Confession time: I’ve always been fairly crap at coming up with ideas myself from the very beginning, in isolation. Give me the seed of something, and I can refine it and turn it from vaguely amusing into freaking hilarious, but the core idea itself? For whatever reason I can’t do it. But when someone makes an innocuous observation, or a droll observation? I’m off to the races.

AI is sort of turning that on its head. Recently, I was chatting with Claude (that sounds sad, but it’s a decent rubber duck if you’re looking to talk about something remarkably niche) and went in less than five minutes from brainstorming ideas for shitposting into actually coming up with a seemingly-viable side hustle business. More to come on that particular point once it’s a smidgen further along—it’s not my main focus today.

I’ve tried and failed to get Claude and friends to spit out blog posts (not for this blog; never for this blog!) in my voice, and it’s always missed the mark in one way or another. It likes to apply snark in inappropriate ways (ahem), hallucinate wildly, personally insult Jeff Bezos (which is just odd; I don’t recall ever doing this), or frankly miss a lot of forest-for-the-trees type of stuff. But in comedy, there’s a concept of a “writer’s room,” where people bat ideas around with a “yes, and” type of punch-up improvement to the joke. Sometimes this is just absolutely wild; jokes that you KNOW aren’t going to ever make it to the finished product. But it’s part of the creative process because by tossing that crack out there someone else can pick it up, run with it, and come up with something that’s often not only more usable, but a lot funnier as well.

That’s where I find that AI assistants add value. Look, folks can argue with me about this, but YOU aren’t going to sit there as I go back and forth over Managed NAT Gateway jokes, or spit out 50 options for a blog post title that I’ll ultimately choose none of because number 33 gave me an idea for a better one. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not anthropomorphizing this thing into something it’s not, and it cannot replace the human connection elements we all desperately need. But where I used to go on Twitter for inspiration, or a long walk bouncing a ball? This fills that gap handsomely.

And I think that’s pretty neat.