Sometimes I just want a blank sheet of paper (and sometimes I don't)

Photo credit: Ashley West Edwards via Unsplash

I call it the pushback moment.

It’s that moment when I am writing something - it might be a work document, or a presentation, or one of these articles - when it’s just not working. The sentences are tangled, the meaning is muddy, and I am not getting my point across.

That’s when I push back all of the papers and references and notebooks from my desk and reach for a fresh, blank sheet of paper (or, digitally, open another browser tab and create an empty document). And I ask myself a question: ‘What am I trying to say?’

Sometimes the answer comes quickly, and I find that I am writing fluently and easily. Sometimes the answer is hard, and my page becomes filled with false starts and crossed out sentences, the crossing out becoming more emphatic as it gets further down the page. But in each case I have to start writing to discover the answer. The act of writing helps me figure out what I think. It is a conversation with myself, and I am sometimes surprised by what I find.

However, I am conscious that, these days, there is an alternative. Actually, there has always been an alternative. I could search online, I could read a book or I could phone a friend. I could adopt the practice of rubber duck debugging, and try to explain my thinking to an inanimate object.

Or, I could ask ChatGPT or any of the other proliferating AI chatbot tools. They are unlikely to have a good answer to the question, ‘What am I trying to say?’, but I could try asking them for ideas about the topic I am exploring. I know that they would respond confidently and prolifically, with helpful bullet points and suggestions.

I must admit that I have been reticent about using AI chatbots to help me write original content. Even though I am usually an early adopter of technology, I have not yet fully incorporated these tools into this part of my working practice, even though I use them for summary, for synthesis and for keeping track of collections of documents I am using for research.

Part of this reticence is vanity: I like to believe that, when I write, I am saying something new, original and compelling, and it is disturbing to think that an AI tool could help me with this - let alone do better. Part of it is aesthetic: despite improvements (and despite the further improvements that can be achieved through prompting), I find most AI generated content verbose and hollow - at best a rough draft that I will have to ruthlessly edit.

However, I think that the real reason for my reticence is that there is only one way to work out what I am trying to say, and that is to try to say it. At the pushback stage, AI input (at least for me) is just more clutter on the desk, something to be pushed out of the way so that I can see what I really think.

This is, of course, a personal view, based on my experience and the approach that works for me today. My practice may change as tools develop and become a more normal part of our working day. However, I think that my current experience may provide a helpful example.

I am one of many people who have built a toolbox for writing and thinking that I have been using for many years. Some of these tools are ancient, constructions of grammar, style and logic which bear the marks of human history and culture. Some of these tools are much newer - for example, the way I search the Internet - but are nevertheless decades old by this point. And some of these tools arrived yesterday. They are strange and unfamiliar, and surrounded with an aura of promotion and advocacy which can seem overwhelming. Their manufacturers are keen to see what I can do with them - even though they admit that they don’t know exactly what they can do, or how to use them safely. They are powerful and it would seem foolish to ignore them - but they will take some getting used to.

Those of us who are in the business of deploying new technology, especially AI, should recognise that millions, if not billions, of people, will be going through this process of adjustment. We can - and should - try to help them with change management and guidance, but they will discover the best way to use these tools for themselves. And they will surprise by using this new technology in ways we never expected, just as people used programming languages, spreadsheets and the Internet in ways that were never imagined by their inventors.

But, despite the power and promise of these tools, I expect that I will continue to experience the pushback moment, and will continue to reach for a blank sheet of paper: sometimes the only person that can answer the question, ‘What am I trying to say?’ is you.