My Post-Ai Writing

There's this idea floating around that using AI means you're somehow cheating the creative process or making it too easy.

But that's NOT how I use AI at all.

When I work with AI, I'm not checking out of the creative process. I'm fully in it—throwing questions, bouncing ideas, asking for rephrasing, exploring different angles.

This is VERY different to... See more

With AI, that was no longer a problem. I would become a Cyborg and tell the AI: I am stuck on a paragraph in a section of a book about how AI can help get you unstuck. Can you help me rewrite the paragraph and finish it by giving me 10 options for the entire paragraph in various professional styles? Make the styles and approaches different from eac

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Even now, when I’m lucky enough to be able to write exactly what I want to write with very few external constraints, writing often feels difficult for me in the same way it did when I was pumping out listicles — slow, sticky, clunky, painful, humiliating. I wonder if this, too, is part of the appeal of AI: it is so often humiliating to push up agai... See more

But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought. Minimal organic thinking required. This has had a dramatic and profound effect on my brain. My thinking systems have at... See more

Use the tools if you must. But a better use of your extra energy — such as it is — is to live the gap between human and AI. Can an AI gather, synthesize, calculate, and even speculate faster than we can? Yes. Can it do all those things better than we can? Maybe. Can it be more interesting, unexpected, artful, or meaningful? Well that’s just a matte... See more