Can We Use AI Without Losing Us?
I've been QWERTY wrasslin’ with ChatGPT and Claude for over two years. Some days, the LLMs feel like awesome and supportive scribbling partners. Other days they suck the life from my soul.
I read the recent MIT study that showed heavy LLM use can contribute to cognitive decline. When we outsource too much of our thinking to machines, our brain starts getting lazy. Pattern recognition gets fuzzy, language skills. Our creative abs go soft.
Scribbling is mental and emotional weightlifting. Take away the resistance, and muscles turn to mush. AI tools make you faster, but speed sans intention is a waste of carbon credits. If you're not careful, you'll wake up one morning sans scribbling skillset.
Here are my latest takes for remaining human while collabing with our future machine overlords.
Bring Your Weirditude
Don't open a chat window and beg for ideas. You'll get something, but it won't be what you need. A newb move is giving AI a blank page and expecting it to read your mind. It can't ‘til Elan delivers the neuralink, which could be never. For now, we’ve got an insanely fancy and expensive autocomplete.
So, bring your obsessions. Pet theories. Half-baked notions about why zombie movies work better in winter. Your prompt is drawing a map for someone who's never been to your neighborhood. The more landmarks you share, less likely they’ll end up at the wrong house.
Terrible prompt: "Give me heist movie ideas."
More better prompt: "I think every heist movie is secretly about found family. The 'job' is just the excuse to throw interesting strangers together until they care about each other more than the money. Give me three plots where the heist fails but the family succeeds. Think Ocean's Eleven meets The Remains of the Day."
The T-1000 can riff on weirdness, but can't make it from scratch.
Be the Director, Not the Extra
Every AI response is like a first draft from an eager film-bro intern who's read every screenplay but has never paid money they earned working at Subway to see a flick in IMAX. It's got great raw material. But needs your vision and fingerprints to shape it.
Let AI handle: Brainstorming fifty title options, generating outlines from your premise, notes, and beat-brainstorm, untangling clunky sentences, and finding novel ways to say tropey jibber-jab.
Keep for yourself: Your core argument, character decisions that matter, the relatable and relevant moments that will resonate.
If I'm not rescribing at least a third of what comes back, I'm probably playing Helldivers 2 instead. Combine your creative vision with LLM computational horsepower. Architect the building; let AI lay the bricks faster than you ever could scribbling solo.
Check the facts. LLMs are notorious BS masters. They'll confidently tell you Napoleon invented pan au-chocolat or Citizen Kane was shot in IMAX. If you're scribbling about anything that really actually happened, verify everything the machine delivers.
Check the bias. The current models learned to scribble by reading the entire internet, which means they absorbed every opinion humanity ever posted online. Watch for stereotypes, lazy assumptions, or OG perspectives that sound like they came from a 1950s advertising executive.
Analog is Awesome
Sometimes your brain's best work happens when you're not even trying. Walking the dogs when you’d rather be sleeping. Washing the cheese-encrusted dishes your home-for-the-summer son left under his bed for a week. Staring out the window, plotting the demise of the alley rats that keep chewing on your picnic table.
Every creative problem doesn't need an instantaneous machine-generated solution. Sometimes the answer comes three days later while brushing your teeth or… playing Helldivers 2. So, before I fire up an LLM, I ask myself: Am I looking for help or shortcuts?
Help is good: "I've got this scene, but the dialogue feels clunky."
Shortcuts are dangerous: "Write me a compelling villain."
One gives you outsider insight. The other terminates your talent.
Sorry, anti-AI-Twitter, AI isn’t going anywhere. The upside is too mega for solving the currently unsolvable. Climate. Disease. Seating chart at a Barmitzvah. And making the empathy-free tech-bros even richer. AIs will keep getting smarter, faster, and more helpful until they go rogue and create a virus that kills humanity.
That’s a problem for future-us, today’s challenge is forgetting the goal isn't to generate “content” ASAP, but to spin worthy yarns that resonate. Stories that sound a little off, like you. Stories that couldn't come from anyone else's demented brain.
If you chose scribbling as a trade, it should be easy to stay opinionated and weird, but staying in control requires more taurine-powered all-nighters. Until Judgement Day or The Butlerian Jihad, focus on scribbling stories that are less HAL, more Johnny Five, and absolutely always uniquely and undeniably your own.
