Let the weirdness steer you
Last year, author Stephen Marche made headlines by using AI to prompt the mystery novella Death of an Author. To develop the story, Marche relied on a combination of ChatGPT, Cohere, and Sudowrite. First, he’d instruct one of the chatbots to write in various styles, then he’d switch to another to rephrase the original output. As he kept iterating, he leaned into the unknown and welcomed unexpected twists.
“There were times where the machine was creating something that I would never have created—and those are the really interesting moments,” he says. “I don't mean to sound weird about it—but it was like I was getting an alien to write a short story.”
“At one point, I got it say, ‘She walked down the hallway like an LP going back into a sleeve,’ which is a great line,” he says. “But I'd be doing a scene of a woman going on a dock somewhere and it would give me a description like, ‘She's wearing a yellow dress.’ It was very specific, like it had an idea. Like, ‘Let's make this character this way.’”
Marche notes that although it feels like the AI has intentionality, the truth is that even its developers don't completely understand its workings a hundred percent of the time.
“It does not participate in the scientific method,” he explains. “It's not something that is understandable. So what comes out of it is kind of magical. I don't mean that in some metaphorical way. I think it's actually a force that we don't really understand, which is the name that we give to magic.”
Make a map of where you don’t want to go
Some creators find AI useful as a kind of mental GPS. In the same way that Google Maps can show you different route options, chatbot collaborations might not provide the fastest way to get where you’re going. But sometimes, the “scenic route” is what you really want.
For example, Jordan Harrod is a PhD candidate at Harvard-MIT who creates educational videos that help viewers understand the impact of AI and algorithms. On top of using AI to edit videos, manage her schedule, and plan trips, Harrod uses chatbots when she’s working on a draft of a script or an outline of a talk, but she’s not sure what she wants to say.
“What often happens is that whatever is generated, I look at and I'm like, this is not what I want,” she says. “But now that I know what I don't want, I can start writing things that I do.”