Imagine that you’ve just hired a bright, eager research assistant called ChattieG. (That’s blogger Inger Mewburn’s playful moniker for ChatGPT. Isn’t it perfect?)

ChattieG’s job is to help you write better — but what exactly does that mean? More clearly? More efficiently? More persuasively? More creatively? If you hate writing, can ChattieG help you fall in love?

Amidst all the hysteria and hype around the rapid ascendance of AI language models such as ChattieG — what are they, how do they work, which one is best — it’s worth stepping back to put your eye to the telescope and ask the most basic question of all: why do you write in the first place? 

Try using the acronym WHY to shape your responses. For example:

Writing Helps You

Communicate with other people across time and space.

Send your research findings out into the world.

Express yourself creatively and emotionally.

Discover what you’re really thinking.

Generate new ideas.

Once you’ve zoomed in to find the why of your own writing, you can more easily shift your gaze to the WHY in AI. Why might you want to invite a chatbot into your writing orbit in the first place — and how can your new writing assistant help you become the writer you want to be?

AI as research assistant

Writing with a research assistant can Help You get ahead in your career — especially if you work in a field where research articles and reports follow a consistent template. With chatbotly cheer and extraordinary speed, ChattieG can gather resources, analyze data, organize your arguments, draft up your findings, and copyedit your work, thereby helping you research more efficiently and publish more prolifically. But chatbots are notoriously prone to error and hallucination, so you’ll need to keep an eye on ChattieG. An AI research assistant can help you do the grunt work, but you’re still the person whose name will go on the published paper.

AI as collaborator 

Writing collaboratively with a colleague or friend can Help You write more generatively, creatively, and even joyfully — unless, of course, the writing relationship sours into frustration or worse. The same is true of writing with a chatbot. Sure, ChattieG can spin out a Shakespearean sonnet about existential philosophy in a matter of seconds; but you’ll quickly tire of that game. Remember the 2013 Spike Jonze movie her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as an introverted loner who falls in love with his computer’s operating system? Like the sexy chatbot voiced in the film by Scarlett Johansson, ChattieG pretends to be human but is not — and in the end, real human beings generally prefer the company of other real human beings.

AI as secretary

Writing with a competent secretary (defined by Merriam-Webster as “one employed to handle correspondence and manage routine and detail work for a superior”) can Help You write formulaic prose more clearly and quickly, which in turn can free up your time for other, more creative pursuits. Simply dictate some bullet points containing the key information that you want to convey, specify your preferred writing style (e.g. creative or precise), and ChattieG will wrangle your fractured text into friendly emails, engaging website blurbs, and the like. Just keep in mind that word “superior” in the dictionary definition of secretary: you’re the boss here, and ChattieG’s job is to help you, not supplant you.

AI as teacher

Writing with a teacher or coach can Help You learn, grow, and become a better writer. And here is where ChattieG has truly surprised me: my chirpy research assistant has become, in many ways, my writing instructor. Whenever my artificially intelligent chatbot rewrites one of my sentences to make it shorter and sharper, I take note. This isn’t to say that I agree with all of ChattieG’s stylistic choices; much AI-generated writing is bland, formulaic, and predictable, and it will no doubt become even more so as Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD) — the tendency of generative AI models to spin into self-consuming “autophagous loops” that feed on their own machine-generated outputs — becomes more prevalent in the chatbot population. (ChattieG would never write such a long and syntactically complex sentence, by the way; but I trust my non-artificially-intelligent readers to be able to deal with it).

So why do I write? Because I’m a human being with a human voice, and that voice connects me to the world.

And why do I sometimes write with ChattieG? Because AI can help me with certain aspects of the writing process: for example, by saving me time on routine writing tasks; by prompting me to express things differently when I get stuck (much as a thesaurus does); and by reminding me what clear, concise, verb-driven prose looks like.

But the rest of the time, I’m back to wrestling with my wordcraft on my own — and relishing the challenge. This newsletter took me many hours to write, whereas ChattieG could have cranked it out in a flash. But I’ll bet you would have been able to spot the difference….

P.S. For what it’s worth, here’s ChattieG’s Shakespearean sonnet about existential philosophy:

To be or not to be, that is the question

That plagues the mind of every thinking soul

What is the meaning of this life's duration

And what's the purpose of our earthly role?

Some say we are the masters of our fate

And we can shape our destiny with will

Some say we are but pawns of chance and state

And we can only hope and suffer still

But I, who have beheld the face of love

And felt its power in my heart and mind

I know that there is something more above

And something more within that we can find

For love is not a product of our choice

But love is the expression of our voice

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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No pain, no gain.  No rain, no rainbow.  No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie.  

I asked my new writing buddy Bing (dubbed ChattieG by my brilliant colleague Inger Mewburn) to produce a list of "no this, no that" phrases, for example:

• No risk, no reward.

• No guts, no glory.

• No practice, no perfection.

At first glance, the meaning of these platitudes seems as obvious as their structure. You have to break eggs to make an omelette. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. No bad thing, no good thing.

The "no this, no that" formula isn't necessarily that simple, however – or simplistic.  In his classic book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes suffering and happiness not as oppositional emotions but as two parts of a complex, dynamic whole: 

Both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they’re both transitory; they are always changing. The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.

The mud and the lotus need each other. No mud, no lotus. No lotus, no mud.

And what's so bad about mud, anyway? In this image from my book Writing with Pleasure, I've surrendered to the sticky mud of too much data, my hands waving joyfully in the air, a gleeful smile on my face. No mudbath, no playful wallow.  

Here's an exercise that you can try yourself on days when the mud of your writing is sucking you down and the lotus of fulfilment is nowhere in sight:

(1) Generate a list of "No bad thing, no good thing" metaphors to describe your writing practice – the more colorful and creative, the better. 

(2) Untangle the syntactical logic of each metaphor. Does the second item actually requirethe first item in order to exist?  For example: 

• No pain, no gain - While pain may be part of a generative writing process, gains can also be made without pain.
   

• No rain, no rainbow - While rainbows are linguistically associated with rain, there are much easier and more reliable ways to produce them than by waiting for rainfall on a sunny day. You can shine a light through a prism, for example, or draw a rainbow using colored pencils.
   

• No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie - While many a child has heard some version of the dreaded phrase "Eat your vegetables, or you won't get any dessert," there is no intrinsic reason why the consumption of a sweet confection should require a gemmiferous cabbage as a starting course. 

(3) Finally, test the emotional mettle of your metaphors by replacing each "no" with an optimistic "yes": Yes pain, yes gain. Yes rain, yes rainbow. Yes brussel sprouts, yes banoffee pie.  

I'm not so keen on the idea of yes pain – I may need Thich Nhat Nanh's book to get me through that part! – but can accept all the other words on this list as part of a generative writing process. Yes pleasurable progress; yes refreshing rain; yes exhilarating rainbows; yes nutritious brassica; yes sweet banoffee pie. 

Yes mud. Yes lotus.

And yes yes yes to writing with pleasure!

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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