My, Myself and AI
The Return of The Blank Page
If you subscribe to The Situation Room, you can ‘reply to’ the email and it arrives in my inbox. I’d be interested to hear from you, and find out what you’d like me to write about. But I mention it here because I had a reply to last week’s post about The Blank Page.
Don't Tinker. Start Over.
Before we get started, PLEASE could you answer one question for me? It affects what I’ll be writing about on this blog over the next 3-6 months. Here’s question:
My correspondent said that they find AI useful for filling the blank page. And it is. But I’d like to think a bit more about our use of AI, given it’s not going anywhere.
The Upside of AI
I use AI. I spent at least 90 minutes this morning using ChatGPT 4 for pictures for The Wycliffe Papers; and for a picture to go with this post. I also used for research on how law enforcement works in a particular region of the world. I pay for it. And get value for money. I also make use of free versions of Grok 3 (good for questions about the Bible and theology) and Perplexity which gives useful footnotes and sources for information.
But I don’t use AI to cover a blank page. The reason for that really emphasises the point I made last time. Once you have text, you will only tinker with it. Even if you substantially change and rearrange it, it has come from another source. And the voice of that source will likely remain. You can tell. At least my wife can. Let me explain:
A few months ago, I used AI to generate a paragraph of information on some aspect of English church history. I imported it into an article I was writing for Cary’s Almanac, another weekly blog that I write about the church calendar, the Bible and English history. My wife proofreads these articles and makes comments on style and clarity. She flagged the paragraph as being both weird and boring, not knowing that it was essentially written by AI. I’d fiddle with it and tried to put it in my own voice. And failed. And I took note.
Last time, I wrote:
Having conquered the blank page, however, many of us can be reluctant to go back to a blank page. We feel that we’ve done the hard yards. We’ve got our rough draft. And we chip away at it, hoping a statue worthy of Michelangelo is going to emerge at some point. Eventually. How’s that going?
Here’s my question: where did you get that block of marble from? The one you’re chipping away at in the hope of producing a beautiful statue? Is it marble? Is it some composite material? Given a particular smack with hammer and chisel, is it something that will shatter into tiny pieces? When you’re finished, is it going to be a weird or unnerving colour or texture?
Let’s take another example. You’re trying to make a delicious meal: where did you get your ingredients from? Are they fresh? The problem with using AI to cover the page is that you’re basically using canned goods and frozen food. That can work okay, but it won’t be great.
The existence of AI means that you, human, need to do better than ‘good’. Your writing needs to be great because AI is getting better and better with every passing day. Chat GPT 5.5 will probably be able to write a good script by the end of next year. Or the following spring. Seriously. ‘Good’ isn’t good enough.
Your Advantage over AI
There’s no need to panic or despair. If you’re 100% confident you will never be able to write better than AI, then I’ve saved you years of pain and frustration. Pack it in right now and do something AI will never be able to do. Unsubscribe and have a nice life.
But you probably can do better than AI. You have plenty of things that Chap GPT 7.9, Grok 6, or Claude 12.3 don’t have: a soul; a voice; a perspective; a passion; a desire to write; a love of the craft or the form; an audience to serve. Don’t outsource that.
Don’t find a fake version of your authentic voice using AI. It will give you one, and trick you into thinking it’s good enough. It isn’t. If not now, then soon.
Don’t Write a Novel in a Week
The other day, I was listening to a podcast about authors and their use of AI. I listened in amazement as someone explained how to write an entire novel using AI in a week. Big idea; plot; outline; words; text; everything. You can’t get AI just to spit you out a novel. But you can use various prompts to build a novel from the ground up. And at the end of the week, you could have 80,000 words of a novel with protagonists and plots, that is free from mistakes, typos and grammatical errors. It’s all ready to upload to Amazon. But why would you want to do that? And who would want to read that?
The co-presenter was explaining that she did it this way because she was busy, and didn’t have time to put all the effort in herself. I guess that makes logical sense. But the novel is the effort, isn’t it? It’s a crafted, compelling story expressed with stylish prose. It doesn’t have to be Tolstoy. It can be Grisham or Clancy. But an AI novel is just, well, a lot of words.
Anyway, I use that as an extreme example to avoid the temptation of using AI to ‘save time’ on the actual writing. Use AI for research and ideas. But then start with a blank page and write something that literally no-one else can, or would even want to.
Need help Supercharing Your Sitcom Script?
If you’ve filled 30 or so blank pages with a sitcom script and need someone to look at it so you can write a new draft (rather than just tell you its marvellous and perfect), I offer a script-reading service which includes a 45-minute one-to-one Zoom call where we go through the notes and talk about the script. Find out more over here:
