—Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Zamora Design via Canva; Iuliia Bondar via Canva)Neuroscientist Adam Green still remembers a college student telling him about a new addition to the home she shared with her roommates: a basil plant. Naturally, it needed a name, and she thought coming up with one together would be part of the fun. One roommate, however, promptly recruited some outside help, pulling out her phone to ask ChatGPT for suggestions.To Green, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University who studies creativity, the roommate had missed the point. “Who the hell cares what the name of the basil plant is?” he says. “We’re supposed to have fun together.” Coming up with something themselves would have given the roommates more than a name: They’d have a shared memory and a story to tell whenever they referred to their leafy housemate. Instead, he says, “we just lost this experience.”You don’t have to be naming a houseplant to recognize the temptation. A birthday gift, a tricky email, a problem at work: Why wrestle with it yourself when a chatbot is happy to get you started? Yet before you hand over the task, experts suggest one small change: Write down three ideas of your own. They can be rough, impractical, or destined for the recycling bin. The point is to give yourself a chance to think before someone—or something—else supplies the answer.Why you should brainstorm before asking AIAI platforms can be enticing; no one likes to stare into a void of ideas. “We’re all scared of the blank page,” Green says, “and AI is offering to fill that page for us and take that fear away.” Yet working through the discomfort of having to think for yourself offers rewards: figuring something out, expressing something meaningful, or realizing you’re capable of doing something difficult.You get to tell yourself: “I’m actually proud of this because it was hard, because I failed and I didn’t give up, because I learned something in order to succeed,” he says. “And now I’ve got this new skill and this new capability.”Ask AI to spare you that struggle, and you might find it starts to feel harder to come up with your own ideas afterward. AI offers “a narrow set of possibilities,” says Sabrina Habib, a creativity researcher at the University of South Carolina, which can lead to what researchers call anchoring or fixation. “You’re going to have a hard time thinking of ideas beyond that narrow set of possibilities that was given to you.”Plus, rely on AI too much, and everything you produce might start to sound like everything else everyone else produces. In research comparing human-written college admissions essays with those generated by ChatGPT, Green and his colleagues found that the human essays explored a wider range of ideas; the AI essays covered much of the same ground. “When we adopt AI’s ideas as our own, our own ideas become similar to each other,” he says. “We lose our unique voice.”Your own ideas have the advantage of being squarely yours. Only you know the inside joke that belongs in your sister’s birthday card, or what would make an overworked colleague’s day easier. Taking a first pass lets those details shape your approach. “We’re bringing our own thoughts. We’re in charge. We have agency. We’re the authors,” Habib says. AI can help you build on what you’ve started, but “humans have to be in control of the vision, the direction.” How to get into the habit of writing down 3 ideasBefore opening a chatbot, spend a moment figuring out what you actually need, Habib suggests. If you’re choosing a gift, what would make it a good one for this particular person? If you’re swamped at work, what would actually take something off your plate? Giving yourself some criteria helps you generate possibilities—and, later, judge whether AI’s suggestions are useful.Then take your first pass. Write down three gifts your sister might like, three ways to adjust your workload, or three points you want to make in a difficult conversation. If you’re tempted to ask AI to write an email to your boss about that workload, try putting those points into your own words first—even if they come out clunky. Digital communication expert Erica Dhawan, author of the forthcoming book Use Your Brain, calls this the “naked draft rule”: “Write your own raw draft before you ever use AI,” she says.And remember: It doesn’t have to be perfect. Your birthday-card draft can have an awkward opening and a sentence you’ll eventually delete. Your gift list can include something too expensive. Getting those thoughts down gives you something to revise, build on, or cross off the list.If three ideas come easily, keep going. Habib suggests trying five for an extra challenge. The precise number doesn’t matter as much as giving yourself a chance to think before turning to AI.If nothing comes as you brainstorm, resist treating the blank page as evidence that you’ve forgotten how to think. “Give yourself permission to find the task difficult,” Habib says. Try setting a three-minute timer and writing everything that occurs to you, with one idea per sticky note. Or take a walk and return to the problem later. A change of scenery may help when staring at your screen clearly isn’t productive, she says.Whether you come up with one idea or five, be patient with yourself. Habib likes to remind herself: “Even if it takes time, I’m capable. I can do this.”How to use AI without losing your own ideasOnce you have something on the page, you may decide you don’t need AI after all. If you do want to enlist a bot’s assistance, however, give it your ideas and the details that inspired them, says Aron Lindberg, a professor of information systems and analytics at Stevens Institute of Technology. Asking what to buy your sister, without telling it anything about her, will get you “the most generic answer possible,” he says. Explain that she loves dancing and horror movies, and “then you’ve got something to work on.”Share the gift ideas you’ve already come up with, then ask for more along those lines, Lindberg suggests. Once you have a longer list, ask the chatbot to critique those ideas as well. That gives you a chance to weigh what might work and what might go wrong, rather than simply accepting a recommendation. “AI is giving me two perspectives on this thing,” he says. “What do I think?”Sometimes, the most useful thing AI can offer is a question for you to answer. For a birthday card, Dhawan suggests asking the chatbot to pose five questions, one at a time, that would help make the message more personal. It might ask: “What’s a memory with this person that still makes you laugh?” “What’s something they did for you that you’ve never properly thanked them for?” You still have to supply the memories and feelings—but the questions might jog your recollection of the disastrous road trip you now laugh about, or the late-night phone call that helped you through a breakup.If you’re trying to solve a problem at work, ask what you’ve overlooked. Habib suggests laying out the problem and your possible approaches, then asking whether there are other solutions you haven’t considered. Dhawan recommends questions such as: “What would have to be true for this to be wrong?” or “What are three ways someone would interpret this the wrong way?”Then step back and evaluate the response yourself. Is it accurate? Does it fit the situation? Does that polished message sound like something you would say in real life? “First, we actually have to think, then we use it to challenge our thinking and make it better, and then we have to think again,” Dhawan says. “What’s missing from what I know? Only I know.”You don’t have to settle on an answer just because the chatbot has supplied one. Keep thinking, toss around possibilities with a friend, and give yourself a chance to enjoy coming up with something—even if it’s only a name for a houseplant. “Thinking is hard,” Habib says. “But it’s also wonderful.”