Using AI in your writing is like collage
In my space of the Internet, there was a kerfuffle about a marketing strategist who used AI to generate a bunch of articles for a company.
Site traffic to the company’s site went up, the guy mentioned it as a case study of sorts, people did the research to figure it out, and the company’s site traffic started going down once Google detected it.
This led to (yet) another round of arguments about AI-generated content and then this Sports Illustrated thing came out, which had been pretty obvious if anyone had stumbled onto the site looking for a sports score.
All of this is a fun conversation for me, because it brings up all kinds of authorial questions in my fields of interest that often don’t overlap.
It’s been a minute since I’ve studied Barthes, but I know what “death of the author” means and now we’re almost there, for real.
People don’t know how to handle this of course, and so I enjoy the practical questions all the way up to the artistic ones.
Practically speaking, AI for writing is…
AI content is helpful in some situations. Google doesn’t ban it by the way. It’s about how you use it.
AI content is a great brainstorming and outlining tool. This can’t be denied. I didn’t ask it to outline this, I could probably reverse outline it, and then probably make this article better. You’ll never know!
Things change. I’m typing this in a coffeeshop and I could hem and haw about how you can’t smoke in here anymore, or what’s with all the paper products, can’t I just get a good mug? Or about how I can’t find a quill pen, and that the tavern where O.Henry wrote is right down the street by they have TVs in there now so who can write and no one has inkwells and also where will I fill up on my papyrus supply?
It’s another tool in the toolbox. Just like a laptop, just like your Moleskine, just like how you have a mishmash of print and Kindle books at your disposal. These students today, they even use styluses to take notes on their iPads???
Theoretically speaking, I love the authorship conversations.
I’ve always loved experimental & metafiction, trying to figure out what’s real, what’s not, what happened, what didn’t. It’s the same with AI generated content.
It reminds me of the collage scene. The collage as authorship. Can you remix this quote and use it in a different context? What happens to the words once they’re out in the world? What about reader response theory and how the reader interprets something vs the author intent?
David Shields has been the literary person most recently invested in this type of content, and I like (most) of his books and ideas. I just read the one where he curated all the questions from his podcasts and put them in a book, question form.
Here’s a quote from an interview he did with Brad Listi:
Basically, I start with a question—a huge question like reality or race or sex or death or celebrity—and I shoot a lot of film, as I call it. I just gather stuff for months, sometimes years. With The Trouble With Men, I had been taking notes on that work for probably fifteen years, and at one point in the book it was 3,000 pages of stuff. So I keep shooting film and researching and reading and emailing people, and then at a certain point I am no longer learning anything. All the insights are starting to repeat. At that point, I compress, compress, and compress and winnow, winnow, and winnow, by which I mean that I get rid of 90 percent of it. 3,000 pages became a very brief 30,000 word, 138-page book. You’re exactly right: I begin with a personal, cultural, and human cataclysm, something that I find I am obsessed with and which I think in my grandiosity carries larger human resonance.
AI content is really poor on research and statistics, but is great at mimicking different styles. Write like Ernest Hemingway, write like Mary Shelley, write like Stephen King.
You can then take that raw text as “research” and then do what Shields describes above— you winnow, winnow, winnow.
AI and ChatGPT is great at turning out tons of content, and then you can refine, ask it to do something differently.
I’ve run some experiments on a site where I straight-up publish the AI outputs, but most of the time you still need a human editor.
So it could give you the kernel of a great idea or story, but you’re still going to have to add your own words or guide it.
One of my favorite AI writing tools (though I haven’t used it as much recently) is this tool called Lex.
It looks like Google Docs, and there are no prompts, you just start writing.
But if you get stuck, you ask it to continue and it’ll come up with something for you.
I’ve even used ChatGPT to “write like Josh Spilker” and while it’s cringey most of the time, I see a few of the patterns that I hate in my writing lol.
It’s so weird to have stuff you’ve written spit back at you — not directly, but in that mimetic way.
More Things on Collage
(short one because I’m sending out a full email of November “More Things soon)
Andrew Weatherhead also talking to Brad Listi about collage. At LitHub
Walter Benjamin and collage. By Adrian Pelegrin.
Last Thing
“This is something Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.”—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Keep going,
-Josh Spilker
PS: I put together some templates for writing in Notion and taking notes if you’re interested. Discounts included!