What AI Can't Do (And Why That's Great News for Writers)

How a Room Full of TV and Film Execs Learned to Understand LLMs AND Relax in the Process

I recently gave a presentation about AI to a room full of entertainment professionals, and hit just the note I was hoping to hit — something between “relax, it’ll be fine” and “oh… THAT’S how that works.”

The more I explained what AI actually is—math and statistics at massive scale—the more excited people got about their own irreplaceable value.

I thought it would be fun to share what I told them.

Understanding Our New Creative Partner

Large Language Models are pattern-recognition engines. They've ingested vast amounts of text and learned how words, ideas, and styles connect. They can predict what comes next based on what they've seen before.

As I’ve said before, they’re all different types of collaborators:

ChatGPT is like an enthusiastic film school graduate—incredibly well-read, full of references, eager to help.

Claude is your thoughtful writing partner who remembers every conversation and helps you think through problems.

Notebook LM becomes your perfect research assistant, organizing and connecting all your materials.

Each has its strengths. Each has its limitations. And that's exactly why they're tools, not replacements.

The Magic of Not Knowing

Here's what I love about the creative process, and what E.L. Doctorow captured perfectly when he described the first stages of writing as "driving down a dark dirt road with one headlight."

And it doesn’t just happen at the beginning. We revisit this over and over. It’s the MOST VALUABLE thing that writers do. We discover our story by telling it.

Brian Grazer has two terrific books about his “creative conversations.” (And a third in which he combines the first two. Very efficient!) He talks about the creative process around films like Splash—how what they thought they were making transformed into something entirely different and better through the creative process. The movie about a mermaid became a love story.

AI can't make those discoveries. IT CANNOT KNOW THAT IT DOESN’T KNOW SOMETHING. It generates based on patterns it knows. WE create by finding patterns that don't exist yet.

The Human Advantage

There's something in bluegrass music called "the high lonesome"—that emotional quality that reaches right into your chest. Comedy writers know the feeling when a joke doesn't just work, it lands and it lands hard. Drama writers feel when a scene transcends words and becomes truth.

During the Writers Guild Strike, my favorite picket sign read: "AI Never Went to Fat Camp."

Because that's it exactly—AI has never had the experiences that make stories resonate. The awkward moments. The unexpected joys. The specific details that make universal truths feel personal.

BUT... let’s just say you’re developing a project that takes place in a fat camp... or you are writing about an adult who carries all of the memories of being in fat camp.

You are going to want to dive in and enlarge your knowledge of every part of that experience.

AI is great at that. It’s great at enlarging your vision of the world. At understanding the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. At understanding the audiences for our stories, what platforms they’re on, what questions they have, how they discover and consume media.

AI can help storytellers build a bond between their obsessions and passions and the people out there who have the same obsessions and passions. Not only in a specific way, but in the larger / metaphorical “What’s the universal truth I’m getting at here” way.

The Opportunity Ahead

Here's what excites me most: We're not in competition with AI. We're entering an era of augmented creativity.

AI can help us:

• Generate multiple story options quickly

• Research faster and more thoroughly

• Break through writer's block with new perspectives

• Handle repetitive tasks so we can focus on the creative ones

• Test different dialogue approaches instantly

But we bring what AI cannot:

• The lived experience that makes stories authentic

• The intuition about what audiences need to hear right now

• The ability to take creative risks that break patterns

• The knowledge of when rules should be broken

• The human connection that makes stories matter

Building Our Creative Future

The writers and creators who will thrive aren't the ones who resist these tools or the ones who rely on them entirely.

They're the ones who understand that AI is like having a incredibly capable assistant who never gets tired, never runs out of ideas, but also never knows when an idea is truly special.

That's still our job. That's always been our job.

We're the ones who know which AI-generated option has that spark. We're the ones who can take a generic suggestion and transform it into something specific and moving. We're the ones who know when to push past the safe, acceptable answer to find the dangerous, necessary truth.

Your Turn!

I'd love to hear about your experiences:

• What AI tools have you tried in your creative process?

• What unexpected discoveries have you made?

• Where do you see the biggest opportunities?

Share your story in the comments. The best insights often come from creators on the front lines, experimenting and learning together.