AI IS NOT US.
But Writing With AI Can Make Us Better Writers
QUALITY WON’T WIN IF WE DON’T PUT UP A FIGHT
We are at a crossroads. From my conversations and reading, it’s clear that entertainment professionals (writers, producers, development execs, marketers, etc.) are ALL using AI. But we’re at the “blind men and the elephant” stage right now: Everyone is focused on what’s in front of them, on their task, on what “they” want to do. There’s no “common language,” no comprehensive discussion.
There also appears to be two divergent paths (You know, all Robert Frost like): While entertainment professionals would like AI to help create better product and even innovate new forms of entertainment, the AI Slop merchants are creating AI that “Floods the Zone”: AI that creates videos based on the last AI-Created Video you watched. (And yes, using that phrase was intentional.)
Every breakthrough in media is accompanied by a flood of CRAP. I know, I’ve watched a ton of it. As a kid, I was glued to the TV watching a man talking to a “talking goose”, then I glommed on to truly bad sci-fi and murder mysteries, and loved very single comic book I could get my hands on... Media in the 60s and 70s was, in the phrase of TV Exec Newton Minnow, “A vast wasteland.”
Over time... well, here we are, living in the days of Peak TV. (Although even John Landgraf admits, we might be in the waning days.) But it took a fight. Lots of meetings where execs told writers (and yes, I heard this one): “Just steal from what’s already working!”
We’re whistling in the dark if we think that “Quality will win” over AI Slop without a fight. All of us need to dig in and learn how to use AI to make writing, developing, producing, posting, marketing BETTER. If we’re not working to put the best possible work in front of audiences, AI will fill the vacuum.
I have worked on all sides of the process. I’ve won Emmys, been in amazing writers’ rooms, had a couple of outstanding writing partners, produced award-winning TV, and also worked as an executive at two tech companies (Twitter and Microsoft), helping established companies integrate new technology -- including AI.
From years of experience, I can see the path forward for entertainment -- and for writers.
IT ALL STARTS WITH WRITERS
We are the guinea pigs and (to confuse metaphors) the canaries in the coal mine. As guinea pigs, we should be testing every tool -- from the crap Sudowrite (yeah, I hate it), to Nolan.ai, to Cuebric, to Google Flow, Veo3, Runway... the list goes on. As Canaries, we should watch out that the glut of AI slop doesn’t suck up the oxygent we need to flourish. No more AI slop, no more “AI wrote a novel in a day.”
Writers are also practical. We only have so much time, energy, mental power. Writing is hard. We don’t want to add something to the process that will make it harder. We WILL add something that will make it better.
Could Artificial Intelligence really help you as a writer?
Can it save you time and energy?
Can it organize your thoughts and work in a way that will help the best of your ideas “rise to the surface?”
Can you guide it to do research that will not only save time but also reveal facts and ideas that you might have missed on my own?
Can it help you “brainstorm” new approaches, ideas and perspectives that will enrich what I’m writing?
Can it help you understand the audience for you work and help you do the “job” that audience needs to have done?
Can it help you with the tasks of checking grammar, formatting your writing for a specific audience or purpose, making it ready to send on to other parties?
Can it help you identify the collaborators you need to get my writing to the widest possible audience?
Can it help to make a better process for working with others: Editors, Agents, Publishers, Producers, Development execs, Marketing, etc.?
(I’m sure there are other things we’ll come up with over time, but for now, that’s a pretty good list.)
Yes, It Can.
As a partner and collaborator, AI is an invaluable tool for writers, producers, development execs, editors, publishers and agents.
Here’s what AI CAN’T DO:
AI Can Not Write the Thing YOU Want to Write
SO... Who are you?
WHAT IS A WRITER?
An artificial intelligence can’t know you as a writer.
You know who you are:
You have to do this. This is your life, your one time on earth.
You’re prepared to devote a sizable chunk of time, preferably every day, to writing.
You recognize that this is hard. You aspire to be better, to write better. I have the typical Midwesterner’s resistance to the word “Artist,” so let’s just say you take your work seriously.
You’re writing for an audience -- some group of people you imagine will get something out of what you’re working on.
You’d like to get paid. You’d LOVE to make a living doing this.
If you want to make a living at this, you know that you’re going to eventually work with others to get your writing in front of an audience.
WHAT IS WRITING?
Writing is thinking and feeling something, putting down words that struggle to express that feeling or thought, revising those words over and over again until you begin to know what it is you were truly thinking in the first place.
Writing is an exploration of your own brain, heart and sensibility. It is a way of knowing.
Even for those writers who write only for themselves, never intending their writing to be seen by others, are still writing as a way of coming to know.
For most of us, the time between when we start to write and the time we feel we’re “finished” is one of discovery. Many writers will tell you, “I don’t know what I’m thinking until I start to write about it.”
We write to share the experience of coming to know with others. Think about an amazing novel, an amazing play, an amazing movie. The journey of the protagonist is a “coming to know.” The language, images, scenes are a way of expressing what it is to come to that knowledge.
This is a distinctly human experience. The way that we come to know something by writing about it is infinitely more complex and rich than the “reasoning” even the best LLM or AI model can achieve.
As my my favorite sign from the last Writers’ Guild Strike put it:
CHATGPT NEVER WENT TO FAT CAMP.
Humans come wrapped in flesh and blood. (Or, in the case of that quote, a lot of flesh...) We possess something that we have a hard time putting a name to: “mind,” or “soul” or “heart.” Despite our problems naming it, this is the thing that makes “us”, “US.”
During his “Story” workshops, Robert McKee supplies a setup for an opening scene. If I remember correctly, there’s a girl who is down on her luck, has pieced together a wardrobe fit for a job interview with a very fancy employer (fashion magazine, something like that). She’s down to her last dime, and has chosen to walk across Central Park to get to her interview.
It begins raining. A deluge.
What next? McKee throws out a few scenarios (I forget what they were) He finally says something like:
“The way you answer that comes from the STUFF that is inside you. I teach you this entire framework... but you fill it with your stuff.”
(My great apologies to McKee if I’ve misquoted him, or to others who remember it better than I do... but you get the point.)
Put simply, the thing that makes US is an experience of the world that exists beyond intelligence. If you’re working with an artificial intelligence, it will be able to do MANY things. But it is not one of US.
I repeat:
THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT ONE OF US.
We are writers. We’re smart and obtuse; we write best under deadlines and we waste time down rabbit holes; we search our interior lives and ignore the people around us; we feel like the most important person in the world and worry that someone somewhere won’t like what we’ve written.
We are, in the words of Kris Kristofferson, “A walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, takin’ every wrong direction on that lonely way back home.”
COMING NEXT:
To understand what we can and can’t do with AI, we need to talk about the relationship of writers with their tools, from pen and paper to writers’ room and LLMs.
NEXT UP: How our tools affect the way we write. I’ll discuss writing alone, collaborating with partners and rooms, and collaborating with Artificial Intelligences (who are just as unreliable and flawed as humans).
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YOUR TURN
What’s one way that you’ve used AI and it has actually helped you? (OR... go ahead, one way AI frustrated the hell out of you. And yes, whoever came up with the term “Hallucination” is a marketing genius. IT’S A MISTAKE!)
COMING UP: A WORKSHOP IN L.A.
Next week, I’m presenting a workshop at AI on the Lot in L.A. I’ll be showing writers how to set up multiple LLMs as a Writers’ Room. If you’re going to be there, please send me a note and we’ll get together.