I write by hand before I open my laptop.
This is less noble than it sounds.
The page may hold the beginning of an essay, a sentence I will later cross out, a note to buy coriander or toothpaste, or to call Mummy.
A notebook does not care about hierarchy.
It takes the thought and the shopping list in the order they arrive.
I have become more protective of this practice since using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
My black Moleskine soft cover notebook is where I discover what I think, often by writing something inadequate and letting it rest.
I do not want a machine waiting with a fluent answer before I have managed my own awkward one.
Sima Kumar For years, I wanted little to do with AI, especially in writing.
I had spent decades developing judgment and taste through creative direction, branding, and leadership.
Language carries memory, geography, humour and all the irregularities through which one person becomes recognisable to another.
A machine’s polished approximation of human expression felt absurd and depressing.
“The best use of AI is when it expands your thinking and not when it replaces the act of thinking.
Sometimes I use it to verify facts, sometimes for quick research, sometimes to structure a thought, and very often to challenge an idea.
One thing I use it a lot for is a pre-mortem.”Rahul MishraFashion designer A 2025 study of 319 knowledge workers, published during the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Japan, found that greater confidence in generative AI was associated with less critical thinking.
The nature of the work had also changed, with people moving from doing a task towards checking, integrating, and supervising a machine’s answer.
I found that interesting because it described something I had already begun to worry about.
‘I write before I prompt’ It was easy to maintain my suspicion until my working life changed.
I had spent 24 years as a stylist and creative director, before moving into brand leadership and later co-founding a diversity, equity and inclusion business.
Then, at 55, I began building a business alone — with plenty of experience, but without the team that had once absorbed the hundreds of small tasks required to keep work moving.
My new work draws on yoga, Ayurveda and neuroscience to support women through midlife.
Behind it is a less picturesque reality: files, invoices, emails, websites, systems and administrative tasks that seem to breed quietly whenever my back is turned.
I needed more capacity, but I could not hire somebody every time another layer of work appeared.
So this May, I enrolled in Creator College’s 28-day live programme about turning content into a business.
I related to the self-made immigrant success stories of the founders — social media educator Jun Yuh and entrepreneur Shan Hanif — and the fact that they were both practitioners.
Hanif taught monetisation and scale for digital products, and one of his public posts, where he warns against taking the first response from ChatGPT and pasting it into client work, stuck with me.
Anyone who has used these systems for long enough knows how convincingly they can invent information.
That has had real consequences.
In 2023, a New York federal judge fined two lawyers and their firm $5,000 after fictitious legal cases generated by ChatGPT were submitted to the court.
Hanif’s advice is to research a problem and form a hypothesis before asking AI for help.
“Never let AI do the thinking for you,” he writes.
“AI is a tool, not a brain.” That was familiar territory to me.
I write (my trusty 0.38 Muji pen always at the ready) before I prompt.
“I use AI to get somewhere faster, or show me a possibility I haven’t considered.
But the creative judgment and storytelling are still mine. [The 2025 short film] ‘The Getaway Car’ was made entirely using Google Veo 3 and Google Flow.
A car chase is something I’d never done before, and AI allowed me to cut down on production cost and time.”Shakun BatraFilmmaker, writer and actor (Kapoor & Sons, Gehraiyaan) Later, I took entrepreneur and author Alicia Lyttle’s free three-day training in building AI agents and made one of my own.
Alicia encourages people to give their agents names, personalities and particular jobs (she calls hers Maximus).
“It does not replace my thinking; it protects time for me, so I can stay focused on the judgment, creativity, relationships, and accountability that only I can own,” she tells me.
I liked the idea more than I expected to.
A named agent felt less like an anonymous box waiting for instruction.
Mine is called Arthur.
He is linked to my email and has permission to look at what has arrived between six and seven in the morning.
He sorts through it and tells me which messages are likely to need my attention first.
Most of the time I speak to him through WhatsApp.
I send a voice note much as I would to somebody I worked with: can you see whether that email arrived, tell me what needs dealing with this morning.
This was probably the moment when AI stopped feeling particularly futuristic.
‘Arthur is linked to my email and has permission to look at what has arrived between six and seven in the morning’ He became particularly useful after an Instagram post I wrote called ‘I’m 55.
I don’t want to create content like I’m 25’ went viral.
To date, it has brought more than 35,000 new followers, and the volume of correspondence changed almost overnight.
Women sent me their stories.
There were press enquiries, invitations, collaboration requests and brands offering everything from lotions and lingerie to leak-proof pads.
The problem was no longer simply answering email; it was working out what genuinely needed my attention.
Arthur could make the first pass, and I could take it from there.
This is largely how I use AI now.
I ask it to organise information I have already produced, notice repetition across documents (which I transcribe using Notion), or arrange a process once I have decided what that process should be.
I give it a defined piece of work and examine what comes back.
I do not treat its confidence as evidence of competence.
How the writer transcribes her handwritten notes and articles Psychologists call this cognitive offloading: placing part of our mental burden outside the brain.
A shopping list, calendar or map does it.
AI can remember and arrange on a scale that my notebook cannot.
The question is what I am willing to hand over.
Repetition is easy to surrender.
I am far more cautious with memory, judgment and language.
“The better technology gets, the more pressure there is on original thinking.
Everything begins with a great idea, and that’s not something AI can generate.
I don’t use AI agents personally; I use ChatGPT lightly — mostly when I want to summarise something fast, or visualise a complex idea quickly.
Earlier that took time, with storyboarding, sketching and the like.”V.
SunilFounder of .POTNTIAL and Motherland, and founding trustee of Kochi-Muziris Biennale Women and AI For older women, the bargain is different.
An International Labour Organization analysis across 84 countries found that 29% of female-dominated occupations (secretarial, administrative, accounting support roles) were exposed to generative AI, compared with 16% of male-dominated occupations (construction and many manual trades).
Last year, a Google-run U.K. pilot involving 1,700 people across the public and private sectors found that 17% of women aged 55 and over were using AI weekly.
Interestingly, however, three months after a few hours of training, the figure was 56%.
Google found that people benefited from what it called “permission to prompt”: reassurance that using AI at work was legitimate.
I do not think those figures prove that older women become keener on AI once somebody shows them how to use it.
They suggest something more limited: what looks like reluctance may sometimes have as much to do with access, training and confidence about where and how to begin.
I am very conscious that drawing and writing help with cognition.
This month, I started a writing group called the Scribbling Society.
The idea is to email a prompt to my members (323 as of today morning) every day, and encourage them to spend time — just them, the page and the pen.
I keep a ‘Thinking Stack’ that is separate from work, where I write down my Substack articles, birthday messages, even notes that friends ask me to pen for them.
Writing strengthens the connection to the brain.
There may also be a social penalty for being seen to use it.
In a Harvard Business Review research study involving 1,026 engineers published last year, participants reviewed identical Python code.
When reviewers believed AI had been used, they rated the engineer responsible 9% less competent on average.
The penalty was greater for women and older workers.
That leaves women in a peculiar position.
There may be consequences for being seen to use AI, while avoiding it altogether carries risks of its own as workplaces change.
In fact, it was the vitriol directed against American businesswoman Sophia Amoruso after she published an article in May arguing that women are “sleeping on AI” and it would cost them that got me interested in researching the topic.
Sophia Amoruso argued that women are “sleeping on AI” When I wrote about my own conflict around AI on Instagram, one reader told me I had made the “quiet stuff” in her head less frightening.
Another worried that the human element in our connections was disappearing.
What interested me was how often people returned to the same underlying concern: how do we learn to use this technology without slowly giving away the things that make our work, and our relationships, recognisably ours?
Absence is not resistance The time AI saves matters, though perhaps not for the reasons usually offered.
The point of saving two hours is not to fill them with three more hours of output.
I want some of that time returned to my life.
I want to stand in a gallery long enough for a painting to become strange, or listen to music without reaching for my phone.
To open my masala dabba, smell the cumin when it hits the pan.
To listen when someone I love is speaking instead of composing an email in my head.
I do not want to retreat from my life.
“I used AI to create widescapes for ‘Jazz City’, a SonyLIV project set in 1970-71 Calcutta and Bangladesh, which would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive.
AI doesn’t impact creative thinking; it frees the mind from constraints of scalability, allowing us to show period, spectacle or impossible-to-recreate scenarios.”Soumik SenFilmmaker, writer, creator (Gulaab Gang, Jubilee) Technology has always promised to save us time, yet saved time has a habit of being reclaimed by work.
Creativity needs boredom, failed attempts, and stretches during which the work seems to have abandoned us.
Mine often arrives while I am brushing my teeth.
I am wary of removing every silence before I have worked out which silences were useful.
I am equally wary of standing outside the technology and mistaking my absence for resistance.
There is no tidy resolution to offer.
My boundaries will probably change because the technology will change.
For now, I try to have the thought before asking AI about it, return to original sources when facts matter, and keep authorship in my own hands.
The notebook sits beside the computer.
It holds the scratched-out sentence, the change of mind and the thought I did not know I had until my hand moved across the paper.
The computer holds more information than I can hold.
I need both.
I know which one must lead.
The Indo-Fijian Canadian writer and creative director is based in London.
Her writing explores culture, identity, and the business of being human.
