Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The last question comes from JimmyAK, who asks, When you write your episodes, do you go completely old-school and just open up the word processor and start typing? Or do you use any sort of AI tools to either “simply help” with completing sentences and grammar more quickly (Grammarly, or something similar), or full-blown AI MMLs that help generate the outline and content, where you then do some cleanup and editing?

All of my scripts are written in Google Docs. Every single one since the first episode has been written this way. This allows me to switch between my laptop and desktop computers without having to worry about version control.

I have also used Grammarly since the very first episode. It does a pretty good job of doing copy editing on the fly as I’m writing which allows me to write faster.

I’ve been playing around with AI tools, but its still pretty limited with what I can do.

You can’t just say, “Write 2000 words on this subject,” and then have it give you a full script. What it will come up with is very boring and never what I’m looking for.

I have a very specific story arc for each episode, and an AI tool can’t really give me what I’m looking for. By definition, a large language model will give you something average.

The one area I have used AI in writing is when I have a very broad subject, and I need to figure out how to narrow it down or determine what the most important points are.

For example, I’ve been working on an episode on the religions of ancient civilizations. There are an enormous number of major and minor gods, festivals, and practices that could be covered.AI can usually do a good job of providing an outline of what the important things to cover are, although it will almost always skip smaller things that are still quite interesting.

So, the vast majority of what I do is still old fashioned writing in a word processor.