Just Start: 6 ways I actually use AI (and 2 I don't)

Spoilers: not for facts

A couple of times recently, I’ve had people ask if / how I use AI for creative stuff. The short answer is yes, kind of — the slightly longer answer is, yes, for some of the same stuff as everyone else uses it, and also for some other, weird use-cases that I’m pretty sure I’ve invented on my own. Let’s start with the weird ones, because that’s more fun for a newsletter (we’ll finish with the things that I’m pretty sure I’ll never use it for, however good it gets):

1. To soundtrack my reading
   For about as long as I can remember, I’ve liked pairing the books I read with appropriate listening, to get more immersed in whatever it is I’m learning about: this can either be really explicit, like Vietnam-era songs for Tim O’Brien’s memoir The Things They Carried, or more of a vibe, like 65DaysOfStatic’s We Were Exploding Anyway to go with Kyle Buchanan’s amazing oral history of Mad Max. Nobody else seems to be into this idea, but now AI will create a starting point for me, often throwing up bits of music that I’d never heard of. For instance, I asked it to soundtrack John Higgs’ fantastic William Blake versus The World, and…check this out:

   

   Not perfect, but pretty cool.
   

2. To scamp up stuff I’m drawing or making
   In case you’re not familiar with scamps (I wasn’t, five years ago), they’re a quick way to visualise and refine ideas — something you do at the brainstorming stage to see what works and what doesn’t. I don’t often use AI to actually illustrate stuff for me, but if I’m clay-modelling (for instance) an angry bamboo spike for a game I’m making with my seven-year-old, they’re a great way to get some rough ideas together.

3. For stock footage

   I quite often use AI to make one-off images for YouTube videos where I can’t find a good visual reference — like a really messy shed, for instance, or a big gold yacht. This is what I think AI is great for right now — little throwaway things that don’t need to look perfect. We’re not far away from the point where it’s a reliable source of bespoke stock footage for videos, and I’m already starting to feel bad for the stock footage libraries.

4. To explain stuff (that I can check)

   When I was a lot younger, I loved the conceit of The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: an interactive book that uses a mix of artificial intelligence, immersive storytelling, and real-time feedback to adapt narrative and educational material to the needs of its reader. Tools like Perplexity aren’t quite there yet, but they’re already pretty good at summarising the basics of an argument or system, and ChatGPT is surprisingly good at giving instructions for well-known tasks (for instance, I recently got it to walk me through setting up an Anki flashcard deck properly). It works even better if you ask it to explain it like you’re five, or seven, or twelve, or already familiar with part of the thing you’d like to understand. The only caveat here? You can’t fully trust it, so you have to build a bit of checking time in.

5. To brainstorm titles and subtitles

   Buzzfeed apparently used to make its writers iterate through 27 versions of each headline, to get past the obvious, into the creative, and then through that into the outright mad. AI can do something similar: it never comes up with anything really good, but if ask for 20 good titles, you’ll often find something that triggers something else in your brain, or takes your thinking in a direction that you hadn’t considered. You can also ask it to riff off a suggestion you already like, or steer it in a given direction.

6. To come up with examples

   Similar to the titles thing: if I’m in the middle of a bit of brainfog, AI is often better than me, or a web search, at coming up with examples of something I’m trying to talk about. The other day, for complicated reasons (I was making a boardgame), I needed to come up with a bunch of crimes that could plausibly committed by a fish. ChatGPT was surprisingly good at this.

What don’t I use AI for? Easy:

1. Sourcing studies
   Quite recently, an ‘expert’ contacted me about a feature I was writing, with some answers saying that studies showed a quite implausibly tricky thing happening. I’d already done quite a bit of research on the area, and I was pretty sure I’d never seen those findings, so I asked to see them: and got back a clearly AI-generated list of studies that didn’t say anything like what the (also AI-generated) summaries claimed they did. This is a super fast way to undermine your credibility.

2. Actually writing
   Listen: I’m pretty sure that AI is getting better all the time, and one day it’ll probably be better at putting together a coherent argument than me. But writing is the way I feel out ideas and understand the world better, and the way I write is, I’m hoping, one of the things people like about my stuff. I’m not giving that up.

   How are you using AI? Bonus points if it’s absolutely bonkers.
   

Have a great weekend!
Joel x

Stuff I like

📝 Article - Do Things That Don’t Scale

Another one by Paul Graham, this time on the advantages that startups and small companies/individuals have over huge corporations. I’ve already started using some of the ideas in here.

🌐 Website - Death Generator

This lovely site lets you change the quotes to your own words on dozens of screens grabbed from classic videogames — from Sonic to Street Fighter 2. Loads of nostalgic fun to play around with.

📚 Short story - Understand by Ted Chiang (from Stories Of Your Life And Others)

I’ve read/seen a fair bit of stuff in the genre of ‘Man has a surgical intervention that makes him incredibly smart and capable (think Limitless, or Blake Crouch’s book Upgrade), but this novella does the best job I’ve seen of trying to capture how that would feel for the person experiencing it, as they see connections and understand things that the human mind shouldn’t be able to comprehend. Very cleverly done, with a mind-bending ending that I went straight to Reddit to understand better. The entire collection, which also features the story that became Arrival, is well worth a go.

🧐 Quote of the week

“Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
From Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman

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