Stop making excuses. Real inspiration will never come from AI.
When writers discuss generative AI, one of the responses we often hear is, “I would never have ChatGPT write my story for me. That’s cheating! I just use it for generating ideas.” But even when you write your own stories, generative AI harms creativity.
Sure, if you use AI to generate story ideas or plot twists, you’re still writing the story, or most of it. You’re doing the bulk of the work. Good for you! But writers need to remember that creativity is a skill, one you can only develop through practice. You can never become more creative by asking an AI to be creative for you.
Instead of asking an AI to generate writing prompts, cultivate your own creativity by immersing yourself in stories. Creative writers start with reading. The more you read, the more stories you take in, the more these plots, twists, characters, dialogue, and other bits and pieces will take up residence in your head. Even decade later, they will be there for you to draw upon for inspiration. When you need an idea, you can take all these story elements, shuffle them like a deck of cards, and deal out something entirely new.
Immersing yourself in creativity is an invaluable practice, no matter what you create. For example, consider Star Wars. The original Star Wars trilogy is a remix of Akira Kurosawa films, Flash Gordon, World War II dogfights, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and many, many other elements. Imagine if George Lucas had been addicted to ChatGPT instead. This was the 1970s, so it probably would have been a cabinet in an arcade. If he had simply inserted a quarter asked an idea machine to be creative for him, we never would have gotten the creative mashup Star Wars we have today. It would have been a rehash of old pulp space opera, nothing more.
Learning to draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources and recombine it into something new is what creativity is all about. When you ask a machine to do that for you, you never learn that skill. Whatever creativity you do have atrophies. The next time you try to create on your own, it gets even harder, and you feel even more dependent on AI.
At this point, you might be thinking, “What’s the difference between asking ChatGPT for a story idea and using a human-written writing prompt? Didn’t you write a whole collection of story ideas? Why doesn’t using your writing prompts make people’s brains atrophy?”
Many people find that constraints actually help them be more creative. Being faced with a blank page that can be filled with absolutely anything can leave you paralyzed with indecision, so being given a story idea or even just a word can make it easier to get started. Constraints promote creative problem solving. If a human-created writing prompt gives you a character and a conflict to include, you have to figure out how to make it work in your own way. Constraints can also help you experiment. If you tend to write the same types of characters or plots, starting with writing prompt can force you out of your creative rut and into new areas.
However, asking generative AI for a story idea is different. Rather than being constrained by another writer’s ideas, you tell the AI to generate the exact type of idea you want to write. If you always write stories about depressed wizards meeting free spirited elves and learning to love again, that’s probably the type of idea you will ask the AI to suggest. This is especially true with AI models that remember your previous conversations. They will suggest more ideas like the ones you’ve already asked for. Rather than increasing your creativity, they will end up just echoing your own words back at you.
When I create writing prompts, my hope is that people won’t just pick one and use it as-is. My hope is that people will combine them with their own ideas, or with other prompts. People can browse my whole collection of prompts and mix and match. If you take a hero from one, a monster from another, and a sci-fi gadget from a third, you’re doing the same creative remixing process that people like Lucas do. It’s a shortcut in that you’re not reading a dozen books to get these ideas, but you’re still exercising your creative muscles. My book Inspiration Overdose contains a variety of games and random tables to help teach people this creative remixing process.
Again, asking an AI for a writing prompt is different. Because you can ask the AI to suggest the exact type of story you want to write, there is no need for this creative idea remixing. You will likely just take the idea the AI suggests, and miss out on that valuable creative exercise.
Generative AI harms your creativity and limits your growth. Every creative endeavor has its hard parts. If you ask a machine to do the hard parts for you, they will never get easier. You will never learn how to master your art. Putting in the work is how you improve, and how good artists become brilliant.
