June 22, 2025 • 30 mins
Write Your Story with Ally Fallon: AI has been a constant topic of conversation lately, mainly because we’re watching the world change at a rapid pace in ways that are unprecedented and can be unnerving.
We’re in uncharted territory.
As nostalgic as I can sometimes feel about a time when iPhones didn’t rule our lives, I tend toward the belief that, in general, the best times are ahead of us — not behind.
I even recorded an episode a few weeks ago encouraging creative people not to be afraid of what AI can do for creativity:
In this episode, I want to flag a concern I do have about the current AI takeover. It’s not a concern about AI taking over creative jobs or writing all future published books. It’s about something much more personal.
Take a listen and tell me what you think.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down? On Colord, it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
again about AI. I have talked about this once before,
at least once before. I will link to that episode
in the show notes, and I want to circle back
(00:46):
to this topic because I have more that I want
to say, and I have something I want to say
that I think is really important to anybody who is
a creative being, which is you, everybody, everyone, You and
all your friends who don't think they're creative beings, we're
all creative beings. By creative beings, I really just mean
that you are the one who is responsible for shaping
(01:08):
your life into something meaningful. I talked about this on
last week's episode that I used to think of manifestation
as like sort of this magical woo woo thing where
you hear people talk about manifestation, it's like think about
a Mercedes and you can poof, like there'll be one
in your driveway. And that always felt kind of silly
to me. And then I went down a path where
(01:28):
I was like, Okay, I'm going to just choose to
like be two feet in on this and believe in
manifestation and I'm going to manifest the things that I want.
But I was really trying to manifest them from my head,
like create a list of things that are pie in
the sky goals that you never believe that you could achieve,
and then fixate on them and decide you're going to
achieve these things and think about them every day and
(01:48):
create your vision boards, and you know, all these things
are fine and good. But I will say that that
path took me on a long, disappointing journey, which I'm
still open to learning, like maybe I did it wrong
or something like that. But the more that I have
reflected on the journey of the last five years of
my life, the more I've realized that I think I
(02:09):
was creating still from a place of performance, like creating
from my mind what I thought I should want to create,
or what I thought would bring me satisfaction and joy
instead of just tuning into my body and asking myself
what actually does bring me joy? Like? What are the
things that bring me joy? And I think the things
that bring us joy are so much simpler than we
(02:31):
thought they were, then we believe them to be. So
then the question is what is manifestation? Is it really
a thing? Does it really exist? I do believe that
if you think about a Mercedes enough, you could probably
manifest one in your life. But as Marian Williamson says,
so what's the point Like then what? So then you
think about a black Mercedes one hundred times and you
buy a black Mercedes, does the Mercedes make you any
(02:53):
happier in your life? I don't know for sure whether
it does or doesn't. I've manifested, you know, some physical
abundance in my life, and I've also like lost a
lot of physical possessions in my life too and given
them up. And so what am I trying to say?
What I'm trying to say is that when I can
come back to my heart, when I can come back
to my body, when I can pay attention to what
(03:14):
really matters to me and what really moves me and
what brings me joy. From that place, I realize that
actually the details of my life, the car I drive,
just being one example, the house I live in, the
dollar amount in my bank account, the title you know
on my business card, the number of followers on Instagram,
like all that stuff is just so surface level and
(03:36):
kind of just not kind of but like really really
doesn't matter at all, is really just completely meaningless. And yes,
those things can bring us some joy, like dollars in
the bank account can absolutely bring you joy and freedom
and all kinds of things. So I'm not denying that,
but I'm saying that shaping our lives manifestation in my
mind now is much more about being the person who
(03:57):
shapes the clay, who shapes the raw material of your
life into something beautiful. So life dishes you up this
raw material, and maybe it dishes you up different raw
material than your neighbor or than the person down the street,
and that can feel unfair, but it's like whatever raw
material life dishes you up, what are you going to
do with it? How are you going to shape it?
And like I talked about on last week's episode, it's
(04:19):
really a lot about becoming the narrator of your story,
and we're upgrading the narrator to your story and deciding
that you're going to tell the story in a different way.
That's not untrue, but that is from a higher place
than maybe you were telling the story before. So, like
the example I gave last week was telling the story
about forgetting to send a podcast file, I can either
(04:41):
tell the story like you're such a screw up, we
can't believe you did that. You always do this, Or
I can tell the story like no big deal, people
make mistakes, no problem, moving on, easy to fix. And
telling that different story makes me feel differently in my body,
and it makes me have a different experience of the
same raw materials in my life. But it creates a
different experience, and over time, I imagine the raw materials
(05:02):
do also shift to reflect how you feel about yourself.
So what I want to talk about this week is
how that creative process that we have access to is
the most powerful tool you have in your tool belt.
It is the most important thing that you can tune
yourself into as a human being. There is nothing more
(05:23):
significant that you can do with your life than to
refine that creative process. And the reason that this topic
even came up for me is because I've seen a
lot of people recently talking about using AI to help
them write their books, and I said, this conversation doesn't
have a lot of nuance, But there is some nuance
here because I don't have any issue with AI helping
(05:44):
someone to write a book. I think that there is
a way that AI could be of assistance to again
lighten the load of some of the drafts of book writing.
I think where my issue comes into this is the
idea that writing is such a powerful healing experience and
that I think that there are ways we're using AI
(06:05):
to shorten the experience actually short circuits the healing power
that writing can bring into our lives. Because the many
many drafts that you have to do to complete a
piece of writing to be ready to share with someone
outside of just yourself or maybe your spouse or whatever,
or maybe your therapist. The amount of drafts that you
(06:25):
have to do in order to get a piece of
writing ready to share is an important part of the
idea development process. This is how we learn how to
develop ideas is by writing it one way, having it
be terrible, reading it through realizing how terrible it is
and then rewriting it and redrafting it until it's something better.
And when we're writing our personal stories, for example. So
(06:47):
let's just talk about because there's kind of separate topics here.
There's the topic of like writing something for publication, so
writing a book, or writing something for like even like
a professor or for school or something like that, like
writing a thoughtful argument, which I think there's still an
argument to be had for teaching students, teaching human beings,
(07:07):
teaching people in general how to build a thoughtful argument
on their own without always reaching to AI. But I
want to just focus more on the topic of writing
a personal story for the sake of personal growth, because
even if you're writing something where you have no intention
to publish, the after draft after draft that you do
to get it to where you're happy with how it
(07:29):
sounds is part of the process of healing. When I
think back to writing Indestructible, which is my memoir about
leaving a toxic marriage and finding myself on the other
side of it, When I think about that writing experience,
I started that experience without knowing that I was going
to publish. I did not have any plans to share
that story publicly. I started writing that story simply because
(07:52):
I knew that I knew that I knew in my
gut that I needed to get it on paper in
order to fully understand what had taken place. I was
having this EXPERI sperience of getting a divorce and leaving
this toxic situation. And yet even though I was physically
having the experience, I really was baffled about why this
was all going on, what it all meant, where I
(08:12):
had gone wrong, how I had not seen the signs,
or if I had seen the signs, why hadn't I
left earlier? So I was tangled up in these knots,
and I knew that the only way to untwist the
knots was to really begin writing about what was taking place,
so that I could see the experiences more clearly. And
this is what I teach people to do. Even if
I'm teaching someone to write something that they're planning to publish,
(08:34):
I still teach them to write about their experiences so
that they can understand the experiences more clearly. But let's
just say you're not planning to publish. I teach you
to write your story anyway without any plans to share
it with anyone, not for the sake of publication, but
just so you can see yourself, see your experiences, understand
the narrator that's at work in your stories, get so
(08:54):
much more clarity on all of these different things, so
that you can begin to heal and move on and
grow and shape your life molded into something new and
better moving forward. And so that's what I was doing
with Indestructible. When I sat down to write that story.
It was not about sharing this with a big audience.
It was about really sharing it with myself and learning
to understand, you know, how did I get here, what
(09:15):
took place? Like I want to understand this more clearly
and see it more clearly so that I can do
something different moving forward. And let's just talk about timeline
here for a minute, because that book took me probably.
Let's see, I started writing in the end of twenty fifteen,
when everything fell apart. I wrote through all of twenty sixteen,
while my divorce was finalized, and into twenty seventeen. I
(09:36):
shared it for the first time at the end of
twenty seventeen with an agent who pitched it to several publishers.
I was rejected by every publisher then I was eventually
dropped by that agent. Then I decided to self publish
the book. So I didn't self publish the book until
I think early twenty eighteen. So we're talking two and
a half years of time of writing this story, refining it,
(09:58):
going through it again and again and again, doing rounds
and rounds and rounds and rounds of edits. That was
very labor intensive. And so you know, in a culture
that's driven by capitalism, we don't have any other way
to measure whether or not something was quote unquote worth
it except to say how many copies did it sell,
(10:20):
how many people's lives did it change? How much money
did you make? You know, how many people's lives did
it change? Is even like our way of being like, see,
it's not all about the money, it's not all about
the you know, the profit. How many people's lives did
you change? But even that, in my mind, is still
a way of asking a question like was it worth
it the time that you put in, what was your
(10:41):
cost benefit analysis? Did you get enough of a return
for your investment? And it's just a really linear, one
sided way to think about the process of creativity in
my opinion, because Let's ask this question. What if I
had written in destructible, What if I had spent two
and a half years refining it, What if I had
never shown it to anybody? What if if I had
literally never even shown it to my husband? And what
(11:03):
if it had allowed me the massive shift in life
experience that I had from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five,
Then would it be worth it? Would it be worth
(11:26):
it quote unquote worth it for me to have invested
two and a half years of my time, my energy,
my creativity into that project. If it had literally shifted
the course of my life so that I could have
the relationship that I have now, the joy in this marriage,
you know, my two beautiful children, Like, would it have
(11:47):
been worth it? I think we get confused sometimes in
our culture about what makes it worth it, And we're
so focused on, you know, reducing the amount of time
that we spend on something so that we can make
more money in less time, or so that we can
make more progress and less time, we can have more
of a return, a greater return on our investment of time.
We get so focused on those things that we forget
(12:08):
that actually the benefit exists inside of the process that
you can't just skip the process and get the end
result and be happy about it. That you actually have
to go through the pain of the process. Otherwise the
end of the story isn't as exciting as it would
have been. I think I shared this analogy a couple
(12:31):
of weeks ago on an episode. But I was talking
about hiking to Machipichu in Peru and how absolutely jaw
dropping it was for me to be in Machu Pichu
and see these ancient ruins and have the experience. It
was like the most spiritual experience for me that I
had had up until that point and completely shifted the
(12:54):
course of my life. I mean, I started like marathon
training at that point and really started to make some
big strides health wise in my life because of that
experience of hiking to the top of muchI Peachu. But
then I shared how my friend Mary had taken the
train up to the top of muchI Peachu and she
had had a very different experience. She was like, Oh God,
this is so gross, it's so commercialized. This is you know,
(13:14):
really not that exciting and not that important of a
moment in my life. And so the difference is the
only difference is between her experience and mind, is that
I hiked to the top and she didn't hike to
the top, Which doesn't make her experience bad or wrong.
It's just a very different experience. And so when we
compare that to writing a book, if you want to
have the experience of this changed my life, like I
(13:37):
see myself differently. I am so much more in touch
with my personal power, with my ability to creatively manifest
and change my own destiny and you know, shape the
path that I'm on. If you want to connect with
that part of yourself, then consider the idea that part
of connecting to that part of yourself requires you to
(14:00):
really be in the process, to really kind of experience
some of the suffering of climbing from the bottom of
the mountain to the top of the mountain. That you
can't necessarily short circuit circuit that process by dropping your
story into chat GPT and having it spit it back
out to you in a way that's very grammatically correct
and structurally correct. I mean, you could do that and
(14:21):
chat GPT might even do a quote unquote better job
than you of putting together the narrative arc because it's
a computer and it you know has learned what it
does from thousands upon thousands upon thousands of other stories
that are also beautifully crafted and put together within with
the same narrative ark. So yeah, chat GBT could in
(14:42):
some ways do a quote unquote better job than you
would do putting the story together. And yet my question
would be, what do you miss out on because you
dropped your story into chat GBT instead of really wrestling
with it and struggling with it for a long period
of time. So I think the question that we have
to ask ourselves is what is the the end goal
here in writing my story? Is the end goal to
(15:04):
get this thing published and to really impress a bunch
of people with how good of a writer I am,
and to do this as quickly as possible so I
can make as much money as possible and I can
really like maximize my time and maximize my efforts. Or
is the goal to go on a personal healing journey
and go inward and really reflect and really sit with
(15:25):
it and really take the time to see yourself from
a different light and to inquire about who is the
narrator at work here and what does the narrator have
to say about me? And what role does this narrator
play in my life? And what happens if I shift
the narrator this way or shift the narrator this way.
When we start to ask ourselves those questions, it opens
(15:48):
up whole universes to us. You know, the universe where
I can be with Matt and have my two beautiful, perfect, healthy,
amazing children. This universe would not have been available to
me if I was still stuck in a world where
my narrator was telling me the things that it was
telling me when I was stuck in that toxic dynamic.
So if I was still operating under that narrator who,
(16:10):
by the way, just to give you an example, the
narrator that was at work in that story, One of
the main reasons I stayed in that story for as
long as I did is because the narrator was telling me,
this is God's plan, this is God's purpose for your life.
Only you could live this story, only you could handle
this person. God chose you specifically for this person. You know,
nobody else could handle him quite the way that you
(16:32):
handle him, which, aside from being like extremely egocentric, is
also just really twisted and weird theology. So without letting
go of that narrator, there's no possible way that I
would be in this life that I'm in right now.
I had to not only just see that narrator at work,
(16:52):
but also realize, like, that is not the narrator that
I want to believe in. That's not a narrator that
I want to align myself with. It's not something that
I'm interested in carrying with me into the next phase.
So I'm letting go of that narrator and I'm rewriting
the story to something new. If I hadn't been willing
to self reflect on that, to really sit with it,
to be in the discomfort of it, to rewrite it
(17:14):
slowly but surely, to upgrade the narrator a few other
times before I finally got to one that really fit
for me and made sense for me, and felt right
moving forward, and felt really aligned with who I was
in that moment. If I hadn't taken all of the
time to do that, which included a lot of pain
and suffering. But if I hadn't taken the time to
do that, I wouldn't be where I am now. A
(17:34):
visual that just came to my mind was being at
the beach I booked myself a condo in thirty A
for I think it was eight or ten days, for
a period of time where I told myself every morning
I was going to wake up, I was going to
turn off my cell phone through the night, wake up,
have no internet access, no phone calls, no nothing until
(17:55):
after lunch. And all I was going to do every
morning was right. And I wrote almost the entire story
during my time that I was at the beach. I
think it was eight days, maybe ten. So I did that,
waking up every morning, sitting down to my computer, forcing
myself to relive these horrifying memories of literally the darkest
and worst moments of my entire life, to sit down
(18:16):
and write about them. It was awful. I mean it
was truly truly awful. So on the one hand, you'd say, well,
if I could help someone avoid that experience in their life,
I would love to do that. Maybe chat GBT can
do it for us. Maybe we can just kinda drop
the basics into chat GBT and chat GBT can spit
out something new and tell the story in a better
(18:38):
way than we could. I am of the belief that
if you use AI to short circuit your process, that
it's like taking the train to the top of the mountain,
and your experience of being at the top of the
mountain is not going to feel the same. So it
doesn't make you bad or wrong for doing it. There's
no morality here. It's like, sure, use AI, use chat GBT,
(19:01):
that's fine. But if you choose to go that route,
you may not have the experience of accomplishment that you
would otherwise have if you were to sit down and
write this story yourself. Now, I do understand fully that
that means that it might take you five times as
long or ten times as long. And I guess my
(19:21):
question for you would be, and my question for myself
would be, so what. My question for all of us
as a culture would be, so what, So what if
it takes us five times as long or ten times
as long, what is the need and the pressure that
we are putting on ourselves to produce as much and
crank out as much as possible in the shortest amount
of time. Maybe the value of finishing as much as
(19:46):
we can as fast as we can is actually something
that needs to go and maybe we can come back
a bit to the laws of nature where things actually
happen beautiful things happen quite slowly, and they happen cyclically,
and it doesn't need to be everything all at once
all the time. Maybe we can plant a tree and
over the course of ten years we can watch it
(20:07):
flourish into something really incredible, or over the course of
decades we can watch it flourish into something incredible, or
plant a garden, or you know, bake sourdough that takes
hours and hours and hours. I think there's a reason
why so many of us are coming back to these
values during this time. It's not because technology is bad.
It's not because technology is wrong. It's not because there's
anything wrong with using technology to make our lives feel easier.
(20:31):
It's just that it's not the essence of who we
are to simply produce more and more and more and more.
The essence of who we are is we are creative beings.
At our core. We are literally wired to make stuff.
(20:53):
We are literally wired to make stuff. I mean, you
think about babies and where babies come from and how
babies are made. We are wired to make something out
of nothing. This is what human beings do, is we
reproduce ourselves and without any any influence, any outside influence
at all. This is what human beings will do is
(21:14):
reproduce themselves. They will turn nothing into a baby. And
that analogy, that idea, that visual is so powerful to
me that human beings just follow what feels natural for
them and they create something out of nothing. They literally
create life out of nothing. So it's at our very
(21:34):
nature to do this, to create something out of nothing,
to make something creative, to shape our lives into something incredible,
to build a family, to build a legacy, to build
a compound, to build a business, to build a life
for ourselves, to build routines, to build rhythm, you know,
to build community, to build connectedness, togetherness, a building a
(21:56):
third place for people to come our home, to invite
people into our home. Whatever it is, creating something out
of nothing is extremely instinctual, and human beings have been
doing it since the beginning of time, including making babies together.
And so I think AI, to whatever extent AI can
assist us with that great, But I also feel myself
(22:20):
exercising caution and would ask you to exercise caution around
where we're handing our power over to AI, thinking that
AI simplifying things for us so that we can be
more productive is actually going to make us happier. I
don't know what age you were when iPhones came out,
or when you got your first smartphone, but I was,
I think twenty six or twenty eight years old somewhere
(22:42):
in that realm. I had just started grad school, and
I was so excited to get this computer in my
hand because I was like, Oh, think of the things
I will be able to get done. And to be fair,
iPhones have brought a lot of joy and love and
connection and amazing things into our lives. I'm not anti
smartphone at all, but I do feel for the generation
(23:04):
of human beings who came into the world at a
time when we didn't yet know how detrimental a smartphone
could be to the human brain, and also at a
time where they don't remember a life before smartphones. I mean,
gen Z is the best example of this. I've been
reading or listening to an audible The Anxious Generation, and
(23:25):
it's definitely worth a listen. This idea that coming into
a world where we don't we've never lived without a
smartphone in our hands, where there are no boundaries or
guardrails around smartphones, because we didn't know to create a
new boundaries or guardrails around smartphones is changing the way
a brain develops, because human brains were meant to be creative.
Human brains were meant to be bored. They were meant
(23:48):
to be you know, out in nature playing with nothing,
like turning a cup into a game, or you know,
like a broken hula hoop or what like the stuff
we did when we were kids. If you're my age
or older, think about your childhood and the kind of
freedom that you had and the way that you had
to invent something out of nothing in order to create
(24:09):
entertainment for yourself. And kids who grew up in the
era of iPhones without any guardrails around technology didn't have
that same experience, and so it's messing with their brains
and they're feeling more anxious, and it makes perfect sense,
and they're having more mental health issues. And so I've
been thinking recently so much about my own nostalgia around
life before. iPhones offer us convenience and they give us
(24:36):
access to the whole world at our fingertips. There's so
many great things about that. We have cameras, and we
have music, and we have podcasts, and I have social
media and I can connect with people from all around
the world, and I can learn all this information, and
I can, you know, FaceTime my mom and let her
talk to the kids. And there's so many beautiful things
about being connected in that way. And yet this last
(25:00):
week I was having this experience where there was, you know,
I'm looking outside and the sky's turning dark, and I'm
thinking like, oh gosh, I wonder what's going on. So
I'm logging onto The only thing that I ever use
the Twitter app for anymore, and I refuse to call
it x, but the only thing I ever used the
Twitter app for anymore is Nashville Sphere weather guys, who
are our local weather guys that keep us informed about
(25:23):
severe weather that's happening in the area. And I really
really love them so much, and I just love turning
on their YouTube lives and learning about, you know, like
where the storm systems are and how they're operating, and
do we need to be concerned and are we on
a tornado watch or a tornado warning and what's the
difference between the two. And they do such a public
service to everybody who's in the Nashville area. Thank God
for Nashville Sphere weather guys. But I log on to
(25:47):
look at what they're saying, and I get onto the
YouTube live and I spent basically like two and a
half hours watching a storm that was south of me
never even made it to me, feeling anxious the whole
time because I'm thinking, oh God, or we're gonna have
another tornado, watch and feeling anxie, which just for over
two hours watching this whole thing take place. And after
the fact, I was like, you know what, if I
didn't have an iPhone, I never would have even known
(26:11):
it never even rained here the sky got dark, but
it just never even rained. So on the one hand,
it's like, thank God for this tool that I have
access to know when we need to get into our
storm shelter to feel safe and make sure my family
is safe, and thank God for the amazing public service
that these guys do. And on the other hand, I
was like, Wow, maybe if I hadn't known any information,
(26:34):
if I had stayed in the dark, I also could
have avoided that whole experience of anxiety. So it's nuanced.
It's all tied up with each other. There's not one
easy answer. I'm not saying iPhones are bad or smartphones
are bad. Or technology is bad or I'm not thinking
that life was better back then than it is now necessarily,
but I am inviting you to reconnect with the part
(26:54):
of yourself that knows deep down inside of you that
it is your nature to create, it is your nature
to make something out of nothing, And do not allow
your life to turn you into more of a consumer
than a creator, and don't allow technology to steal from
you the process that is going to ultimately bring you
(27:16):
so much joy. Whether that process is writing your own
personal story or whether the process is something totally different.
Please do use AI to help with tasks, to reduce
the heavy lift so that you can open up more
space to be more of the creative person that you
already are. But when it comes to writing your story,
my suggestion would be not to let AI take over
(27:40):
the process of writing for you, because the process of
writing is the climb to the top of Machu Pichu,
and you will feel such an amazing sense of accomplishment
if you're able to stay engaged from start to finish
and to allow yourself to sit in it, to sit
in the discomfort, to sit in the wondering is this
going to be in a good is anyone going to
(28:00):
read this? This is even worth my while? You know,
this is such a waste of time. This isn't going
to matter for anything. Like all of those thoughts that
we go through as writers, that's part of it. It's
all part of the process. And when we short circuit
that by dumping something into chat GPT and having it
split it back out at us, do we get a
better finished product, sure, but we also short circuit the
(28:23):
healing that could have taken place by sitting down to
do it ourselves. So I invite you to consider your
intention for the writing project. If you're writing an email
to someone, by all means, please use chat GPT. We
all need to spend less time on email, you know,
like we all could stand to be like, yeah, let's
maybe spend a few less hours a week in my
email inbox. But if you're writing something for personal growth
(28:46):
or for healing, or for journaling or whatever, or you're
writing a personal story that maybe you hope to publish
one day, but that really is about understanding better what
you experienced in your life and maybe how your narrator
shaped that experience for you, then I invite you to
avoid using technology to help you or avoid using AI
(29:07):
to help you. Maybe you use technology because you use
your computer, maybe use technology because you use Google Docs.
But just think about what is my intention for bringing
technology or bringing AI into this experience with me, And
if it's about short circuiting the process so that you
don't have to invest as many hours, then ask yourself
why you're so concerned about investing hours in this project
(29:28):
and what would be a worthwhile thing for you to
invest your hours into. Just something to consider. Not answers,
nothing black and white, not answers to any problem necessarily,
but definitely an invitation to think a little more critically
about the why behind what you're doing, what you're writing,
how you're using AI in your life, and an evolving
(29:50):
conversation because AI is changing every single day. So I
invite your feedback. Come find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon.
Let me know your thoughts there and I will see
you back next week on the Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down? On Colord, it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
again about AI. I have talked about this once before,
at least once before. I will link to that episode
in the show notes, and I want to circle back
(00:46):
to this topic because I have more that I want
to say, and I have something I want to say
that I think is really important to anybody who is
a creative being, which is you, everybody, everyone, You and
all your friends who don't think they're creative beings, we're
all creative beings. By creative beings, I really just mean
that you are the one who is responsible for shaping
(01:08):
your life into something meaningful. I talked about this on
last week's episode that I used to think of manifestation
as like sort of this magical woo woo thing where
you hear people talk about manifestation, it's like think about
a Mercedes and you can poof, like there'll be one
in your driveway. And that always felt kind of silly
to me. And then I went down a path where
(01:28):
I was like, Okay, I'm going to just choose to
like be two feet in on this and believe in
manifestation and I'm going to manifest the things that I want.
But I was really trying to manifest them from my head,
like create a list of things that are pie in
the sky goals that you never believe that you could achieve,
and then fixate on them and decide you're going to
achieve these things and think about them every day and
(01:48):
create your vision boards, and you know, all these things
are fine and good. But I will say that that
path took me on a long, disappointing journey, which I'm
still open to learning, like maybe I did it wrong
or something like that. But the more that I have
reflected on the journey of the last five years of
my life, the more I've realized that I think I
(02:09):
was creating still from a place of performance, like creating
from my mind what I thought I should want to create,
or what I thought would bring me satisfaction and joy
instead of just tuning into my body and asking myself
what actually does bring me joy? Like? What are the
things that bring me joy? And I think the things
that bring us joy are so much simpler than we
(02:31):
thought they were, then we believe them to be. So
then the question is what is manifestation? Is it really
a thing? Does it really exist? I do believe that
if you think about a Mercedes enough, you could probably
manifest one in your life. But as Marian Williamson says,
so what's the point Like then what? So then you
think about a black Mercedes one hundred times and you
buy a black Mercedes, does the Mercedes make you any
(02:53):
happier in your life? I don't know for sure whether
it does or doesn't. I've manifested, you know, some physical
abundance in my life, and I've also like lost a
lot of physical possessions in my life too and given
them up. And so what am I trying to say?
What I'm trying to say is that when I can
come back to my heart, when I can come back
to my body, when I can pay attention to what
(03:14):
really matters to me and what really moves me and
what brings me joy. From that place, I realize that
actually the details of my life, the car I drive,
just being one example, the house I live in, the
dollar amount in my bank account, the title you know
on my business card, the number of followers on Instagram,
like all that stuff is just so surface level and
(03:36):
kind of just not kind of but like really really
doesn't matter at all, is really just completely meaningless. And yes,
those things can bring us some joy, like dollars in
the bank account can absolutely bring you joy and freedom
and all kinds of things. So I'm not denying that,
but I'm saying that shaping our lives manifestation in my
mind now is much more about being the person who
(03:57):
shapes the clay, who shapes the raw material of your
life into something beautiful. So life dishes you up this
raw material, and maybe it dishes you up different raw
material than your neighbor or than the person down the street,
and that can feel unfair, but it's like whatever raw
material life dishes you up, what are you going to
do with it? How are you going to shape it?
And like I talked about on last week's episode, it's
(04:19):
really a lot about becoming the narrator of your story,
and we're upgrading the narrator to your story and deciding
that you're going to tell the story in a different way.
That's not untrue, but that is from a higher place
than maybe you were telling the story before. So, like
the example I gave last week was telling the story
about forgetting to send a podcast file, I can either
(04:41):
tell the story like you're such a screw up, we
can't believe you did that. You always do this, Or
I can tell the story like no big deal, people
make mistakes, no problem, moving on, easy to fix. And
telling that different story makes me feel differently in my body,
and it makes me have a different experience of the
same raw materials in my life. But it creates a
different experience, and over time, I imagine the raw materials
(05:02):
do also shift to reflect how you feel about yourself.
So what I want to talk about this week is
how that creative process that we have access to is
the most powerful tool you have in your tool belt.
It is the most important thing that you can tune
yourself into as a human being. There is nothing more
(05:23):
significant that you can do with your life than to
refine that creative process. And the reason that this topic
even came up for me is because I've seen a
lot of people recently talking about using AI to help
them write their books, and I said, this conversation doesn't
have a lot of nuance, But there is some nuance
here because I don't have any issue with AI helping
(05:44):
someone to write a book. I think that there is
a way that AI could be of assistance to again
lighten the load of some of the drafts of book writing.
I think where my issue comes into this is the
idea that writing is such a powerful healing experience and
that I think that there are ways we're using AI
(06:05):
to shorten the experience actually short circuits the healing power
that writing can bring into our lives. Because the many
many drafts that you have to do to complete a
piece of writing to be ready to share with someone
outside of just yourself or maybe your spouse or whatever,
or maybe your therapist. The amount of drafts that you
(06:25):
have to do in order to get a piece of
writing ready to share is an important part of the
idea development process. This is how we learn how to
develop ideas is by writing it one way, having it
be terrible, reading it through realizing how terrible it is
and then rewriting it and redrafting it until it's something better.
And when we're writing our personal stories, for example. So
(06:47):
let's just talk about because there's kind of separate topics here.
There's the topic of like writing something for publication, so
writing a book, or writing something for like even like
a professor or for school or something like that, like
writing a thoughtful argument, which I think there's still an
argument to be had for teaching students, teaching human beings,
(07:07):
teaching people in general how to build a thoughtful argument
on their own without always reaching to AI. But I
want to just focus more on the topic of writing
a personal story for the sake of personal growth, because
even if you're writing something where you have no intention
to publish, the after draft after draft that you do
to get it to where you're happy with how it
(07:29):
sounds is part of the process of healing. When I
think back to writing Indestructible, which is my memoir about
leaving a toxic marriage and finding myself on the other
side of it, When I think about that writing experience,
I started that experience without knowing that I was going
to publish. I did not have any plans to share
that story publicly. I started writing that story simply because
(07:52):
I knew that I knew that I knew in my
gut that I needed to get it on paper in
order to fully understand what had taken place. I was
having this EXPERI sperience of getting a divorce and leaving
this toxic situation. And yet even though I was physically
having the experience, I really was baffled about why this
was all going on, what it all meant, where I
(08:12):
had gone wrong, how I had not seen the signs,
or if I had seen the signs, why hadn't I
left earlier? So I was tangled up in these knots,
and I knew that the only way to untwist the
knots was to really begin writing about what was taking place,
so that I could see the experiences more clearly. And
this is what I teach people to do. Even if
I'm teaching someone to write something that they're planning to publish,
(08:34):
I still teach them to write about their experiences so
that they can understand the experiences more clearly. But let's
just say you're not planning to publish. I teach you
to write your story anyway without any plans to share
it with anyone, not for the sake of publication, but
just so you can see yourself, see your experiences, understand
the narrator that's at work in your stories, get so
(08:54):
much more clarity on all of these different things, so
that you can begin to heal and move on and
grow and shape your life molded into something new and
better moving forward. And so that's what I was doing
with Indestructible. When I sat down to write that story.
It was not about sharing this with a big audience.
It was about really sharing it with myself and learning
to understand, you know, how did I get here, what
(09:15):
took place? Like I want to understand this more clearly
and see it more clearly so that I can do
something different moving forward. And let's just talk about timeline
here for a minute, because that book took me probably.
Let's see, I started writing in the end of twenty fifteen,
when everything fell apart. I wrote through all of twenty sixteen,
while my divorce was finalized, and into twenty seventeen. I
(09:36):
shared it for the first time at the end of
twenty seventeen with an agent who pitched it to several publishers.
I was rejected by every publisher then I was eventually
dropped by that agent. Then I decided to self publish
the book. So I didn't self publish the book until
I think early twenty eighteen. So we're talking two and
a half years of time of writing this story, refining it,
(09:58):
going through it again and again and again, doing rounds
and rounds and rounds and rounds of edits. That was
very labor intensive. And so you know, in a culture
that's driven by capitalism, we don't have any other way
to measure whether or not something was quote unquote worth
it except to say how many copies did it sell,
(10:20):
how many people's lives did it change? How much money
did you make? You know, how many people's lives did
it change? Is even like our way of being like, see,
it's not all about the money, it's not all about
the you know, the profit. How many people's lives did
you change? But even that, in my mind, is still
a way of asking a question like was it worth
it the time that you put in, what was your
(10:41):
cost benefit analysis? Did you get enough of a return
for your investment? And it's just a really linear, one
sided way to think about the process of creativity in
my opinion, because Let's ask this question. What if I
had written in destructible, What if I had spent two
and a half years refining it, What if I had
never shown it to anybody? What if if I had
literally never even shown it to my husband? And what
(11:03):
if it had allowed me the massive shift in life
experience that I had from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five,
Then would it be worth it? Would it be worth
(11:26):
it quote unquote worth it for me to have invested
two and a half years of my time, my energy,
my creativity into that project. If it had literally shifted
the course of my life so that I could have
the relationship that I have now, the joy in this marriage,
you know, my two beautiful children, Like, would it have
(11:47):
been worth it? I think we get confused sometimes in
our culture about what makes it worth it, And we're
so focused on, you know, reducing the amount of time
that we spend on something so that we can make
more money in less time, or so that we can
make more progress and less time, we can have more
of a return, a greater return on our investment of time.
We get so focused on those things that we forget
(12:08):
that actually the benefit exists inside of the process that
you can't just skip the process and get the end
result and be happy about it. That you actually have
to go through the pain of the process. Otherwise the
end of the story isn't as exciting as it would
have been. I think I shared this analogy a couple
(12:31):
of weeks ago on an episode. But I was talking
about hiking to Machipichu in Peru and how absolutely jaw
dropping it was for me to be in Machu Pichu
and see these ancient ruins and have the experience. It
was like the most spiritual experience for me that I
had had up until that point and completely shifted the
(12:54):
course of my life. I mean, I started like marathon
training at that point and really started to make some
big strides health wise in my life because of that
experience of hiking to the top of muchI Peachu. But
then I shared how my friend Mary had taken the
train up to the top of muchI Peachu and she
had had a very different experience. She was like, Oh God,
this is so gross, it's so commercialized. This is you know,
(13:14):
really not that exciting and not that important of a
moment in my life. And so the difference is the
only difference is between her experience and mind, is that
I hiked to the top and she didn't hike to
the top, Which doesn't make her experience bad or wrong.
It's just a very different experience. And so when we
compare that to writing a book, if you want to
have the experience of this changed my life, like I
(13:37):
see myself differently. I am so much more in touch
with my personal power, with my ability to creatively manifest
and change my own destiny and you know, shape the
path that I'm on. If you want to connect with
that part of yourself, then consider the idea that part
of connecting to that part of yourself requires you to
(14:00):
really be in the process, to really kind of experience
some of the suffering of climbing from the bottom of
the mountain to the top of the mountain. That you
can't necessarily short circuit circuit that process by dropping your
story into chat GPT and having it spit it back
out to you in a way that's very grammatically correct
and structurally correct. I mean, you could do that and
(14:21):
chat GPT might even do a quote unquote better job
than you of putting together the narrative arc because it's
a computer and it you know has learned what it
does from thousands upon thousands upon thousands of other stories
that are also beautifully crafted and put together within with
the same narrative ark. So yeah, chat GBT could in
(14:42):
some ways do a quote unquote better job than you
would do putting the story together. And yet my question
would be, what do you miss out on because you
dropped your story into chat GBT instead of really wrestling
with it and struggling with it for a long period
of time. So I think the question that we have
to ask ourselves is what is the the end goal
here in writing my story? Is the end goal to
(15:04):
get this thing published and to really impress a bunch
of people with how good of a writer I am,
and to do this as quickly as possible so I
can make as much money as possible and I can
really like maximize my time and maximize my efforts. Or
is the goal to go on a personal healing journey
and go inward and really reflect and really sit with
(15:25):
it and really take the time to see yourself from
a different light and to inquire about who is the
narrator at work here and what does the narrator have
to say about me? And what role does this narrator
play in my life? And what happens if I shift
the narrator this way or shift the narrator this way.
When we start to ask ourselves those questions, it opens
(15:48):
up whole universes to us. You know, the universe where
I can be with Matt and have my two beautiful, perfect, healthy,
amazing children. This universe would not have been available to
me if I was still stuck in a world where
my narrator was telling me the things that it was
telling me when I was stuck in that toxic dynamic.
So if I was still operating under that narrator who,
(16:10):
by the way, just to give you an example, the
narrator that was at work in that story, One of
the main reasons I stayed in that story for as
long as I did is because the narrator was telling me,
this is God's plan, this is God's purpose for your life.
Only you could live this story, only you could handle
this person. God chose you specifically for this person. You know,
nobody else could handle him quite the way that you
(16:32):
handle him, which, aside from being like extremely egocentric, is
also just really twisted and weird theology. So without letting
go of that narrator, there's no possible way that I
would be in this life that I'm in right now.
I had to not only just see that narrator at work,
(16:52):
but also realize, like, that is not the narrator that
I want to believe in. That's not a narrator that
I want to align myself with. It's not something that
I'm interested in carrying with me into the next phase.
So I'm letting go of that narrator and I'm rewriting
the story to something new. If I hadn't been willing
to self reflect on that, to really sit with it,
to be in the discomfort of it, to rewrite it
(17:14):
slowly but surely, to upgrade the narrator a few other
times before I finally got to one that really fit
for me and made sense for me, and felt right
moving forward, and felt really aligned with who I was
in that moment. If I hadn't taken all of the
time to do that, which included a lot of pain
and suffering. But if I hadn't taken the time to
do that, I wouldn't be where I am now. A
(17:34):
visual that just came to my mind was being at
the beach I booked myself a condo in thirty A
for I think it was eight or ten days, for
a period of time where I told myself every morning
I was going to wake up, I was going to
turn off my cell phone through the night, wake up,
have no internet access, no phone calls, no nothing until
(17:55):
after lunch. And all I was going to do every
morning was right. And I wrote almost the entire story
during my time that I was at the beach. I
think it was eight days, maybe ten. So I did that,
waking up every morning, sitting down to my computer, forcing
myself to relive these horrifying memories of literally the darkest
and worst moments of my entire life, to sit down
(18:16):
and write about them. It was awful. I mean it
was truly truly awful. So on the one hand, you'd say, well,
if I could help someone avoid that experience in their life,
I would love to do that. Maybe chat GBT can
do it for us. Maybe we can just kinda drop
the basics into chat GBT and chat GBT can spit
out something new and tell the story in a better
(18:38):
way than we could. I am of the belief that
if you use AI to short circuit your process, that
it's like taking the train to the top of the mountain,
and your experience of being at the top of the
mountain is not going to feel the same. So it
doesn't make you bad or wrong for doing it. There's
no morality here. It's like, sure, use AI, use chat GBT,
(19:01):
that's fine. But if you choose to go that route,
you may not have the experience of accomplishment that you
would otherwise have if you were to sit down and
write this story yourself. Now, I do understand fully that
that means that it might take you five times as
long or ten times as long. And I guess my
(19:21):
question for you would be, and my question for myself
would be, so what. My question for all of us
as a culture would be, so what, So what if
it takes us five times as long or ten times
as long, what is the need and the pressure that
we are putting on ourselves to produce as much and
crank out as much as possible in the shortest amount
of time. Maybe the value of finishing as much as
(19:46):
we can as fast as we can is actually something
that needs to go and maybe we can come back
a bit to the laws of nature where things actually
happen beautiful things happen quite slowly, and they happen cyclically,
and it doesn't need to be everything all at once
all the time. Maybe we can plant a tree and
over the course of ten years we can watch it
(20:07):
flourish into something really incredible, or over the course of
decades we can watch it flourish into something incredible, or
plant a garden, or you know, bake sourdough that takes
hours and hours and hours. I think there's a reason
why so many of us are coming back to these
values during this time. It's not because technology is bad.
It's not because technology is wrong. It's not because there's
anything wrong with using technology to make our lives feel easier.
(20:31):
It's just that it's not the essence of who we
are to simply produce more and more and more and more.
The essence of who we are is we are creative beings.
At our core. We are literally wired to make stuff.
(20:53):
We are literally wired to make stuff. I mean, you
think about babies and where babies come from and how
babies are made. We are wired to make something out
of nothing. This is what human beings do, is we
reproduce ourselves and without any any influence, any outside influence
at all. This is what human beings will do is
(21:14):
reproduce themselves. They will turn nothing into a baby. And
that analogy, that idea, that visual is so powerful to
me that human beings just follow what feels natural for
them and they create something out of nothing. They literally
create life out of nothing. So it's at our very
(21:34):
nature to do this, to create something out of nothing,
to make something creative, to shape our lives into something incredible,
to build a family, to build a legacy, to build
a compound, to build a business, to build a life
for ourselves, to build routines, to build rhythm, you know,
to build community, to build connectedness, togetherness, a building a
(21:56):
third place for people to come our home, to invite
people into our home. Whatever it is, creating something out
of nothing is extremely instinctual, and human beings have been
doing it since the beginning of time, including making babies together.
And so I think AI, to whatever extent AI can
assist us with that great, But I also feel myself
(22:20):
exercising caution and would ask you to exercise caution around
where we're handing our power over to AI, thinking that
AI simplifying things for us so that we can be
more productive is actually going to make us happier. I
don't know what age you were when iPhones came out,
or when you got your first smartphone, but I was,
I think twenty six or twenty eight years old somewhere
(22:42):
in that realm. I had just started grad school, and
I was so excited to get this computer in my
hand because I was like, Oh, think of the things
I will be able to get done. And to be fair,
iPhones have brought a lot of joy and love and
connection and amazing things into our lives. I'm not anti
smartphone at all, but I do feel for the generation
(23:04):
of human beings who came into the world at a
time when we didn't yet know how detrimental a smartphone
could be to the human brain, and also at a
time where they don't remember a life before smartphones. I mean,
gen Z is the best example of this. I've been
reading or listening to an audible The Anxious Generation, and
(23:25):
it's definitely worth a listen. This idea that coming into
a world where we don't we've never lived without a
smartphone in our hands, where there are no boundaries or
guardrails around smartphones, because we didn't know to create a
new boundaries or guardrails around smartphones is changing the way
a brain develops, because human brains were meant to be creative.
Human brains were meant to be bored. They were meant
(23:48):
to be you know, out in nature playing with nothing,
like turning a cup into a game, or you know,
like a broken hula hoop or what like the stuff
we did when we were kids. If you're my age
or older, think about your childhood and the kind of
freedom that you had and the way that you had
to invent something out of nothing in order to create
(24:09):
entertainment for yourself. And kids who grew up in the
era of iPhones without any guardrails around technology didn't have
that same experience, and so it's messing with their brains
and they're feeling more anxious, and it makes perfect sense,
and they're having more mental health issues. And so I've
been thinking recently so much about my own nostalgia around
life before. iPhones offer us convenience and they give us
(24:36):
access to the whole world at our fingertips. There's so
many great things about that. We have cameras, and we
have music, and we have podcasts, and I have social
media and I can connect with people from all around
the world, and I can learn all this information, and
I can, you know, FaceTime my mom and let her
talk to the kids. And there's so many beautiful things
about being connected in that way. And yet this last
(25:00):
week I was having this experience where there was, you know,
I'm looking outside and the sky's turning dark, and I'm
thinking like, oh gosh, I wonder what's going on. So
I'm logging onto The only thing that I ever use
the Twitter app for anymore, and I refuse to call
it x, but the only thing I ever used the
Twitter app for anymore is Nashville Sphere weather guys, who
are our local weather guys that keep us informed about
(25:23):
severe weather that's happening in the area. And I really
really love them so much, and I just love turning
on their YouTube lives and learning about, you know, like
where the storm systems are and how they're operating, and
do we need to be concerned and are we on
a tornado watch or a tornado warning and what's the
difference between the two. And they do such a public
service to everybody who's in the Nashville area. Thank God
for Nashville Sphere weather guys. But I log on to
(25:47):
look at what they're saying, and I get onto the
YouTube live and I spent basically like two and a
half hours watching a storm that was south of me
never even made it to me, feeling anxious the whole
time because I'm thinking, oh God, or we're gonna have
another tornado, watch and feeling anxie, which just for over
two hours watching this whole thing take place. And after
the fact, I was like, you know what, if I
didn't have an iPhone, I never would have even known
(26:11):
it never even rained here the sky got dark, but
it just never even rained. So on the one hand,
it's like, thank God for this tool that I have
access to know when we need to get into our
storm shelter to feel safe and make sure my family
is safe, and thank God for the amazing public service
that these guys do. And on the other hand, I
was like, Wow, maybe if I hadn't known any information,
(26:34):
if I had stayed in the dark, I also could
have avoided that whole experience of anxiety. So it's nuanced.
It's all tied up with each other. There's not one
easy answer. I'm not saying iPhones are bad or smartphones
are bad. Or technology is bad or I'm not thinking
that life was better back then than it is now necessarily,
but I am inviting you to reconnect with the part
(26:54):
of yourself that knows deep down inside of you that
it is your nature to create, it is your nature
to make something out of nothing, And do not allow
your life to turn you into more of a consumer
than a creator, and don't allow technology to steal from
you the process that is going to ultimately bring you
(27:16):
so much joy. Whether that process is writing your own
personal story or whether the process is something totally different.
Please do use AI to help with tasks, to reduce
the heavy lift so that you can open up more
space to be more of the creative person that you
already are. But when it comes to writing your story,
my suggestion would be not to let AI take over
(27:40):
the process of writing for you, because the process of
writing is the climb to the top of Machu Pichu,
and you will feel such an amazing sense of accomplishment
if you're able to stay engaged from start to finish
and to allow yourself to sit in it, to sit
in the discomfort, to sit in the wondering is this
going to be in a good is anyone going to
(28:00):
read this? This is even worth my while? You know,
this is such a waste of time. This isn't going
to matter for anything. Like all of those thoughts that
we go through as writers, that's part of it. It's
all part of the process. And when we short circuit
that by dumping something into chat GPT and having it
split it back out at us, do we get a
better finished product, sure, but we also short circuit the
(28:23):
healing that could have taken place by sitting down to
do it ourselves. So I invite you to consider your
intention for the writing project. If you're writing an email
to someone, by all means, please use chat GPT. We
all need to spend less time on email, you know,
like we all could stand to be like, yeah, let's
maybe spend a few less hours a week in my
email inbox. But if you're writing something for personal growth
(28:46):
or for healing, or for journaling or whatever, or you're
writing a personal story that maybe you hope to publish
one day, but that really is about understanding better what
you experienced in your life and maybe how your narrator
shaped that experience for you, then I invite you to
avoid using technology to help you or avoid using AI
(29:07):
to help you. Maybe you use technology because you use
your computer, maybe use technology because you use Google Docs.
But just think about what is my intention for bringing
technology or bringing AI into this experience with me, And
if it's about short circuiting the process so that you
don't have to invest as many hours, then ask yourself
why you're so concerned about investing hours in this project
(29:28):
and what would be a worthwhile thing for you to
invest your hours into. Just something to consider. Not answers,
nothing black and white, not answers to any problem necessarily,
but definitely an invitation to think a little more critically
about the why behind what you're doing, what you're writing,
how you're using AI in your life, and an evolving
(29:50):
conversation because AI is changing every single day. So I
invite your feedback. Come find me on Instagram at Ali Fallon.
Let me know your thoughts there and I will see
you back next week on the Write Your Story podcast
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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