WHY I WRITE WITH AI

Writing is getting your obsessions in order. Only then can AI help you.

PHI / AI is still a relative newcomer to the Substack space, but I highly recommend reading them. In particular, their most recent post: “Not That Smart, Not That Agent,” where they provide a skeptical take on what AI can do, based on three years of experience.

The final take:

What appeared "smart" wasn't true intelligence or agency – it was simply the product of careful human architecture, precise prompting, and operation within a narrow, standardized domain.

Each of my experiments showed that behind every "autonomous" AI system lies a complex web of human effort: often more costly and complicated than the problems they're meant to solve.

WHY WRITE WITH AI?

My immediate reaction to this piece was to sit down and articulate why I write with AI and why I think writers get real value out of writing with AI.

The TL;DR:

The bugs that plague AI use by many people — hallucinations, approval of bad ideas, going down errant rabbit holes (and even the use of em dashes!) — might, in fact, be terrific features for writers.

Agree? Am I kidding myself? Let me know.

AI is your first reader, your source of outside analysis, a terrific source of information about your audience and their concerns. OH… and it is also a a great Improv partner.

But there’s still a lot of hard work involved.

The great misconception about writing with AI is that it is capable of doing anything close to really good writing. It’ll do “good enough,” but never “really good.”

If you’re a TV or FIlm writer (or aspire to be one), “Good enough” will never get you paid. It’ll never get you a career.

BUT… having an assistant / partner you can use as you write CAN help you write faster, with more confidence and ease, and … I’ll go out on a limb here… your work will be better.

HARD WORK: IT’S UNAVOIDABLE

Before you write with AI, you have to understand:

You still have to write your goals as a writer, the goals of the project you are currently working on, and the methods that AI is going to employ when it responds to you.

You will have to do the work of summarizing — in a 1-5 page document (at least) — what you are working on. You will have to create, from your own heart and mind, rough sketches of characters, conflicts, settings.

You will have to tell your LLM how you want it to think about you and your work and how it should respond to you.

Writing is the act of getting your obsessions in order. The best writing comes from the questions that plague us. We create characters and stories to help us feel and think our way through these vexing problems.

The first part of writing is all about trying to figure out the “thing” you’re writing… where are your obsessions taking you? As E.L. Doctorow once said, it’s like driving down a dirt road with one headlight.

You HAVE to do that work yourself. And you need to constantly revisit that dark road.

To a point, writing with AI is a lot like writing without AI. It’s creative struggle, constant revision. Critical thinking.

In short, the hard work of creativity.

So… why add AI to the process?

AI: THE BUGS ARE THE WRITER’S FEATURES

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. When I told people I wanted to be a writer, the response was always “How are you going to make a living?”

What they really meant: “When will you do something useful?” Welcome to the creative life.

The goals of a creative person are different from the goals of people who make things in the “real world.” So when you read the research around AI’s wrong turns and “hallucinations,” maybe…

(AND SERIOUSLY… the person who came up with the term “Hallucinations” for the out and out mistakes that AI makes is a marketing GENIUS!)

MAYBE … the bugs that plague the current versions of AI are, in fact, features for writers.

Creativity involves dead ends and hallucinations. Take improv, for example. What are the rules of improv? Say yes. Add new information. Don’t block the other actors. Focus on the here and now. Provide colorful details. Perform a variety of emotions… etc. Etc.

AI is incredibly good at that.

My LLMs act as a virtual writers’ room because I share my work with them and ask them to do all of those things. Say yes AND no. Dive into the “present moment” of a scene and show me other ways of thinking. Give me a variety of emotional arcs around a character or story line.

In short, improvise with me.

THINKING OUT LOUD AND OTHER FUN THINGS

Just the act of crafting a prompt and having a conversation with an LLM forces me to think out loud. (If you’re using voice mode, literally thinking out loud.)

Articulating what you are trying to do, why you’ve written what you’ve written, and what you’d like the LLM to do for you creates a process that forces you to adopt a new perspective on your work. It gets you out of your own head. To me, that’s invaluable.

AI thinks differently. When you end a prompt with “You can ask me questions that will help you give me a better answer,” AI will undoubtedly ask you something you hadn’t thought about before.

I have conversations with my LLMs. I am still doing the hard work. I own the end result. I’m thinking critically about everything I add to my drafts.

There is still a lot of critical thinking and struggle involved. At no point do I think one click will finish my work.

Each click helps me make my work richer. But it’s all my work.

In the end, I have a stronger sense that I’ve looked at my work from many different angles, that I’ve entertained options that I might never have imagined, that I can have more confidence in what I have on the page than I would have had without AI.

That’s just me. I believe that it can be you, as well.

AI CAN DO THESE THINGS AND YOU CAN’T

There are also things that AI can do that are beyond my abilities.

AI has intelligence about my audience that is far more detailed and comprehensive than I could ever come up with. AI can tell me what platforms they are on, the kind of media they consume.

AI can help me identify their concerns and themes. It will surface their questions, issues and concerns — things I can use to create characters and narratives that will resonate with the audience for my work. Sometimes, I’m even surprised and enlightened by its insights about my audience.

AI can help me design my writing as a product that will reach “users.” In the age of algorithmically-driven discovery, that’s a huge advantage. (And too vast a topic to go into here… it’s really the subject of much of my writing about AI.)

AI is a very useful first reader. It will analyze my writing and give me feedback — 70-80% of which is either wrong or marginally useful, 20-30% of which is useful, if only because I think “I’m not sure WHY it’s saying that… but I’d like to fix it anyway.”

AI is 100% useful (especially Google’s NotebookLM) at keeping all of my research, drafts, notes and random thoughts. It can retrieve a character note, a line, a random thought in moments. It can summarize a pile of notes and drafts in moments, showing me what I’ve done and where I have gaps.

It can even create two “podcast hosts” who will talk about my work. (And I can tell “them” to be positive, negative or something in between. Trust me, there’s nothing nicer for a writer than hearing a couple of NPR-inflected voices talking about how interesting their work is! I don’t care that it’s fake! Thank you for the attention!)

COME ON IN, THE WATER’S FINE

Using AI to write and knowing that the hard work still has to be done by you is BETTER than writing without AI. I firmly believe that.

Taking the time to learn how to get AI to understand you and your work, to learn how to have a conversation with AI through prompts, and to ask AI to do what it can do and you can’t is well worth your time.

Just don’t ask it to write for you.

Know someone who would agree / disagree?

And if you haven’t yet… Come on! Join the fun.