Two winners of the 2024 newswriting Pulitzers say they used AI in developing their stories.
To be clear, neither the New York Times nor the City Bureau and Invisible Institute called on AI to create anything. But the Institute trained a custom machine learning tool to comb through thousands of police misconduct files. The Times visual investigations desk trained a model to identify 2,000-pound bomb craters in areas marked as safe for civilians in Gaza.
That’s just the sort of task we hope AI will take on: thankless comparison and combing of data. It’s the kind of work that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did by hand in the library during that scene in All the President’s Men.
On another front, AI is poking its way into most aspects of creative life. Nobody is dancing yet with AI, but just about every other artistic endeavor has an artificial intelligence lure. Making the case for a clean and clear creative conscience gets more complicated. If everybody’s using it, how can a creator stay even with fellow artists?
Dan Blank makes his case for considering if creativity is an organic affair. He operates We Grow Media, a service and consulting bureau that helps authors gain media attention. Getting media attention is still crucial to getting books sold. Earned media, we call it, one of the four kinds of media. Blank helps authors tell stories about their stories to gain a readership.
Blank wrote a Substack column about the future of creativity amid the rapid ascent of AI. “Where will it destroy our ability to create, diminish the value of what we create, and change our identity as writers and artists?”
No, AI still cannot write a book, and its dialogue skills are the most wooden of its writing talents. Screenplays will be out of reach for years, therefore, because they’re pretty much all dialogue. But authors are using AI, and the trend does not fit for Blank. He prefers the improvised arts. He asks us to consider if AI is becoming a natural part of a larger process. Maybe AI is the art.
Here’s a good question: If AI is the creative process, does the writer lose their identity? AI, he admits, will simply be more convenient to use than to skip it. Writers might even feel they’re hurting themselves by not using AI.
Such well-meaning advice comes from all corners. My therapist suggested using AI as a summary tool, having it read over his published books for ideas about improving them and expanding the scope of the books as he republishes. That’s restating your own creativity, and so in that case AI is amplifying and clarifying what he’s got to say.
But Blank warns us not to “lose your unique creative voice to AI. That is probably easy at the moment, because you may not be an early adopter to AI tools. But as they become more useful and compelling, we may even become unaware of how AI is not only becoming a part of the creative process, it becomes the entirety of the creative process.”
A common strategy today is to write many books in a series. The tools of AI will make that easier to accomplish, as well as faster if we subsume our voices to what the robots recite to us.
Blank is keeping me trained on the big prize of creating organically. Writers make something out of the associations we capture. One thing looks similar to another in a significant way. I hope that creative association movement, full of surprises, doesn’t go away. He’s helping keep it alive and vibrant. And believe me, vibrancy is what keeps us reading and watching — and recommending, too. Last night my wife and I watched Argylle on AppleTV. Minute to minute, we enjoyed so much organic goodness in that film.
It will be many years until AI makes something that rewarding. Especially if you’re a discerning audience member, watching for innovation instead of what I call echo art. Especially if you want audiences to be surprised, in a way that makes sense. Especially if we keep creating organically — people can tell the difference. That unique voice sucks us in, unlike the one that tempts us to lift our phones and go all second-screen on our film experience. Or click on the notification that just dropped down onto your Kindle screen on your phone.
“Will AI be a part of the creative process,” Blank asks in his column, “or become the process itself? I feel we each get to decide for ourselves. And all I ask is that you make these decisions consciously and with intention.”
