A British fiction magazine — Take a Break’s Fiction Feast, built entirely on human-written short stories for women — has started replacing its freelance writers with AI, and Matt thinks it’s about to backfire. Not just because readers tend to recoil from creative work once they know a machine made it, though he believes they will. The deeper mistake is the sequence. The magazine is having AI generate first drafts and bringing humans in afterward to approve them. Matt’s experience runs the opposite way: write your own rough, imperfect draft first, then hand it to AI to pressure-test, poke holes in, and suggest angles. Starting from a pool of pre-existing machine material and expecting something genuinely creative to come out isn’t how creativity works.
From there he shares the principle he’s actively building his own practice around, learned years ago from a neuroscientist: your brain will focus on whatever you point it at. It’s tempting to drop a fragment of an idea into ChatGPT or Claude and get back something fleshed out and agreeable — but the moment it’s done for you, your brain stops processing. The missed opportunity is the struggle itself, because that’s what digs down into the soil of your thinking, your memories, how you actually see the world. And here’s the reframe worth keeping: you can set your brain on a problem the way you set an AI agent running and walk away — pose the question, do a little writing, then go live your day and let it work in the background. Writing is how you start that process and keep molding the idea like clay, where no two pieces come out the same. His prescription for a world drowning in synthetic content: use the tools for processes, files, and organization, but reserve the majority of your creative thought for yourself. Nurturing ideas takes time — are you willing to put it in, a little every day? (He also mentions he’s investing more heavily in Substack and building community there, so that’s the place to drop him a note.)
