Getting Past the Blank Page

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I’ve started to use AI to help me write articles. I’ve always enjoyed writing but often run out of steam, inspiration, direction, call it what you will, before the ideas in my head “hit the paper” in a coherent narrative that I am happy with. AI has certainly helped me get past that wall.

It’s great for making me think about structure - it forces me to list all the key points I want to make before starting - something I never used to do simply because I enjoy telling stories so happily started at the beginning to see where it took me - all too often that was nowhere special.

Elegant, but Wooden

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I edit AI content ruthlessly. Out of the box I find it elegant but wooden. Beautiful words carefully constructed by a Mechanical Turk lacking anything that could be described as visceral or even memorable.

The more I edit, the more I see one common pattern - the disconnect between all those well-constructed sentences. The narrative is correct but the sentences are often less than the sum of their parts:

Compare “You had to think about what you wanted. You had to articulate it” with “You thought about what you wanted then articulated that thought”.

The first sentences read as if each were written by a different author in some sort of parlour game. Knowing how LLMs work, that’s almost certainly true.

The Writer Still Has to Know Why

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AI is a helpful tool, it can help me arrange the journey, but it still needs me to know why we are travelling.