I hate to go all Gene Siskel on John (in this post), but I do see the point of teaming up with AI on writing.
My belief is that humans don’t think in outlines, and it is often the essence of writer’s block and a ton of procrastination. My method – just force it onto the page and restructure it in edit.
Writing teachers would hate this. They teach you to work through an outline first and then methodically hang the ornaments on that tree. Boring and completely uninspiring. This isn’t how my brain works, and I don’t think it is how most peoples’ brains work.
Our organic brain seems to fire off ideas not in a sequence. And if you write like I do, you’ll spend a ton of time on the back end moving things around, so the reader receives a logical flow.
Try this as an experiment: If you know the subject well but you don’t know how to organize it, do not pause. Do not check the mail or get a cup of coffee. Open anything that will take dictation and start talking. Talk on the particular subject until you are done. My tool of choice is old school. Microsoft Word. The dictation feature is amazing at capturing your thoughts to 90% fidelity. What you end up with is one giant run on sentence that is a complete dog’s breakfast.
It turns out this is AI’s absolute strong suit comes in. Picking needles out of a crap stack. It doesn’t care about run-on sentences. It is good at isolating distinct ideas. It is happy if you feed it some User Story structure, or any suggested form and it is equally happy if you don’t.
And about verbosity. Its default is to puke on the page in volumes, but its overlords are happy to save GPU cycles. If you ask it to respond in max 3 sentence paragraphs, it will.
One day we may want to read original, tight, and intense novels generated entirely by AI. Today, not even close. What we can do now, though, is collaborate.
I say embrace being the idea factory. Direct the AI time savings into structure and to stretching your ideas. In the end, though, you have to own what is on that page. If it is garbage that you didn’t come up with and you didn’t rewrite for brevity, tone, and message, you own it and the consequences.
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