How I Actually Use AI For Creative Writing

Where I've landed with AI and creative writing is that I think AI is very helpful and it can be a very cool technology, especially on the front end. It's great for brainstorming. It's great for feeding in a draft and getting a first round of feedback, right? Like you don't always have to, oh, I gotta go ask my friend to read it to give me feedback. Now you can get instant feedback from the robots at any point in time. And usually the first few things the robots point out to you, you're like, oh yeah, that's a good point. I should probably fix that. Right? So there are a lot of benefits to using the technology. When you take it to the extreme though, and you go, "Okay, if art is just competence plus choice, then the entire fun, all of the joy, the craft of writing is, so what choices am I gonna make?" when, when you completely defer all of the choices to AI, even if it produces something cool or even if it produces something great, it's like, okay, fine, you skip to the end, but you, you literally just removed all of the fun. Like, the entire point of creative writing is, so what choices am I going to make? That's not to say AI can't help you with your choices, or that's not to say AI can't help you improve the quality of your choices. But like, fundamentally, what is art? Art is I have acquired baseline skills, competence, and then I subjectively choose the way to use that competence. Like this, Saramago makes the choice, I'm going to use incomplete sentences, or I'm going to break the rules of dialogue. That was, that was the fun of him writing this book. So why would, why would you like remove all the fun? If you want to write, why would you remove all the fun? Now if you don't want to write and you're like, you know what, all I want to do is just produce high-quality end products and sell them, right? I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. It's just you're, you're playing a different game. You are not playing the game of writing. You're playing the game of of product creation and monetization and marketing. It's a different game. It's— and, and that's just the advanced version of, like, I had friends in college that, you know, were purists, and all they wanted to do was just write literary things. And I also had friends who were like, I don't care at all about writing something great. All I want to do is just print ebooks on Amazon and market them with ads and make as much money as I can. Two completely different sides of the spectrum. And I think it's unhelpful to think that one is better than the other. It's just they're different games. It's like saying, which is, which is better, basketball or soccer? They're different games. So if the game that you want to play is something creative or something centered around art or, or increasing your own capacity for making high-quality choices or unexpected choices, then I don't, I don't know that they're like, what's the point of deferring all of that to AI? You, you like, it's like, I think about it sort of like buying a brand new video game as a kid and not even giving yourself the, the opportunity to play the game. You just install the GameShark and instantly give yourself all the levels and all the items. And what's the point? Why'd you even buy the game?

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