world with an abundance of “perfect” content and a shortage of genuinely original thought.
Everything may become polished.
And quite boring.
The day the blankets started looking alike
We recently conducted Learner Circle's Revelio Chennai 2026, a celebration of young creators that included writing and illustration competitions.
For the illustration competition, children were asked to create three illustrations inspired by Fred and the Monster Under the Bed, a previously published book by one of our young authors.
More than 170 children participated.
Giving everyone the same story was intentional. We wanted to see what different young minds would see in it.
And then something curious happened.
As we went through the entries, certain elements began appearing again and again.
A blue blanket covered in stars.
A framed picture of a rocket on the wall.
Similar compositions. Similar visual interpretations. Similar details appearing across supposedly independent pieces of creative work.
The similarities were too striking to simply dismiss as coincidence.
Could we prove exactly what tool or prompt each child had used? No.
But turning a blind eye to patterns like these because we are afraid of accusing children would, in my view, do them a greater disservice. When many children independently produce remarkably similar creative interpretations, we need to be willing to connect the dots and, more importantly, ask what it means for the way children are learning to create.
The question isn't about catching children using AI.
The more important question is this:
If everyone has access to the same tools, what will make one person's work worth noticing?
One of the entries gave us a rather beautiful answer.
Almost everyone had illustrated the story from the obvious point of view: the child looking towards the monster under the bed.
One child turned it around.
She drew three faces peering down from the top of the page. We were looking at them from underneath the bed, from the monster's point of view.
Her drawing may not have been the most technically accomplished entry in the competition. But she had seen something that the others hadn't.
That originality of thought became an important part of why her work stood out and was chosen for the top recognition.
For me, that experience was a tiny preview of a much larger shift that is coming.
When "good" becomes cheap
For most of human history, producing something good was difficult.
Writing a polished article took time. Creating a professional presentation required skill. Illustrating an idea required artistic ability. Even getting information meant knowing where to find it.
AI is rapidly reducing those barriers.
That is wonderful in many ways. It democratises capability.
But there is an interesting consequence.
When competent output becomes abundant, competence alone stops being a differentiator.
Imagine opening LinkedIn a few years from now and finding thousands of beautifully written posts. Perfect hooks. Perfect structure. Perfect grammar. Perfect concluding questions.
How many will you actually want to read?
I suspect we will develop a hunger for the imperfectly human.
The unexpected observation.
The opinion somebody actually arrived at.
The story that could only have happened to that person.
As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, authenticity may become scarce and therefore more valuable.
Then I asked a room full of children a question
I saw another glimpse of this recently when I was invited to judge a small speech competition for children.
It was an intimate group, perhaps 25 children, and somewhere during our interaction I asked:
"How many of you used AI while preparing your speech?"
A majority of hands went up.
I wasn't shocked. Frankly, why wouldn't they?
AI exists in their world. Asking today's children to pretend it doesn't exist would be a little like asking my generation to ignore Google.
So we didn't have a conversation about avoiding AI.
Instead, we talked about what might happen if everybody asked AI to do the thinking for them.
I told them we might all start sounding a little vanilla.
That got their attention.
Nobody wanted to be vanilla.
The children quickly decided they would rather be cassata, falooda and considerably more interesting things!
And somewhere in that laughter, they came up with a remarkably sensible rule:
Think and write first. Then use AI for help if you need it.
I couldn't have framed it better myself.
AI should meet a mind that has already begun thinking
This is where I think our conversations with children need to change.
"Don't use AI" is unlikely to work.
Nor should it.
These children will enter universities and workplaces where knowing how to work intelligently with AI will probably be a basic skill.
But there is an enormous difference between:
"Here is what I think. Help me challenge it."
and
"Tell me what to think."
There is a difference between asking AI to improve your story and asking it to imagine the story for you.
Between using AI to interrogate an argument and asking it to manufacture one.
The danger isn't that AI will think.
The danger is that we might practise thinking less.
And childhood is precisely when that practice matters.
Let children produce bad ideas
Working with young writers at Learner Circle has taught me something that I wish more adults remembered.
A child's first idea does not have to be brilliant.
It can be silly.
Predictable.
Impossible.
Grammatically disastrous.
Sometimes downright bizarre.
That is okay.
Because underneath that messy first attempt, something important is happening. A child is discovering, This is what I think.
If we replace that uncomfortable stage immediately with a beautifully structured AI-generated answer, we may improve the output while accidentally weakening the process that creates an original thinker.
This is why I increasingly believe parents and educators need to become comfortable asking questions for which we don't immediately seek polished answers.
"What do you think?"
"Why?"
"What if the opposite were true?"
"Can you think of a completely different ending?"
"What is something here that nobody else in your class might notice?"
These aren't anti-AI questions.
They are pro-thinking questions.
And perhaps we adults need to practise them too.
What will become valuable when everyone has AI?
This, to me, is the more interesting question.
We spend a lot of time discussing what AI can do and which jobs it might replace. Perhaps we should spend equally as much time asking what becomes more valuable precisely because AI can do so much.
There will be no shortage of information.
There will be no shortage of grammatically correct paragraphs, attractive images, competent presentations or reasonable ideas.
What may become harder to find is a voice.
The courage to disagree with the obvious answer.
The ability to look at the same story that 170 other people have looked at and somehow see it from underneath the bed.
That is why I don't think creativity is a "nice-to-have" skill sitting somewhere below maths, science and technology.
I think it is becoming an economic and human advantage.
And perhaps the greatest mistake we could make with the next generation is teaching them to become extraordinarily efficient at producing what already exists.
AI and originality can make a wonderful team.
But I hope we teach our children one simple rule:
Bring something to the conversation before you ask AI to join it.
Because the future will have plenty of answers.
What it will need are people who can still surprise us with a thought of their own.
About the Author
Anuradha Venkatachalam is the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Learner Circle, a Singapore-based platform empowering children to become published authors. She has helped nurture the creative journeys of over 25,000 young learners and played a key role in publishing more than 700 young authors across multiple countries. A passionate advocate for creativity and pursuing passion, Anuradha regularly speaks on creative writing, publishing, education, and nurturing children's voices. Her work has been featured at international literary events, where she champions the belief that every child has a story worth telling.