Stop using ChatGPT.

If you write, I made something better for you.

As a writer myself, the chat part of ChatGPT just wasn’t doing it.

I don’t want answers to questions when I’m writing.

I want a partner. A collaborator.

I want something that felt more like an improvisation partner

Something that would riff with me when I was trying to find a line through an idea.

I certainly didn’t want something to write for me.

I wanted something that would write with me.

That’s why I invented this tool for myself.

I call it Vibewriter.

(That name might change. 🤣)

Back in the day when I was a teenager, I played jazz.

I was in a little jazz quartet. We called ourselves “Little Sunflower”, after the song by the great jazz musician, Freddie Hubbard.

We would play at receptions and fancy parties around the little town I grew up in.

George on piano. Steve on trumpet and flugelhorn. Colin on drums. Me on bass.

We were kids. 15. 16.

Those boys were great musicians. Way beyond their years.

Me?

I had to work hard just to keep up.

That meant practicing. A lot.

Improvising. A lot.

I was taught to play jazz by the great Dr. B. — Tony Biancosino — the high school band director Damien Chazelle used as inspiration for his film “Whiplash”.

(With a great deal of creative license — Dr. B was not a monster like J.K. Simmons’ character in the film. He was a beautiful, corny, hard-driving, dedicated, funny, and could be a quite gentle mentor. Whiplash was our secret weapon for the competition circuit. He would work us hard to get first place. Which we did. A lot.)

Dr. B taught us how to improvise.

He taught us how to ‘trade fours‘.

Trading fours is a jazz improvisation technique where you’d take turns improvising over four bars of music, alternating back and forth.

Sax for four bars. Piano for four bars. Drums for four bars. Trumpet. Back to sax.

That sort of thing.

It’s beautiful to hear. Beautiful to watch. Building together. Collaborating on something new and unexpected. Telling jokes with music. Horsing around. Telling a story together.

It’s a kind of call and response.

A communal and collaborative interaction.

An interface connecting one musician to another through ideas in the form of melodies and rhythm.

So, anyway…why the heck am I telling you all of this about trading fours?

Because it’s is an underutilized interaction metaphor suitable for creative tasks.

And it’s the metaphor of Vibewriter’s interaction.

It’s also a fresh way of thinking about how we interact with AI.

Vibewriter has some deep features that I won’t get into here, but it has a morning workout game mechanic that is like trading fours.

First your collaborator (the AI) starts writing a couple of sentences.

(It might start out with an opening line from a hardboiled detective story. Or a line from a poem. Or a line from a song.)

Second you respond with your own line of prose, poem, lyric, etc.

The game? Well — there’s a clock. A timer. It counts down. You can’t over analyze.

You. Just. Write.

Then the AI responds with another line.

And so on.

It’s an awful lot of fun. And it feels like a morning workout for my brain.

Want to try it?

Drop me a note in the contact form below to learn more.