David Simon, the ex-police reporter who created HBO’s The Wire, was on NPR during the Hollywood writers’ strike a few years ago. The interviewer, Ari Shapiro, asked him whether he might have liked some help from an AI model when he was drafting scenes back in the early 2000s. “If you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.”
Simon responded, “I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.”
Me too. I see this a lot now, the idea that chatbots can serve as a conduit between your brilliant ideas and the words needed to get them across. And I hate to be the one to break this news, but that is just not how writing works. You do not have brilliant ideas, sparkling like hidden gemstones in the unseen caverns of your mind, waiting for some helpful android to chisel them into words. What you have are lumpy blobs of disjointed half-thought, flopping and melting into each other like the gunk in a lava lamp.
It’s a nasty shock, I know. But if you take the time to sit down and spell those half-thoughts out, you will find their structure is not yet anywhere near as firm and logical as it feels to you. You have to whittle and mold and link each idea until the murky outlines of what you are thinking emerge into a clean and exacting picture, like a sculptor hacking away at his block of marble until he’s gotten rid of everything that doesn’t look like what he sees in his mind. And that is how writing works.
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