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sung to the tune of “Don’t Follow the Guru – You are the Guru.”

How to shift from Artificial to Innate, Intuitive Intelligence

A recent upgrade to the Chatbot VeniceAI comes with guidance for writing more useful prompts. While writers may bemoan the takeover of our creative space by soulless robots, the instructions for bots may be put to good use for challenging our own creative capabilities—as writers, or humans in general seeking to delve deeper into our potential powers and native intelligence.

Especially inspiring is the technique I would venture to call metaprompting: or asking the bot to deliver a set of further prompts to guide us in fleshing out a larger project or task. For example:

All these are wonderful angles a traditional writer could use to penetrate writer’s block and generate fresh approaches to a story or scene.

Instead of handing over the process to the machine, however, we can reclaim our internal resources to fulfill the same mission. We could just as well invent a similar list of exercises as the above prompts suggest.

Better yet, we could then embrace the challenge of responding to each prompt/exercise with our own human talent, rather than handing it all off to the AI.

After all, what is the point of the whole exercise? Is it to “write a novel as efficiently as possible”? No contest, just plug and play, the bot can deliver a passable result a hundred times faster than any speed-writing weekend retreat.

Or is it to get our own creative juices flowing, so that our bubbling universe of possibility can manifest its own desired world, in our own true words, firsthand and authentic?

The choice is yours. If you’d really rather be doing something else, then go for that instead; and leave the automatic writing to the newfangled washer/dryer ghost in the machine.

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Speaking of ghosts in machines, check out my cyberpunk psychological thriller PsyBot to find out what can happen if you’re not up to matching wits with a rogue AI. 

Or, for a more topical treat in the season of dystopian electoral politics, download The Last Book: The First Woman President. She talks a good policy, but who’s really calling the shots?