AI, Writing, and Herding Goats
Creativity requires a little mess
A few years ago, my husband and I met a woman and dog herding goats in a park in the middle of San Luis Obispo. Yep, goats. On a hill in the middle of the city.
A conversation with the herders (cleverly named the Goat Girls) enlightened us. Goats clear shrubs from hard-to-access spots like steep hillsides or ravines, reducing potential wildfire fuel without sparking fires on dry brush. They reach spots that equipment cannot. They only need a little guidance, provided by dogs and temporary fences, and occasional repositioning.
Given the right conditions, nature does its thing. Goats even restore the soil by breaking up the top crust and depositing, um, unprocessed fertilizer.
Natural processes often yield the best results.
Is writing like herding goats?
The goat analogy matches my writing process pretty closely.
When I set out to write about a topic, I start by setting my mental processes loose on an area-often through freewriting or journaling. My thoughts wander over the terrain, nibbling tasty bits here, exploring over there, finding a delightful morsel tucked in by a creek.
The whole process is messy and imprecise. The results may be uneven at first. But it’s fun to see what happens.
Using AI to outline and draft for you is more like showing up with a giant ride-on mower. Sure, it’s faster, especially if the field is flat. But the mower won’t easily handle those hard-to-reach, rugged spots.
We can debate all day long about the quality of AI-generated writing, and it’s getting better all the time. But when machines write for us, we lose the beauty of the process.
The many uses of AI in writing
I’m not anti-technology. Far from it. Nor were the Goat girls, who set up electrified wire fences to keep the goats in the right area until they completed their tasks.
That’s kind of how I use AI in my writing; creating boundaries, herding the Muse. Tools like ProWriting Aid catch mistakes, thank heavens. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity can help with the herding. By crafting my prompts with care, I use AI to:
- See if I’m missing important insights or questions that people might have
- Point me toward fruitful areas for research or exploration
- Help me brainstorm with far-flung suggestions for titles or descriptions
Sometimes AI simply helps me remember what something is called. Last week I asked it: “What’s the name for a type of survey question where you rank something between 1 and 5 on a spectrum?” Oh, that’s right: Likert scale.
AI functions a bit like those electric fences around the goats, keeping me on task and preventing me from wandering off into a black hole looking for the name of something!
Other authors and writers I know used generative AI in more expansive ways, feeding it entire manuscripts and research notes to:
- Help them get unstuck when drafting
- Cull the insights and stories from hours of interview transcripts
- Edit the draft, streamlining the prose
AI assists their creative processes without replacing them. One friend fed her manuscript into a custom GPT and asked it to suggest a tighter structure and rearrange the content into it. Doing that got her unstuck on her book and she’s writing again. She suggests it helped her get past her inner critic.
What about using AI for creating first drafts? I am neither panicked nor completely at ease with it, but I resist drafting with it in most cases. One exception? Anything I really don’t want to spend time or mental energy on, like a letter of complaint to a company. AI can draft that for me.
But for work I care about? If AI writes the first drafts for me, I’d lose out on that lovely grazing and exploration experience. Who would reach into those distant, overgrown corners of my brain? That’s where creativity lies, and I don’t want to give it up.
What’s your call?
This conversation won’t stop soon, as AI improves and more people experience its possibilities. If you haven’t already experimented with generative AI yet, you might try it out simply to see what it does.
Look into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any of the large number of AI options embedded in tools in smaller writing tasks. Use them to generate ideas, polish up an email, or even draft a paragraph or two. Experiment with what works best for you.
Then figure out your personal guidelines for using AI, to see if it has a place in your writing process.
If you’re writing for human connection, make sure you hold up your side of the conversation. Ann Handley, something of a GOAT in marketing writing, suggests that if the writer themself doesn’t really matter to the content, you can use AI. But, she writes, “Does the writer matter a lot? Is the goal memorable, personal, persuasive insights? Use AI for research (if at all). “*
And if you enjoy the goat-herding of creative work, stick with it. Don’t worry about feeling like a Luddite. You’ll have the pleasure of the process.
* Ann Handley’s quote comes from issue #168 of her Total ANNArchy newsletter (in Myth #7). When I refer to Ann as a GOAT, I of course mean Greatest of All Time!
Originally published at https://annejanzer.com.
