Failed Writer's Journey: Why Do You Think You Need Imitative AI to Brainstorm?

I have written about this before, but as we now have Generals stating that they use imitative AI to help them make decisions and a “human only” badge that makes exceptions for brainstorming with imitative AI, it feels relevant again. Ideas, as I keep saying, are easy. Execution is what matters.

I have plenty of ideas, all the time. I can hardly go a boring meeting without coming up with another idea for a story. What if the boy from Encyclopedia Brown grew up to be the kid from Brick? What if Batman and Catwoman had a Robin and Marian denouement? What if a necromancer murdered craftsmen and used their spirits to build factories? What if someone is magic-ed to another world as the hero destined to save the King but prefers to spend their time improving sanitation and agriculture for the peasants? What if, after a zombie apocalypse, someone realized that zombies taste of chicken (Eddie Izzard assures me that babies do, so zombies must as well)? See. Ideas are easy.

But each of those ideas can be executed in multiple ways. Take the zombies taste of chicken idea. A zombie rancher could be a horror, or a meditation on desperation, or a comparison between hunting and farming (We are not, for the record, descendants of great hunters. We are descendants of the people who figure out that if you put a mommy cow and a daddy cow in the same place, you eventually got delicious, delicious baby cows with no tracking required.) or a discussion of how we take the easier, more evil route in the face of difficulties. Or any combination of them. Or all of them. The idea, clearly, is not the work. The execution is the work. So why do so many people want to rely on imitative AI for the ideas?

I suspect part of the answer lies in our general disdain for expertise. It seems to me that we constantly seek math, numbers, validation in programs and statistics and process. All of those things have value. All of those things can assist. But they are not a replacement for thought or imagination or emotion. People need math and numbers and process to inform their intelligence. Trying to use those tools as a substitute for expertise, for any human experience, is bound to end in failure.

If you think your problem as a writer is that you do not have enough ideas, than I would humbly suggest that you are misunderstanding the problem. You have ideas — everyone does. If they do not come, it is likely because you do not understand how to call them. That is a failure of skill, of practice. Trying to shortcut that practice by substituting the median idea from the imitative AI’s training data will fail. People learn by doing, not by outsourcing their thinking, whether to an answer key or to a fancy word calculator.

I am a failed writer. Says so on the door. But my failures are ones of skill, taste, and execution. I have never failed to produce ideas, stories to chase, paths to explore. I may have never executed on those ideas well enough to sell a piece, but I have never lacked for the material upon which to build my failures. And you won’t either, if you just practice. If you just put in the work. If you refuse the imitative AI shortcut to nowhere.

Weekly Word Count

I had a lovely table read of the tech-aboriton play, and re-edited the piece based on the feedback in preparation for sending the piece to contests. It seems to have improved, and the suggested edits were more minor, less structural, than past iterations. It might actually be getting better.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.