Does writing with AI make you a worse writer?

Wretify is a clean, minimalist writing app for nonfiction writers, built for focus — with an AI that has read everything you've written and refuses to write it for you.

The short answer

It can, when the AI does the part of writing that builds the skill. Controlled studies find that AI help lifts the result while you are using it, but weakens what people produce on their own afterwards, and that people feel less ownership of text the AI wrote. The effect depends on what you hand over: asking an AI to question your draft is different from asking it to write the draft.

What happens when the AI is taken away?

In two pre-registered experiments with 1,100 people, AI help raised creativity during the task but “may inadvertently hinder independent creative performance when users work without assistance” — in some cases leading to less original, more similar ideas afterwards (Kumar and colleagues, 2025). In a separate experiment with 61 students, creativity fell back to where it started once ChatGPT was removed, while the sameness of their ideas persisted (Liu and colleagues, 2026).

Do better AI-assisted essays mean a better writer?

Not necessarily. In a randomised study of 117 university students, those who used ChatGPT improved their essays more than any other group, yet gained no more knowledge and transferred no more of it to a new task. The authors warn of “metacognitive laziness”: handing over the planning, monitoring and self-checking that learning depends on (Fan and colleagues, 2025).

Do you still own the words?

Often not, and people know it. Researchers call it “the AI Ghostwriter Effect”: people do not feel they own text an AI generated, yet still put their own names on it (Draxler and colleagues, 2024). In a 2026 study, writing by hand gave higher ownership than every AI-assisted condition (Pennanen and colleagues, 2026).

Does the amount of help matter?

Yes. In a study of 131 people, help that wrote whole paragraphs reduced ownership more than help that suggested single sentences — though it also made writing faster and improved quality (Dhillon and colleagues, 2024). The trade is real: speed and polish now, less of the work being yours.

How can AI make me a better writer instead?

Use it where it strengthens your own work rather than replacing it: to ask what a passage is really doing, to find the assumption an argument rests on, to test whether a conclusion follows, and to catch grammar mistakes while telling you why they are mistakes. Keep the planning and the sentences yours. The right way to use AI for nonfiction writing →

Sources

  1. Kumar et al. (2025), Human Creativity in the Age of LLMs, CHI 2025 — doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714198
  2. Liu et al., When ChatGPT is gone: creativity reverts and homogeneity persists — arxiv.org/abs/2401.06816
  3. Fan et al. (2025), Beware of metacognitive laziness, British Journal of Educational Technology — doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544
  4. Draxler et al. (2024), The AI Ghostwriter Effect, ACM TOCHI 31(2) — doi.org/10.1145/3637875
  5. Pennanen, Kanerva & Guckelsberger (2026), How prompting and editing shape psychological ownership — doi.org/10.1016/j.chbah.2026.100381
  6. Dhillon et al. (2024), Shaping Human-AI Collaboration: Varied Scaffolding Levels in Co-writing, CHI 2024 — doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642134

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