AI Assistance for Writing While Overwhelmed

These days, most folks I know have a lot on their minds. (I was going to list some of the things that might be on our minds, but then realized I’d have sidetracked us from the point of this article.) I imagine this can be a really tough time to focus as a student — and particularly as a neurodivergent student. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) as a broad category includes many elements — some of which are  destructive, but others can be helpful and even game changing for students (and others). When many people say “AI” today, they mean generative AI (genAI), including AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Perplexity, etc., which are quite new.  But we’ve actually been using AI for years in social media platforms, weather forecasting, autocorrect, translation, transcription, traffic apps and many others. This can make it easy to not question genAI when we should, but also to reject it because it seems new and unconnected to other types of machine learning we’re used to. For a detailed dive into today’s AI landscape for students, see the resources section below.

I’ve been exploring ways to work with AI to support my writing this year and want to share some of what I’ve found, along with general guides, for folks who will excel with AI assistance. 

My journey to AI assistance

In 2024, I was one of the many people to help the Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS) formulate its guidelines for award submission with AI assisted vs. AI generated text. I’m a nerd and an early adopter of technologies, but a year ago I was solidly in the group of authors who hate AI. 

And then in early 2025, I started to have joint pain flare-ups in my hands that made it hard to type for more than a few minutes at a time. As an author, I’ve had many work days when I type thousands of words: drafting novels, writing emails, journaling, organizing my thoughts, and so on. Getting cut down from thousands of words to hundreds does not work for me — so I began expanding my writing process using voice-to-text. 

My physical therapy doctor had warned me to start this process at least a year before I actually did, and having that medical advice helped me resist the change less than I would have otherwise. (Thank you, Dr. Anna!) She’s also helped with other recommendations, so I’m having fewer flare-ups and am actually typing this blog post with relatively pain-free fingers. 

What I hate about voice-to-text and many dictation options is having to speak punctuation. I got absolutely stuck on “open quote, close quote.” That’s when I discovered that I could use Claude AI to read scenes I’d spoken and add paragraphing and quotes as needed, without changing any words. Other AI models can do this as well — I like Claude for its ability to have project knowledge and efforts to be slightly more ethical than some others. (See below for more on ethical AI models.) Having opened the door, I decided to play around and see what other ways AI could be helpful, especially for me as a neurodivergent writer. 

How can AI help you? 

For students, writers, and others with ADHD, Autism, or a blend of those, AI can fill in the gaps in our working memory and executive function. One popular tool for this is Goblin Tools’s Magic To Do, which will break down tasks into smaller and smaller steps. This can be super helpful for thinking through how to do larger assignments and projects. It can also help by making a project feel fun.

I use Claude AI frequently to help with my executive function. Claude allows users to upload documents into “projects,” so I have projects with deep information about my work style, preferences, and specific neurodivergence that I can ask Claude to draw from when making recommendations about how I tackle big tasks in my daily life. This does require the $20/month subscription — but you could get close by using a very detailed prompt about your project preferences with almost any AI model. Claude also integrates with Atlassian’s Confluence (even at the free subscription level) and can create pages, so I can ask Claude to help me break down large projects and then create pages where we can track them together, or I can see boxes to check off on my own.

For writing tasks, AI can help with:

• Just getting started! The blank page can feel daunting. Talking to an AI about the project may be the boost you need to get excited and start writing
• Brainstorming essay topics and story ideas
• Brainstorming ways to organize your essay 
• Brainstorming things that can go wrong in a scene
• Asking you questions about your characters that help you understand them more fully 
• Web searches and topic overviews — you have to double-check the info, but starting the search in an AI model that gives you links (and most will, especially if you ask for them) will allow you to zoom in on the web pages most likely to have the information you need
• Organizing notes you’ve taken
• Analyzing the techniques of other writers that I love to help me get a fresh take on why I love them and how to play with those techniques in my own writing

If you want to use AI, it’s important to get used to iterating with the AI rather than taking the first information that shows up. AI is very good at presenting information in a way that looks authoritative, but AI is not the authority on your work. 

One of the most useful aspects of AI for me is how it jogs my thinking and helps me surface my own ideas when I see what it has missed or mis-construed. AI can be like an energetic friend who will talk to you whenever you need about your story or essay and offer suggestions (some of them bad). As with any collaboration, you need to keep your attention on what you want to create and stay authentic to that.

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Downsides to using AI in writing

AI can also make it harder for us to focus by generating too much content — and content that looks polished but is effectively meaningless. It can also cause you to skip over steps that are important in the learning process. For example, if you use AI to correct your grammar, but don’t look at the corrections it makes, you won’t learn to change your habitual grammatical mistakes. 

If you ask AI to outline an essay that you’re going to write and then don’t think critically about whether that outline really is the best presentation of that topic — or the way you specifically want to present that topic — then you’re not expanding your ability to effectively communicate ideas. But if you ask AI to create one or two or three outlines and then you take the best parts of each and weave them together, you’ve learned a lot and probably had some fun doing it. 

Using AI to replace our thinking is dangerous. But we can use it to better organize and support our thinking and build foundations from which we can do our best work.

Resources for students

• Macalester’s AI Literacy and Critical Thinking guide
• American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence — this is a great and fairly comprehensive 23p PDF
• Carleton College Plagiarism and Artificial Intelligence — this includes powerful examples of ways students might use AI (some of them inadvisable) that may be worth discussing with professors if you’re using AI in these ways.

Is there ethical AI?

I hope that we’re getting there. Here’s one good list to help you choose AI models that are more ethical. This question may be part of the larger question about what constitutes ethical consumption under capitalism (which I am not qualified to answer and very smart people have written about). My current thinking is that if AI assistance helps neurodivergent students and writers engage more fully with the world, this will be worth the downsides in the long run. 

Example prompts

Here are some prompts based on my work with Claude:

1. I’ve attached a story/essay I’m working on. Would you please read it and let me know places where there are inconsistencies or where I haven’t provided enough information? (Another variation on this is: I’ve attached a story and the theme is X, please tell me three places where I could include more information relevant to that theme.)
2. I want to add a scene to this story (attached) in which the characters take some procedural actions that the story needs [say the actions specific to your story in this prompt]  but that could be really boring. Would you help me brainstorm ways to keep this scene from being boring? Please suggest five ways to make it funny and five ways to make it more dramatic. 
3. Please look at the meta-analysis of my writing in the project knowledge — and then apply the notes about structure to the attached draft document. I’d like you to make a page in Confluence, in the Novel Development space, that is an outline of that story draft that fills in what’s already written but also indicates where I haven’t yet written necessary scenes based on the structure guide I created for myself in the project knowledge. 
4. Please look online and familiarize yourself with Lisa Cron’s “Story Genius” technique, specifically the character misbelief. Then ask me questions that will help me figure out the misbelief of my main character and how that misbelief formed. (Another variation on this is: please read the draft of the story that I’m working on and suggest possible misbeliefs for my main character.)
5. Here’s a description of a book I like a lot. I’m wondering what it would be like if this specific side character were the main character. Let’s brainstorm about this. Please suggest a few ways the book might be different and ask me to come up with additional ways the story would change. 

Note that all of those are just the starting points of longer conversations. Talking with AI can help me maintain my focus on a subject or story that I’m interested in — and at the end of the day, the goal is for me to keep working on my story. The work doesn’t end with the AI conversation. That conversation is a way to get organized, get dopamine flowing, focus my attention and keep bringing it back to my learning, my development, and my work.

Do you have questions about using AI as a supportive tool? Thoughts you’d like to add? I’d love to hear from you! Let me know in the comments on this post if you’re so inclined.

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