What a Chocolate Shop, Dyslexia and AI Taught Me About Creativity

This World Chocolate Day, allow me to tell you a story! I have always been a storyteller even before I was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, and long before GenAI existed.

Stories have always been how I make sense of the world. I tell them when I coach, teach, explain something complicated, or to make people laugh. But getting stories onto paper was a challenge. For years, I believed the common myths about dyslexia, that it was mainly about reading, spelling and muddling words. For me, the challenge was never a lack of ideas (my head overflows with them!), but in organising, holding onto, and translating them into written language.

In my mind, I see the story, hear the conversations, and picture the characters clearly. Yet somehow, between my imagination and the page, it becomes tangled. The difficulty is not intelligence or creativity - it is translation.

Last year, an unexpected visit to the Montezuma's pop-up chocolate shop in Chichester sparked an idea: What began as a simple thought grew into a magical Chocolate Kingdom filled with adventure, friendship, humour and imagination. This story was written as a gift for my niece and nephew, with the support of AI.

There is much debate about AI and creativity. Can a book created with AI support still be considered creative? Where does authorship begin and end?

My experience challenged my assumptions and made me think differently about AI's role in supporting neurodivergence. The Chocolate Kingdom would never have existed without my imagination. The ideas, excitement and desire to tell the story came from me. AI helped me organise my thoughts, explore different directions, and sparked new ideas and characters. It wasn't writing the story for me - it empowered me to tell it.

This raises interesting questions. If a writer develops ideas with an editor, or brainstorms with a friend, do we question their creativity? Yet when AI enters the mix, the debate suddenly becomes more complicated.

For me, AI has not replaced creativity - it has unlocked it. It has helped bridge the gap between imagination and expression, the very gap dyslexia often creates. I found myself wondering whether technology could become one of the most significant accessibility tools available to neurodivergent people. Not because it does the thinking, but because it helps people communicate ideas that were already there.

The more I reflect on my Chocolate Kingdom adventure, and the joys it brings me, the more I wonder:

How many stories, books, inventions, businesses and ideas have remained trapped inside people's heads because they never had the tools to express them? And is GenAI unlocking a new level of creativity?

I don't know where this conversation will lead, or how society will define creativity, authorship and originality. But I do know this: a born storyteller who struggled to get stories onto paper has found a new way to tell them.

And it all started with a chocolate shop.