AI in my Inkwell

In the summer of 2025, I was advising founders at a business accelerator in Vancouver on how to incorporate AI into their companies and products. I had thoughts about workflow, about the categories of use that were likely to produce real returns versus the ones that were mostly theatre. What I did not have was a personal use case. I had founded and sold three technology companies before the AI era. I had used plenty of tools. But AI, for me, had remained something I recommended to others, but not yet folded into anything substantial of my own.

The experiment that started it was not ambitious. The original version of A Frictionless State was a screenplay I’d written at Tel Aviv University in 1996. I thought it would be interesting to ask an AI to convert it from screenplay format into prose fiction. I wanted to learn from the process. I did not expect much from the output. Expectations met. It was my creation, but it had been put through a meat grinder.

The prose AI gave me relayed every event but missed what made those events matter. Character interiority had been manufactured. Dialogue had been preserved in a way that made its weaknesses newly obvious. The tension was there in outline and absent in experience. But I had something I hadn’t had before—the story’s full arc, formatted as prose, in Ulysses, ready to be worked with. The AI had handed me a badly built scaffold. I have renovated worse.

Before I could write anything good, I needed a story bible to track characters, their knowledge states, their relationships, the sequence of events and when each character learns what. Working without one on a novel of this complexity would be catastrophic. I fed the converted prose back to an AI and asked it to read through and generate the bible. Another scaffold. More rough material to improve.

I have ADHD. The condition has its characteristic asymmetries. One of them is this, I can write an entire chapter in my head, in the dark, in complete detail. The scenes come in sequence, the dialogue runs, the structure assembles. What I cannot do, with anything approaching the same ease, is translate that into typing when I am sitting in front of a blank document. Writers block for me is not a creative problem, it is a procedural one. The ideas are present. The blank page makes me afraid to start putting them down.

The AI outputs, poor as they were, solved this. The page wasn’t blank, it already had my ideas there to iterate on.

As the writing progressed, I found a further use. AI has something approaching total recall (with no need for a trip to Mars). It can hold a large amount of text and answer questions about it with a consistency that a human reader, however engaged, cannot sustain across months of drafting. I could ask, what does Alene know at the end of Chapter 8, and what does she believe, and where do those two things diverge from each other? I could ask about character arcs, about the pacing of plot reveals, about the accumulation of a character’s decisions across fifty pages. The kinds of tracking that writers once managed with pegboards and index cards, I could simply ask.

Editing was its own category. I have known bad habits such as tense drift, voice inconsistency, a tendency to name emotions rather than show them, certain words I return to when I’m not paying close attention. I listed these and asked the AI to flag them systematically, so I could return to each passage and make the corrections myself. The fixing was mine. The surveillance was shared.

Art has never been about which tools are used to create it. It’s about the thousands of decisions an artist makes. Painters once ground pigment from minerals and layered them on their canvas. Now they use Photoshop, which separates layers and provides filters that save hours on mechanics, but the decisions about what to create and why are still entirely the artist’s own.

Every scene in A Frictionless State was created, judged, revised or kept by me. The narrative is mine. The characters are mine. The choices regarding what these people want, what they cost one another, how the truth moves through the story and what it leaves behind, are all mine. The AI did not make any of them. It has no true experiences from which to be able to do that. It was the inkwell I dipped my quill into.

As for the Vancouver founders, the advice I was giving in 2025 was accurate. I just hadn’t had the chance to prove it to myself yet. Now I have.

You can judge the result for yourself. A Frictionless State is free to read, one chapter at a time. Start reading →