It's Time to Talk About AI 🤖

Good morning 👋🏼 If you saw “AI” in the subject line and instinctively recoiled—I get it.

This topic is a lot. It’s loud. It’s loaded. And depending on which corner of the internet you’re standing in, it can feel either like the death of creativity or the dawn of some weirdly soulless tech utopia.

So let’s just get this out of the way: this isn’t that.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written, you know I’m not in the business of telling people what to think. This newsletter has always been both an observatory and a laboratory—a space to notice things, try stuff, and reflect in real time. And after talking about AI on a recent podcast, I realized I’ve been doing a lot of that behind the scenes.

So I’m bringing it here.

This isn’t a thinkpiece. It’s not a manifesto. It’s just a look at how I’ve been using AI in my own creative work, what I’ve learned, and a few things that have helped me stay curious instead of spiraling.

Let’s get into it.

Between the Binary

Let’s start here: I’m not going to evangelize AI. I’m not replacing myself with a robot. And I don’t think anyone should.

But I also can’t ignore that these tools are shifting the creative landscape—fast. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months. And according to Adobe, nearly 3 in 4 creative professionals are already experimenting with AI in their workflows—even if they’re not talking about it.

So…let's talk about it.

For me, AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s a collaborator. A tool that doesn’t have taste or instinct, but does have speed, pattern recognition, and a way of helping me move faster toward the real work.

I’ve used ChatGPT to extract quotes from long transcripts when I don’t have hours to comb through every line. I’ve used Claude to soften a paragraph that felt too sharp, or help me get unstuck when I couldn’t zoom out. I’ve used Descript to help prep podcast clips that would’ve taken days by hand.

None of those tools replaced the part of me that decides what matters. They just helped me get to the good part faster. They removed some of the friction. And when used intentionally, they’ve actually made me feel more connected to what I’m making—not less.

But I’m not pretending this is simple. Or easy. Or without risk. There’s a tendency to treat new tools (especially powerful ones) as either magic or evil. Good or bad. Yes or no. But if we believe, say, gender can be non-binary—if we believe art and identity and relationships live in nuance—then we have to hold that same space here, too.

AI doesn’t do the thinking for me—it just helps me move through the fog.
And learning how to use it? That’s where it starts to get interesting.

We’ve Been Here Before

AI might feel new. But what it’s doing isn’t.

If you’ve ever typed “See you…” and had your phone suggest “soon,” you’ve used AI. That’s predictive text—built on language models, just like ChatGPT. It’s been on our phones since 2014.

If you’ve ever checked Broadway ticket prices and noticed they were way higher (or weirdly lower) than you expected, you’ve seen AI in action. Dynamic pricing platforms like Telecharge, TodayTix, and SeatGeek use machine learning to adjust prices based on demand, time, and behavior. These systems have been evolving since at least 2011.

And if you’ve ever worked on a show, you’ve probably interacted with automated lighting boards and pre-programmed cues—systems that take real-time inputs and trigger precise responses. While not “generative,” they’re still built on intelligent design logic. And they’ve been part of the theater world for decades. The Strand Memory Console came out in 1976.

So yes, the tools look flashier now. And the outputs might feel closer to creativity itself. But the truth is, we’ve been collaborating with “intelligent systems” for a long time. We just didn’t call it AI.

We called it helpful.

This Might Help

Whether you’re already experimenting with AI or still feeling it out from a distance, I figured I’d share a few patterns—small things I’ve started doing that have actually made a big difference in how useful (and human) the process feels.

First: start with something. A messy paragraph, a rough outline, a voice memo you half-understand the next morning. Instead of expecting the tool to generate brilliance out of thin air, I bring it a starting point—something to shape. I’ll ask, “What am I getting at here? Is there an idea that we can distill that’s worth sharing?” I’m not looking for a perfect draft. I’m looking for momentum.

Then: give it a role. Once I’ve got something to work with, I tell the tool who it is. Not just what I want, but the kind of voice or energy I’m aiming for. Let’s say you’re a social media manager writing copy for a new musical coming next season. Instead of prompting, “Write an Instagram caption for a Broadway show,” you might say: “You’re a chronically online theater kid who now runs socials for a splashy, high-stakes new musical. Write 3 captions that feel playful but not cringey.” That shift can make all the difference. It moves the output from generic to usable. From meh to maybe.

And finally: iterate. This part matters more than I expected. I do not just take what it gives me and paste it in. I play. I give feedback. I tweak a few words. And—this is the surprising part—I loop it back. I’ll say, “This is the line I ended up using,” or “Here’s what actually worked in the caption.” Especially in a project space like this, where it remembers our thread, that kind of back-and-forth starts to build a rhythm. The tool doesn’t just spit things out. It starts to learn how I work.

So no, I don’t think AI is THE future of creativity. But I do think it’s part of it. And for me, the goal isn’t to outsource what I do—it’s to stay curious about what’s possible. To reduce the friction. To stay in motion.

That’s the part I’m interested in. Not the hype. Not the fear. Just the very human work of learning a new tool—and seeing what it might help me make.

☝🏼 One last thing…

We're in tech for All The World’s a Stage and my brain is a beautiful disaster.

Tech week is such a paradox—it's simultaneously the most stressful and the most magical part of making theater. The moment when all those isolated pieces we've been crafting in separate rooms suddenly collide in spectacular (often messy) ways.

It's honestly the perfect reminder that nothing good gets made without going through a phase where it looks totally broken. A newsletter, a business plan, a relationship—there's always that messy middle where you're like "Is this even salvageable?"

The real difference between people who make stuff and people who just talk about making stuff isn't some magical creative gene. It's just the stubborn refusal to bail when things get weird and hard. It's betting on the mess. Trusting that the part where everything feels like it's unraveling isn't the end of the story.

If you're stuck in the middle of your own personal tech week right now—that chaotic space where you can't see the finish line—this is your reminder: the mess isn't a detour from the process. It IS the process.

Lol. No one knows what they're doing. We're all just figuring it out as we go, collecting tiny failures until they somehow add up to something that works.

See you next week ♥️