Writers Are Getting AI All Wrong
It's magnificent!
Since the day Chat GPT arrived on our shores, we’ve been told we have to worry.
AI was, we were informed, the death knell. Creative people were finished. Also non creatives. Also everyone else. Every headline screamed the same. The robots weren’t just coming for us; they were here.
Here’s where I agree: AI is here. Very much. And since that’s the case, doesn’t it make more sense to try to acclimate to this new reality so we don’t get left behind rather than freak out about how horrible it is?
I don’t know about you but when faced with something I don’t like, the times I’ve picked acclimation over freak out-imation, things have gone much better.
This week, the Society of Authors was out there protesting Meta’s use of AI. This protest will probably make as much of a difference as a wild boar fighting Zuckerberg’s bullets when he’s gunning for dinner. Zuckerberg was probably too busy picking up the keys for his new $23 million mansion to give this protest more than a second’s thought.
Last week’s New York Times story about my generation is as death knell-y as it gets. You could say I’m the target audience: it describes starry-eyed folks who set out to work at magazines in the early 90s. It quotes people I know and worked with, all of them lamenting about the fact that this world we came of age in no longer exists. They talk about how they’re going back to school to become therapists or submitting their resumes to companies already overstuffed with resumes of other fellow sad sack Gen-Xers or just sounding mystified by how the world has evolved.
If I’m going to be really honest, the article made me feel excellent.
See, I am remarkably unemployable1, which means I had no choice but to have my come-to-Jesus before a lot of people in my industry. Also, my pain tolerance is just very low. What this means is that I realized around 2007 that publishing as I knew it was gone and I was royally screwed so I’d better figure something else out. It took time but I did. And running Legacy Launch Pad is infinitely better than trying to scrape by on magazine assignments, book deals, sure-to-fail publications and TV appearances, no matter how glamorous my life looked back then.
I now see that the seas parted in two directions for those of us raised on Rubik’s Cubes and Reality Bites: on one side are the people who accepted the big wave long ago and started building huts (or mansions) that could withstand the weather and on the other are people who just continued to fling themselves into the ocean pretending that even though they didn’t know how to swim, it would all work out, damn it!
My friend Richard Rushfield started The Ankler. My friend Vanessa Grigoriadis co-founded Campside Media. They didn’t sit back and polish their resume and complain and beg for scraps. They started their own things. They swam instead of sinking. They accepted that the future was here and embraced its options, rather than complaining and fear-mongering about Just How Different It Is!
If you find yourself swimming, it’s not too late to change your attitude. Really, we’re at the nascence of this new world. Looking back, if you got into the internet in 2000 instead of when email became a thing in ‘96, today you wouldn’t be considered behind at all.
There’s a newsletter I subscribe to that gathers all the most interesting stories about publishing. I used to love it so much that I actually wrote the creator a fan letter. But ever since Chat GPT emerged, it’s just become a list of scary stories about how much AI is ruining our lives. I read it now mostly to take the temperature of how terrified people seem to be.
Conversely, I spent a few days last week at Genius Network, which is made up of some of the most brilliant and successful people I’ve ever met. AI was a huge topic, as it’s been at every Genius Network meeting for years. But I’ve never once heard someone there embrace the “AI is coming for us” way of thinking; instead these are people who are embracing it—who see its dangers, yes, but who mostly focus on the opportunities it provides.
After having spent much of my life in fear (usually of the False Evidence Appearing Real variety), I choose, when I have the power of choice2, to not be scared. I’ve learned after spending too many years trying to control things, that I have no control, really. In my belief system, what’s happening is God’s will and I can go along and assume it’s for the best or get dragged.
In other words, I refuse to let my basest fears rule me. When I was dating—and I was dating for ages—I wouldn’t let it get me down. When you’re a single, straight woman in LA (or New York) (or probably any other city), other singles love to commiserate. They want to talk about how terrible the men are in fill-in-the-blank city, how miserable it is to get your hopes up only to find yourself across the table from a sad sack/douchebag/basement dweller/whatever. I made a conscious decision to not join that particular commiseration party because I knew that if I did, I would create a miserable reality rather than an optimistic one.
“Dating is fun!” was my mantra, even when it was the least fun thing in the world, even when I was sitting across the table from a man who managed to be a sad sack, douchebag and basement dweller all at once.
In other words, I am a self-willed optimist. And so I embraced AI from the moment I learned about it. When I first heard a few years ago that the Atlantic had published a piece that showed all the books that AI was being trained on and that the writers listed in that piece were gathering together to create class-action lawsuits, I had one thought and it wasn’t “I will join that suit if they dared to train the robots on my books.” No, my thought was, “They better have used my books or I will feel totally left out.” Good news; they did!
I know that I have railed against having AI write your books. And I still feel that way. But I am all for having AI help you with your books. I promise if you embrace what it’s good at while also remembering what you’re great at, it will allow you to lean all the more into your talent, your brain and your humanity.
Sure, you can press a button and let a plane itself. But do you really want to try that without a pilot? Similarly, an orchestra can play on its own but it sure may sound like shit if not for the conductor. (AI could come up with seven more excellent analogies.)
So when people tell you that writers are growing obsolete because of AI, I urge you to disagree: when everyone’s producing slop, I say, great writing only stands out more. But I believe it’s even more exciting than that: if you know both what you’re looking for and how to make it better—more you—you’re going to be miles ahead of the masses.
Last year, I decided I wanted to write a novel about using a surrogate or being a surrogate or something surrogate adjacent, since the experience was so incredible for us. I also knew that I wanted to write a novel that could be easily adapted into a movie. So I went to AI (I think it was ChatGPT; I actually don’t remember) and wrote something like, “I want to write a novel that has to do with a surrogate. I want it to be a story that can be adapted into a romantic comedy. Can you give me a plot?”
My robot spit out the following storyline: a man’s father is dying and he tells his son he’ll leave him everything if the son agrees to start a family. So the son hires a surrogate and they fall in love.
I’m sorry but is that not a storyline worthy of Nora Ephron? I asked what it should be called and my robot spit out: Labor of Love. Holy excellent title! It took my editor and me months to come up with titles like Bought and Falling for Me and they’re not even that great.
I realize there are people who would tell me NOT to share that idea because you could steal it, but I can’t worry about that. You won’t be able to do what I can do with it and vice versa. And I promise you that your time would be much better spent diving into AI and seeing how much simpler it can make your writing life.
Also, be forewarned: if you do steal my idea, I’ll send the robots after you. We’ve gotten pretty tight.
LINKS OF THE WEEK:
And you thought your co-writer was an interesting choice
More strange bedfellow co-writers!
Barnes & Noble is back, baby (I never thought it left)
Is sending swag with your book a good way to create buzz? (Scroll down the page to read the story; I’m actually quoted in it!)
I’ve been fired from the following places: a yogurt shop on Martha’s Vineyard, People magazine (despite not even being a real employee), Premiere magazine (not my fault; the Editor-in-Chief was hired and I was his protege), The Fix (a website I essentially built from scratch), The AfterParty (a website I created but I was let go because I was costly to employ and there was someone there who would do the same job for half the pay) and In Recovery magazine (a completely insane journey that involved being falsely accused of a string of things because I wouldn’t acquiese to the demands of the cell mate of the magazine’s owner, who was incarcerated for embezzlement). After In Recovery, I realized that working for insane people was not for me (to be fair, the people at People and Premiere were not insane; the others CERTIFIABLY so). Since then, I’ve only worked for myself. Nowadays, if I’m dealing with crazy, it’s only my own.
Meaning: reptitlian brain doesn’t take over
Thank for your thoughts. Enjoyed the read. I agree. While AI is scary, it need not scare us. We need to adapt to use it. We need to find our use cases without compromising with our core values, and I admit it is always a constant battle to avoid the compromise.
At work we use Microsoft copilot for capturing meeting notes and summarizing the takeaways and action items. We also use it to polish our emails for better readability. While I am someone who loves to write my own emails (and I’m good at it) I have started to embrace AI suggestions to improve it. The fact remains: we are good but we can always be better.
For my writing work, I started to use Otter AI to capture my interviews and conversations with people so I can use it to reflect back, draw inspiration from, for my next piece. I’ll ask it to summarize the chat with a barista who talked to me about her tattoos, or a set designer who navigates a tough industry after the LA fires, or a goodwill employee who researches serial killers for his podcast despite being genetically blind. These stories are summarized by ai to give me a starting point, to generate a story arc, as a database of thoughts and conversations for future stories.
And yes, generating better and faster headlines is a no-brainer use case for writers.
I get the people that move instinctively against it, but I'd like to know if they have truly spend some time with ChatGPT to actually grasp what the thing is and what is it not. Having direct and prolonged interaction with it vanishes all sorts of prejudices. I use it a lot -actually, couldn't do my bilingual newsletter as it is if it not were for it- and don't consider it a writing of a lesser dignity.
I type the same or more, I do the writing itself but iterate it with ChatGPT as I have it trained it with the bibliography I'm working with: it provides ideas, connections that you were not aware of, it just takes charge of the processing dimension of the act of writing, and liberates a ton of space for creative freedom. When I've been using it for writing I've found myself just 'writing', like I always do but in a new way, with a lot of possibilities and so many limitations.
You can't ask the machine to speak with your voice, you have to own your voice from beginning to end. How you do it, I don't really care. Words are what makes the magic. These Language Models are dumb know-it-alls. It is not precisely "easy" to work with them in order to get valuable results, nor predictable. But having a "voice" always available to speak to and iterate thoughts is a game-changer for me (as I have to always carry in memory a lot of data), and a ton of fun.