One of the biggest misconceptions about using AI is that you ask a question and get an answer.
Sometimes that happens.
More often, at least for me, something much more interesting happens. Last night I sat down with a simple publishing question. Should my companion book, Claw, Elm & Charm, have sprayed edges?
That was it. A production question. But the conversation wandered.
AI mentioned leatherette bindings and I learned exactly what that means. That led to discussing old books, which led to museum-quality reproductions, which led to endpapers, which led to archives.
Which led to the realization that my fictional world needed an ancient institution dedicated to preserving magical knowledge. And I absolutely have no place to fit that ancient institution in the book or the short story I’m currently working on. Which made me decide—fortuitously—that I really don’t need it in either of the current projects at all. It belongs in a book I haven’t written yet. And suddenly that book became real in my mind.
And that led me to discuss with AI whether this yet to be built ancient institution belongs in a cold, mountain hide-out, maybe in the Swiss Alps, or a tropical setting, such as South Florida or Puerto Rico where I have lived.
None of that was in the original question. We could call this the vagaries of a creative mind, or the rabbit holes that an ADD person falls into, yet every step grew naturally from the one before it.
That’s the real magic of working with AI. Not getting answers. But allowing it to lead your own creativity in discovering questions you didn’t know to ask.
AI didn’t invent my Archive. It didn’t invent Claw, Elm & Charm. It certainly didn’t invent Rivelou. What it did was follow me down a rabbit trail until I discovered something I didn’t know was already in my imagination.
That’s the difference between asking AI to do your creative work and using AI as a creative partner.