AI in the Creative Process
What's in bounds? What's not?
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This will be a very brief post. It started as a note on the Substack homepage, but since I have no way of incorporating those into my Substack layout here, most of you will never see it.
I’m wrestling with something I can’t figure out, and looking for feedback.
I’m a good writer but a terrible structural planner. I’ve written multiple novel drafts that end up going nowhere because I write myself into corners. (I’m talking a couple of 50-60k word drafts that just dead-end).
But when I try to outline ahead of time, I freeze up. I can’t “see” where the story is going until I’m writing it. I have a problem with foresight and visualization - possibly even a less severe form of aphantasia — an inability to visualize images clearly, or at all — which is a condition I’ve only just learned about. I can’t imagine things with sufficient detail. Everything I try to picture is dim, and even if it contains detail, it’s fleeting. I always assumed this was because my brain is like a flickering electrical storm, where thoughts are in constant motion. I’m terrible at chess. I see patterns, but I don’t anticipate logical progression the way I would like to.
For my ideas to become real, I have to get them out on the page — whether text or drawing — or sculpted in clay, or filmed and half-way edited, before I know what I want to do with them. I have to give them some kind of corporeal form to really see and shape them. This works fine for essay-length writing, but has led to endless frustration in long-form, and my hard drive is full of unfinished work that will never see the light of day.
As a consequence, I’ve tentatively begun workshopping projects with AI. Feeding it ideas and draft manuscripts and asking it to help me rescue plots or incorporate new themes into existing work or help me come up with plausible scientific reasons why something in the story might happen, etc. I won’t let it do any of the writing — that’s my job — but I am letting it help me figure out how to get unstuck, and to chart a course.
And I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Is this inauthentic? Does it make the story only partially mine? It feels off, somehow, letting it into my creative process, but my creative process has been broken my whole life, and I never finish what I start when it comes to full-length stories.
Is it better to walk with cybernetic legs than to be stuck in a wheelchair? That’s one question. Another is, “are you allowed to take credit for how fast you walked a mile with cybernetic legs”?
When does a tool stop being a tool and start becoming a collaborator?
I don’t know how to sort this out. It kind of gives me the ick to work with AI on something as personal as a novel, but on the other hand, if I don’t find a way to put some structure on my ideas, they may never see the light of day. Give me a skeleton and I can flesh it out. It’s the skeleton I can’t seem to build.
So I’m looking for thoughts from other writers, readers, and creatives, or those who have been thinking a lot about the interplay between AI and human agency.
How do you feel about this? Where are the lines that shouldn’t be crossed?
Because this is explicitly a feedback-soliciting post, I’m opening comments for everyone on this one. Thanks in advance for your ideas.
I'm a reader and my first thought to your question was "well, what's the difference between AI and a ghost writer?" Figuratively. But either or, I think AI cheapens the process. Thanks for asking :)
Saw this on X and felt compelled to put in my two cents.
For what it's worth, I don’t see a problem here, though maybe I’m biased.
I’m an editor by trade—in German, not English. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: everyone needs an editor. The version authors send us is never the version that gets published.
When I write my Substack stories in English, I use AI as an editor. I write every text, but I let the AI clean it up. I’m still the author—I make the final call—but I value the input. It’s helpful. I see it the way I see my own job: an editor lending a hand on something they didn’t write.
Getting help from an editor usually isn’t considered cheating. And the way you describe it, the AI you’re using sounds more like a very engaged editor.
Now, whether that’s a problem because it makes human editors a little more replaceable... that’s another conversation. One that hits close to home, since that’s my own line of work. But I’m not rich, and I can’t afford a “real” human editor for a hobby project. And truth be told, the AI does just as good a job, for what I need, as any editor I’ve ever worked with.