#6 - I'm not a shitty writer, ChatGPT is

You look at your todo list. Annual reviews were due yesterday. That strategy doc sits unstarted. The food truck app, the personal website, those handwritten wedding thank you cards you’ve been meaning to write - all suffering from the same fate. You “just can’t find the time.” (Translation: you've been procrastinating like a champion.)

The Cold Start Problem

I encountered the phrase “cold start problem” early in my career when working with a new Amazon Web Services offering. It referred to the delay in getting a system “warmed up” after the system had been inactive for some time. But once the system was warm, it could serve requests much faster than that first time. Think of it like you waking up from a deep slumber. You wake up groggy, you’re slow, you haven’t had your coffee yet. You’re the sloth from Zootopia. But once you’re up and the caffeine is in your system, you’re the Road Runner.

Creativity and Impostor Syndrome

It didn’t take long for me to apply the notion of cold and warm starts to all aspects of life - especially creative endeavors. Cold starts are the source of (almost) all procrastination.

The hardest part of any creative act is getting started. Writing, painting, planning a dinner party, strategizing, whatever. It feels like standing at the base of Everest when you just want to take a walk. If it's not urgent, why start today? But I wonder if there’s something deeper. For me, it was a notion of personal worth tied with the output I produce. When I sat down to write, some part of my brain expected my first draft to emerge as 'The Great Gatsby' - polished, profound, perfect. When it didn’t (spoiler: it never does), I felt like a fraud. An impostor. The blank page becomes a referendum on my worth as a writer. Maybe even a person.

The AI-shaped Solution

I consider myself an eternal optimist but over the last decade have turned into more of a technological skeptic. So I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical of AI. I was skeptical of not only the people behind it but also the systems themselves. My reactions ranged from “Are they actually that good (yet)?” to “Even if they are, I don’t need them!” And I’ve heard of similar skepticism coming from other friends and coworkers. Common refrains include, “I’m already pretty efficient with my workflow,” “I can move equally as fast!”, and “I don’t want to bother learning something new.” My own usage of LLMs was reluctant and limited to one-way conversation. I ask, it answers (sometimes), and that’s it. It wasn’t until I saw this video by Jeremy Utley that convinced me that I should at least try to use AI differently and judge for myself.

The case Utley made was for using ChatGPT as if you were talking to another human being. The system is capable of taking your feedback and improving itself and its responses specifically to your needs. You just needed to understand how to communicate with it better.

Whenever I felt stuck on a problem, I’d use it as a rubber duck - a rather common practice within engineering where you talk out loud to a rubber duck, like you would to a colleague, in hopes that you’ll arrive at a solution yourself. Except, the rubber duck could now talk back. The fears from writers and creatives - as seen by the writer’s strike - are well founded. There’s something to be said about the integrity, identity and soul of a writer that hurts when you say their words were produced by an unfeeling machine and not the genius of their own mind. The WGA’s case was against the rampant use of AI as their replacement. What I’m suggesting is using AI for the augmentation of your own craft. More as a tool, like any instrument you already use, and less as an identity-threatening device (despite it’s potential to be one).

Security concerns, data integrity, privacy - both personal and company data - are all valid concerns. My only advice is be smart about what and how you share with LLMs (if you care about that kind of thing). But my personal conclusion is that LLMs have dramatically decreased my cold start problem!

One caveat, this essay is not about becoming an AI power user. There are plenty of resources that can help you do that. However, it is about one specific way AI can help you get unstuck. Anytime I want to start writing something and the blank page scares the hell out of me, I ask ChatGPT to write me a draft. It’s immaterial whether I use 100% of what it produces or none of it. With something in front of me to react to, the fear of the page goes away. And even if the writing is bad, and though the idea was mine, it’s less of a threat to my personal self worth because it’s not my shitty first draft, it’s ChatGPT’s.