People often fundamentally misunderstand AI as a creative tool: They assume it’s meant to do everything, replacing human creativity entirely. They’re afraid that the resulting work is soulless, inhuman.

But using AI well is like using any other tool well. You employ it for tasks that are best suited to its abilities. You act as an editor for

Collecting little moments like this is at the heart of creative work—even before AI. Writers have writers’ notebooks, artists have sketchbooks, and musicians often record snippets of melodies. These collections become the seeds of future work. If we approach creativity like a language model, we see that these collections are also the context for

For almost five years now, I’ve kept a note on my phone called my ineffable list. It’s a trick I learned from the writer Robin Sloan . Every time I come across something in the world that makes me pause—that has a little bit of that flavor of whatever it is that I like—I put it in my ineffable list.

I threw a list of my favorite writers into ChatGPT and asked it to describe what was common about them.