10 thoughts on AI for creative work

I wouldn't want to write a whole novel with AI, or if I did, I would present it as an AI-written or AI-assisted novel.

I've been experimenting with AI for erotica. I dabble in erotica for fun and profit, and I don't care if it's "cheating", because I do it as a side project that I don't feel strongly attached to. It's not a deep expression of my inner self (well, actually, sometimes it is... a bit too much; but let's not get into that). As opposed to my comedy work: I wouldn't want to use AI to write jokes and take credit for them in my stand up or in my written works (such as for my Substack). But I could see myself creating a separate publication (or a sub-publication) dedicated to AI-assisted humor, or doing a specific stand up routine where I clearly state the assistance of the AI.

I'm going to have to delve deeper into video editing, and I wouldn't mind using an AI software to speed up the process (removing silences and language tics, etc.)

In fact, I already use an AI video editor for simple videos using stock footage, and in that case, I don't even feel like I'm outsourcing any sort of meaningful creative work to the AI; finding stock footage is not a meaningful process to me, and the AI speeds it up. I use Lumen5 for this.

If you want to publish a creative work but you want to outsource as much as possible to artificial intelligence, what is it exactly that drives you? Probably just the result: you want to publish a creatve work, but you don't want the work that goes into it. Maybe this means you're just after the extrinsic rewards. Or maybe you're just interested in the AI-assisted process, and that's fair enough. I just think it's worth thinking about. Again, I think using AI for creativity can be great, but to me it depends on the specific work and how meaningful it is. Sometimes, it's worth skipping over the human creative process. If you're an artist that cares about the artistic process, you may not want to give it over to AI in most cases.

And that's awesome too. Again, it comes down to knowing why you want to use AI, and figuring out if it's a good reason. "I want to be a published writer but I don't wanna deal with the pains of the writing process" might not be a good reason. "I want to make money with fun experiments by publishing AI-generated works" might be a good one.

I think this is a good reason to use AI. Most content writing and copywriting isn't particularly creative or artistic, and it might be worth outsourcing it to AI in some (or most) cases. However, I'm not sure I would want to do this if I'm writing to an audience as myself: let's say I ran a health-related newsletter and I sent out an email starting with "Hey this is Mathieu and today I wanna talk about the health benefits of hugging pigeons"; I would devaluate my connection with my audience if I were to use AI for this, because I wouldn't really be talking to them as myself. Or if I used AI, I would probably just use it to speed up the process (research and outlining) and rewrite it (as it stands, rewriting is often necessary with AI anyway). But if I ran a faceless YouTube channel about pigeons, I might use AI for everything.

This is another example of a good use of AI. If you're a visual artist, I understand you might want to stay away from it. But as someone who's not involved in visual arts, I enjoy using NotePD's AI image generator to accompany my lists (it's really fun to use!!).

At the end of the day, this is my personal take on AI, as it stands at the moment of writing (these are new thoughts and they might very well change in the future). And I'm not trying to say how AI should be used; rather, I'm exploring how I feel about its role in my own creative work. Whatever works for you (I've used it for erotica, for god's sake).

If there's an AI software that can write decent jokes, I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to use it for some types of joke writing work (such as speech writing or social media copywriting), but I wouldn't want my joke writing muscle to atrophy (maybe it could be used in a way to improve one's joke writing skills?). Joe Toplyn has been working on one called Witscript, and it looks like it has potential. Again, I don't think I'd want to use it for my own personal work.