Staring at a blank page is tough.
You know you need to start, but don’t know where to start.
Whether you’re writing high-touch copy for your homepage or content for a blog post, the staring quickly turns into guilty procrastination.
Well, I have great news for you.
There’s a new, shiny solution. A button that can generate your way out of a blank page into a slew of words straight from the creative mind of a robot.
The Greatest Showman. The Robot
We suffer from blank page syndrome because it’s where we do the most thinking. It’s where we make high-stakes decisions about our topics, thesis, and approach from an infinite number of possibilities.
And then, right at that moment, when we’re vulnerable and doubtful, AI enters the chat (or rather, you enter the AI chat).
The robot whispers, “Just let me show you the way. I’ll solve all your problems.”
The Hard Truth
The hard truth is that the moment you stop writing is also the moment you’ve decided to stop thinking.
I’ve had several periods where I, too, was hopeful & optimistic.
I tried to let AI do my writing. To be fair, the writing of recent models like Anthropic’s Claude is impressive, and I can only imagine it will continue to get better as time goes on.
But the end result every time: my brain starts clocking out.
Do this for an extended period of time, and it becomes easy to consider everything from unoriginal ideas to shoddy work, incorrect work, and hallucinations as “A-OK.”
And before you know it, “A-OK” becomes the new standard you’re comfortable with.
You start to rely on AI to generate content that you realistically should be ashamed to be letting a robot generate for you, such as:
- Job descriptions geared towards attracting talent that you want to hire at a company that claims to want to shape the future of “X”.
- Your company’s mission statement, vision, and core values.
- High-stakes customer communications.
- High-touch copy on your homepage that is intended to resonate with an expert audience that can sniff out AI/ChatGPT copy from a mile away.
In other words – before you know it, you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.
You end up doing things you know are wrong. You edit or generate work you fundamentally know isn’t good because you have completely lost your sense of direction…
…and the ability to use the truly creative part of your brain after outsourcing your ability to articulate thought.
Anchoring to Suboptimal Ideas
Psychology gave us the term “anchoring bias”.
When presented with an initial number, word, or answer, our minds cling to it. Even when we’re aware of this flaw, it still happens: the initial anchor taints everything that follows.
A similar concept exists in creative work: “design fixation” – you fall in love with an idea, with that love then blinding you to all other possibilities.
The robot triggers these exact problems when it fills the blank page for you. It vomits out ideas, and with a bit of algorithmic luck – a few may well be half-decent.
Clearly, you still want to continue thinking on your own (seeing as you’re reading this), but the AI-generated options anchor your mind, limiting your desire to express, improve, and truly imagine what could have been if not for the initial suboptimal idea.
You Start Thinking “Efficiency > Everything Else”
Human writing requires thought. This requires time.
Spending time thinking is the most valuable way to spend your time.
It’s where we forge our most valuable ideas. If I had let AI generate the hell out of this subheading, you’d get a slew of words that make little to no sense to anyone who’s actually lucid. It would miss including specific ideas that I came across when researching, working with AI myself, and spending hours analyzing what works, and what doesn’t.
AI shortcuts the time, thinking, and luck of coming across your best ideas.
Use AI Before You Lose Yourself
I’m not anti-AI.
In fact, not at all.
However, I would say that:
- I’m anti-low-quality, suboptimal work.
- I’m anti-low-effort
- I’m anti-laziness
- I’m anti-prioritizing efficiency over quality
In other words, I’m pro-craftsmanship.
So, by all means, I do think that you can use AI with some best practices that protect your human creativity and input throughout the process.
Start with your input
If you go straight to ChatGPT with little to no input or direction, you’re setting the stage for AI to quite literally think for you.
This sounds nice on the surface. And if you’re a person who really doesn’t care about the craftsmanship and iteration involved in creating something original to any reasonable standard – then you were likely already comfortable with this concept, and had accepted it as a standard practice before you started reading this article.
Essentially: Get something on the page before turning to the robot.
Don’t press the button to just get the first thing on the page because you can’t be bothered to think. Otherwise, ask yourself why you’re even trying to produce something at all (since you aren’t even willing to think about what you want to produce, you just want something).
Let AI remove complete roadblocks
When I work on a topic, I sometimes think there’s likely an analogy to be made, or a reference to a specific idea.
This is where I turn to AI.
I don’t have the time to find the perfect reference.
And if AI provides me with a list of things that can work, it’s really easy for me to judge for myself whether they (a) make sense, and (b) are accurate, by performing a quick Google Search to find a reliable source of information.
Here’s an example of what this looks like in practice:
Let’s say that I want to write a piece of content about a specific legislation and how certain things would apply to it.
Of course, I’ll want to draw connections to specific parts of the legislation where relevant. I can feed ChatGPT the legislation as a source, ask it specific questions about the legislation based on that source, and get answers.
I can fact-check the answers by asking ChatGPT to always return the relevant article numbers so that I can just hit Cmd + F and search the legislation itself for the specific point where ChatGPT thought it was applicable. Then, using my ability to think (since I haven’t lost it all to AI yet), I’m able to determine whether I feel it actually is a suitable connection to make.
The end result: We created something that I could never have written without AI (at least not without spending an unreasonable amount of time), and which AI could never have written without me.
I wouldn’t have had the time to understand the entire legislation. And AI would not have known what questions to ask and what to look for in the legislation that would have actually been of relevance to the reader in the context of the specific article.
Forbid yourself from using AI to start
AI is really good at creating work that sort of, kind of looks good…ish.
On the surface.
And if you sleep on it and come back to it the next morning, it’s quite easy to tell it’s (quite frankly) bullshit, filled to the brim with buzzwords and filler nobody wants.
At the bare minimum, you have to retain control. Craft out the fundamental logic of what you want to do, and then let AI play its (often very small) role as described above.
The easiest way to avoid this is by not using AI to start.
Don’t turn to it when you don’t know what you want.
This is like turning to a software engineer when you not only lack product-market fit, but also don’t have the faintest idea of what you want to build (not even on the most fundamental level, i.e., what inputs you’ll have leading to what desired output).
You’re setting the software engineer up for failure.
After Action Report – Value Your Thoughts, And Their Value Will Only Increase
The robot continues to trick more writers, founders, and CEOs than ever. It’s created a sea of mediocrity, and some of the founders I know have already fallen victim.
Stay strong. Resist the temptation.
Your human thought is – and will always be – your greatest asset.