How to save your creative brain in the age of AI
By Belinda Lopez, who is is teaching a four-week course called ‘Find Your Story’ with the South Coast Writers Centre
Recently, I was telling another writer about an interview I had done. I was deciding which quotes I would use for an essay I was working on.
“Chuck it into ChatGPT and ask for the best quotes,” the writer said.
“Oh no, I wouldn’t do that,” I said, laughing, surprised. “I guess I’m just old school”.
It was funny to hear myself use that description — old school— so soon into this worldwide revolutionary experiment to connect our brains to the machine.
Sometimes I call myself a neo-luddite, but — required caveat here, emphasis in italics — that doesn’t mean I hate technology.
What I wanted to say is that the process of turning over that source material and working with it was necessary for me, and not because of some inflexible stance against the march of progress. The source material becomes its own tuning fork, for how it should be used, specifically by me, to create a work that could only be mine.
The legendary music producer turned creative guru Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act that creative moments come not from within us, but from “a wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available”. He calls this The Source. “An integral part of the artist’s work is deciphering these signals,” he writes.
When I teach storytelling, I often meet people who feel they can no longer decipher the signals of their own story, whether they are creating something for the first time, or have been published professionally. They are ‘blocked’, they tell me.
That’s fine, I tell them. At some stage in every project, I also lose my way. And so we begin.
After many years of practice, I know that the answer is to return to the source material, The Source, and to learn how to turn it over in different ways.
Of course, there is now the temptation to avoid the discomfort and order AI content, mistaking a statistically average answer from the machines as The Source. But like a living organism, like muscles and bones, The Source’s signal grows only when we use it, and with it, the possibility of discovering something infinitely new.
Belinda Lopez is teaching the four-week course ‘Find Your Story’ with the South Coast Writers Centre, on Tuesday nights from May 5th at Coledale Community Hall. Buy tickets and read her Story Doula newsletter at belindalopez.net.
