Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / Episode 18: Ship Anyway

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Episode 18: Ship Anyway · HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

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  Foreign.
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  Welcome to Human Print. I am Christine Whitmarsh and if
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  you are open to collaborating with AI but you're not interested in disappearing
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  into AI, you're in the right place. Each week we will look
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  at one place where your authentic human signal is at risk for drift and
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  one way to shore it up. Oh, and Human Print is
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  brought to you by Abby AI Brand bank intelligence that helps
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  authors, thought leaders and enterprise teams train AI
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  on their voice and point of view so written content stays unmistakably human,
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  consistent and on brand. Learn more at abby.inkabbi.ink
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  like you write with let's begin Hi
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  everybody and welcome back to Human print and episode 18 and
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  also the final episode in my three episode series called Writing through the
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  Noise. Protect your headspace, know your process, and keep creating.
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  While everybody else argues about AI we have been looking
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  at in the past two episodes what gets access to your head, your process,
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  and the work you haven't made yet. Episode 16 was about protecting your headspace
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  from what I call the peanut gallery, including the one you can build entirely inside
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  your own mind. Episode 17 was about comparing your writing
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  process before and after Generative AI came along
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  so you can decide for yourself what improved, what didn't, and what still
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  belongs to you now. We are looking forward because
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  eventually you'll have to decide how much of your creative future you're willing
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  to spend waiting for everyone else to settle the AI argument.
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  And I have bad news, but it could just be a prediction. Hopefully I'm wrong,
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  but people might be arguing about this for a little while,
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  so don't hold your breath. I don't know when this current level of
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  AI anxiety will settle down, whether it settles down, or whether the conversation simply
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  keeps changing as the talk, as the technology changes.
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  I also don't know which current tools will survive, what regulations will
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  emerge, how publishing will adapt, what platforms will do next,
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  or what completely new controversy we'll be discussing two years from now. Nobody does,
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  which makes waiting for certainty a pretty questionable creative
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  strategy. There's a historical parallel I like here,
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  although as always with technology history, the parallels have limits.
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  When photography arrived in the 19th century,
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  artists and critics had to figure out what this mechanical image
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  making technology meant for painting, portraiture, and art itself.
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  One of the people who spent a large part of his life pushing that argument
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  forward was Alfred Stieglitz. He returned
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  to New York in 1890, determined to establish photography as a medium
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  capable of serious artistic expression. In 1902,
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  after disagreements with the Camera Club of New York, he and Other photographers formed
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  the Photo Secession and he went on to edit Camera Work.
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  And Camera Work is a publication and operate galleries that
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  promoted photography alongside modern art. Here's the
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  little did you know detail I especially like. In 1893,
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  he made a photograph called the Terminal, using a
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  small 4x5 camera that was not considered worthy of serious
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  artistic photography at the time. The larger 8x10 view cameras
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  required tripods and were far less mobile. The smaller camera let
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  him move through the city, though, and respond quickly to what was happening around him.
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  So even within this new technology, there were already arguments about which version
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  of the tool was artistically legitimate. And that was photography.
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  Because, yeah, humans work fast. And this guy
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  didn't resolve the argument by waiting for photography to receive unanimous
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  cultural approval. No, he kept taking pictures, he kept making photographs,
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  publishing them, organizing other photographers, experimenting with the medium
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  and helping build an audience for his work and for every all his peers
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  work as well. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes him as
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  a major force in elevating photography as fine art in the United
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  States. And one of his own ideas was that a mechanical instrument
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  could become an artistic tool when guided by
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  the sensibility of the person using it. And I would like to quote
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  him again. He said that a mechanical instrument could
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  become an artistic tool when guided by
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  the sensibility of the person using it.
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  Again, generative AI and photography, they're two different technologies
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  with different ethical questions, economic effects, relationships to source material.
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  Think about what it's like to be a creator, though. Standing in the middle of
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  all this, a new tool shows up. People immediately start arguing about what it
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  does and does not count as legitimate creative work. And meanwhile,
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  the rules are being invented in real time as we're creating.
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  Some uses are obviously weak, but some are interesting. Some will disappear,
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  others will probably become normalized. And nobody standing in
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  the middle of the transition gets the benefit of knowing how history will sort everything
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  out later. Meanwhile, you still have a creative life happening
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  now. So here's the question I want to ask you.
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  If all the AI noise vanished tomorrow,
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  what would you make? Maybe there's something you've
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  wanted to research and now you can get through the early stages much faster.
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  Maybe you have 20 years of journals and notes and interviews and other material,
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  and you want to explore connections across it. Or maybe you
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  want to experiment with a new kind of story, educational project, podcast, book companion,
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  or interactive experience. Maybe you've had an idea
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  sitting around because this technical barrier was too high before, and maybe
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  AI gives you a way into it. Maybe the answer has nothing to do with
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  some giant innovative project. Maybe you'd simply like to use the tool where
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  it helps you and get back to writing. Whatever your answer is, which part
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  are you comfortable starting now? Because this is where I get
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  I go back to marketing expert and also very prolific author Seth Godin and his
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  constant message about shipping things. Just ship it. He has written
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  this for years about what happens when work approaches the point where other people can
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  see it. Once you ship, people can judge your decisions.
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  The thing can fail. Someone might laugh, but you know, at least you've become accountable
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  for having made something. And this is why, in his language, shipping becomes
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  a skill of its own. Writers already know this problem very well.
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  Generative AI did not invent the unfinished
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  manuscript. It did not invent the person who has wanted to write a book
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  for 15 years and is still quote unquote gift getting ready.
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  AI did not invent perfectionism, fear of
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  publication, obsessive rewriting, anxiety about reviews,
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  or the weird moment when you realize the thing you've been privately controlling for
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  months is about to become something other people can see and have opinions about.
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  I used to do entire your daily writing habit podcast episodes about
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  quitting because writers would get halfway into books and suddenly every possible
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  downstream problem would rush into their process it at once,
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  well before they were going to experience it. Like how will I publish this?
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  What if nobody buys it? What if people hate it? How am
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  I going to market it? What if I can't finish? What if I do finish
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  and it's terrible? Meanwhile, the actual problem that day
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  might be maybe write chapter one first. Let's start with that.
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  Leave the other worries for next. One of the questions I used
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  to ask writers when they wanted to quit was why did you start in the
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  first place? And if that answer had gone cold, figure out whether the
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  why had changed. I'm mildly obsessed, many of you know at this point,
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  with finding your why in writing. Anyone who's listened to my previous podcast,
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  even this one a little bit, I am obsessed with why. Because I have seen
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  what happens when a writer has a powerful why. The clients who are
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  willing to share the personal story they initially wanted to hide. They're often the ones
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  who know exactly who they want their book to help. Their why drives
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  them through their anxiety, their nerves. They don't magically disappear. They may still
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  hate the idea of people knowing what happened in their lives. They may
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  have to work their way through every paragraph of that material.
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  But they have a reason to keep going, and that means more to them
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  than any discomfort and your why doesn't have to involve changing civilization.
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  Maybe you just need to tell the story, just get it out because you've been
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  carrying it around for so darn long. Maybe you want to see whether you can
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  actually make the thing you've had in your head for years. Or maybe
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  you're fascinated by a subject and writing is how you're going to understand it.
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  Maybe there's one reader out there you know would benefit from hearing
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  or reading what you have learned. Maybe you just really, really,
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  really, really want to write a weird book. That's fine. A why only has
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  to be strong enough to keep you attached to the work when there are easier
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  things to do. That has been true throughout my own writing career
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  as well. For years, there wasn't a lot of external evidence suggesting I was eventually
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  going to make a living this way. There were people willing to tell me the
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  odds. I mention episode and I'm sure they were terrible. I couldn't control
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  the outputs, so I focused on the in inputs and I would
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  write every waking hour. I wrote, I learned, I submitted things, I got rejected,
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  I learned. This just, you know, went on for years. And the more nos
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  I got, like I mentioned last time, the more I dug in my heels because
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  I was determined to figure out some way to make writing work. And eventually it
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  worked. But I didn't know that ending while I was in the middle of it.
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  And that's the piece we tend to erase when we look backward at somebody's creative
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  career. Once you know what happened, all the earlier decisions, all of a
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  sudden they seem to make sense. They seem like steps toward this inevitable result,
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  but that they weren't. There's no inevitable result. Most creative work is
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  produced by people who don't know the ending, which is exactly where
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  we are with Generative AI. You don't know what the
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  cultural ending will be. You don't know. We don't know. We don't know how
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  your audience's attitudes will change. We don't know what the
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  norms will be five years from now. We also don't know what we all might
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  individually create during those five years if we keep working instead of waiting.
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  And that brings me back to something I said in the last episode about ghost
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  writing, where I ask my clients to tell me everything because I need their
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  material. I need the real stories and thoughts and opinions and half
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  formed ideas. The weird thing that they've never said out loud before, the personal story
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  that they really, really want to delet because they just don't know where it belongs.
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  And maybe it seems a little too personal. I can interview them and organize the
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  material and find the structure and do the research and use everything I know about
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  readers and books to shape what they give me. But again, I'm not psychic.
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  If they don't bring themselves into the process, there's eventually nothing real
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  for me to work with. Generative AI does not make that requirement
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  disappear. You still need material. You still need curiosity.
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  You still need taste. You still need
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  some reason for choosing one idea over another. And you need to decide when
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  a piece is wrong, even though it's technically fine. When a story belongs,
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  when research changes your mind, when something suddenly isn't good enough
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  and you need to know when you're done. And you need to bring the
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  parts a system cannot retrieve from anywhere else because they only exist in your experience
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  until you decide to express them. This is also where
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  I think our larger conversation about creativity and censorship gets interesting,
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  although I don't want to flatten those words into the same thing. When writers
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  become afraid to experiment because of anticipated public punishment.
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  Censorship, in a way, but really punishment.
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  The effect isn't limited to one unpublished piece.
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  Creative work creates more creative work.
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  One idea sparks another. A book changes how somebody
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  thinks, and they build something from it. A strange experiment fails and teaches
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  the creator something they use later. A story gives somebody language for an experience
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  they never really could explain. We cannot calculate
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  all of the downstream effects in advance, which is part of the reason creativity has
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  value in the first place. We only get to see the chain reaction
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  from the things people actually make. We can trace one book to
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  another book. We can. One film technique to the filmmakers who pushed it further.
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  One strange experiment to the person who looked at it years later and thought,
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  wait, what if I tried this instead? What we never get to see is the
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  other timeline, the one containing everything people almost
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  made or then talked themselves out of making. Think back to
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  photography for a second. What if a whole generation of photographers had decided
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  to wait until the art world finished arguing about whether photography counted
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  as art? The argument itself would have had a lot less evidence to
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  work with. Because part of how a new medium earns its vocabulary,
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  its standards, and even its critics is through people actually using
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  it. They make great things, bad things, weird things,
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  failed experiments, things nobody understands yet. And eventually everybody has
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  more information about what the medium can do. The same problem works in
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  the other direction. Imagine five or ten years from now, somebody creates
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  a form of storytelling or research or education that we don't even have a name
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  for yet. And part of that work grows out of experiments people are doing with
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  those tools right now. That future creator may build
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  on somebody else's awkward first attempt, or avoid a mistake because somebody made
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  it publicly, or take one tiny technique and push it somewhere completely
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  different. Creative progress is messy like that.
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  So what happens if a large number of people decide to
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  wait until the rules are settled, the cultural arguments are finished,
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  and everybody agrees on what counts? I don't know.
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  Nobody gets to observe that alternate timeline. We'll never know which
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  books weren't written, which experiments never got far enough to fail, or which
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  idea never reached the person who would have done something better with it.
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  But I'm not especially interested in volunteering my own work for that experiment. Which is
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  why I'll leave. This is where I'm going to leave this three part series we
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  started with your head. Who gets access to it while the work is still forming?
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  And how do you distinguish useful criticism from people throwing opinions
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  at something they aren't responsible for finishing? Then we went to your process.
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  What did you actually do before AI? What do you do now?
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  Where has the technology helped? Where has it hurt? And which
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  parts of your writing were yours before somebody else decided they were AI tells?
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  And finally today we arrived at your future work.
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  What would you make if these arguments, this noise,
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  disappeared? What part can you start now? How much
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  time are you willing to spend waiting for cultural certainty that may never arrive?
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  Use the criticism that gives you useful information and
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  keep questioning your process. Change your mind when the evidence tells you to,
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  then go make something.
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  And that's it for this episode of Human Print. If you want
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  a practical framework for protecting your voice amid the AI noise,
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  please follow the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself,
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  as the AI noise grows louder and louder,
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  which areas of yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see
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  you next time,