A practical way to use AI to bring your ideas to life
How a spoken idea becomes a finished piece
If I wanted to, I could ask AI to write a piece about my boarding school years and it would produce a neat little narrative packed with scenes I never lived (I didn't, here is what I actually wrote). The same would happen if I asked it to write about creativity, travel, work or music. It would sound polished but it wouldn’t sound like me. Which is why my process begins long before any typing. I dictate the idea as if I’m telling it to someone across the table. Often it’s loose and wandering, but it’s mine. AI then helps me turn that spoken thread into something readable.
This is where the value sits. When you bring your own raw material, the tool gives you momentum. It takes the rough edges and shapes them into a structure you can react to. You stay in the flow of the idea rather than fighting the mechanics of writing. It’s simply a cleaner, quicker way to move from instinct to expression.
Why this approach works
Speaking ideas out loud captures the natural rhythm of how you think. The tone is already there. The phrasing is yours. The tool simply sets the scaffolding so you can refine rather than wrestle. I’ve written about this shift from prompting to directing in my piece on treating AI as a creative studio assistant, but here it becomes even more practical. You bring the intention and the judgement and the tool follows your cue.
The same applies to imagery. Before, I’d have spent hours hunting through stock sites or nudging layers around in Photoshop. Now I describe the feeling of the image I want, iterate a few times and direct it into shape. It’s the same creative instinct expressed through a faster, more responsive tool, and it reflects the same idea I explored in that studio assistant piece. Only here, it plays out at the level of a single image and a single moment.
What changes when you work this way
Working this way changes your creative rhythm in subtle but important ways. Exploration becomes effortless, so you naturally grow more curious and more willing to follow ideas you might once have ignored. Testing options takes seconds, which sharpens your selectiveness and helps you trust your taste more quickly. And because the groundwork appears almost immediately, you find yourself reaching a little further, becoming quietly more ambitious with structure, tone and scale. The whole process expands your range without ever feeling forced.
After two years of working like this, my rhythm has changed completely. I write more freely. I edit more calmly. I follow ideas further because the distance between a spark and a finished piece is smaller. Some of this thinking sits behind my broader view of the augmented creative studio, but here it’s stripped back to something very simple. How one person brings an idea to life.
This, to me, is the right way to use AI. Not outsourcing your story. Not borrowing a voice. Just augmenting the way you already think. You bring the idea and the honesty of what you want to say. The tools remove the friction.
The result isn’t artificial. It’s simply you, with fewer obstacles in the way.