Thinking With or Thinking Through Machines? Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Creative Cognition in English Literature

The rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence into contemporary writing practices raises important scholarly debates about creativity, authorship, and originality within the discipline of English literary studies. While much of the growing literature focuses on the ethical legitimacy or aesthetic quality of AI-generated texts, relatively less attention is given to how AI reconfigures the creative thinking processes of human writers. This article fills this gap by taking Artificial Intelligence as a cognitive presence that intervenes in literary imagination, decision-making, and reflective judgment. Merging insights from literary theory, cognitive creativity studies, and posthuman thought, this research argues that the most profound effect of AI is not to be found at the level of text production but in changing creative cognition as such. The study covered the literature review extensively to identify the enabling and constraining effects of AI-assisted writing. While AI acts, on the one hand, as a facilitator of associative and exploratory thinking, helping authors to overcome creative inertia and expand conceptual permutations, on the other hand, continued dependency on algorithmic suggestion threatens cognitive displacement, which undercuts creative struggle, imaginative risk, and tolerance for uncertainty. For theorizing these divergent outcomes, the study develops a synthetic framework distinguishing between thinking with machines and thinking through machines. Thinking with machines requires reflective, dialogic engagement-which sustains authorial agency-whereas thinking through machines involves cognitive delegation that can attenuate creative autonomy. The present analysis locates these concerns within Indian English literary contexts, where multilingual consciousness and postcolonial negotiations of voice heighten the risks of linguistic standardization. The study thus concludes that artificial intelligence neither negates nor guarantees creativity; it reconfigures the conditions under which literary thinking unfolds. Creative cognition is thus safeguarded only through conscious negotiation, critical literacy, and resistance to unreflective automation within this practice.