No Crime Scene. No clues.
Recently, I helped a few neighbours set up AI. Naturally, it came with the usual jokes: “I’ve seen Terminator, I know where this is going.” But watching them try ChatGPT (others are available) made one thing obvious pretty quickly: almost everyone hits the same wall in their first five minutes.
They type in something vague: Why isn’t my hedge growing? or What’s that film where a guy wakes up with amnesia?, and the AI dumps back three neat paragraphs. But because it didn't magically read their mind, it isn't the exact answer they wanted. Cue the inevitable response: “Huh, it's not that smart, is it.”
The issue isn’t that AI is dumb. It’s that we treat it like an all-knowing wizard when it’s actually a detective. Imagine hiring Sherlock Holmes, locking him in an attic, and giving him zero access to the crime scene. Ask him who stole your keys without handing over a single clue, and he’ll still spin you a clever story about a stray cat or a burglar. But he’s just guessing.
We do the same thing to AI. Ask it a leading question like “Did my sister take them?” and it will dutifully explain why your sister might be guilty. If you actually want a real answer, you have to hand over some evidence. Tell the detective where the door was locked, who had a spare key, what footprints were in the garden, and what you’ve already checked. Give it the context, and suddenly it stops guessing and starts solving the problem.
The golden rule is simple: Give it the crime scene.
The same logic applies creatively.
If you ask for “a film idea,” you’ll get back a lazy cliché. But give it the specific character, their worst fear, the setting, the weather, the camera style, and three bad ideas you’ve already thrown in the bin. Feed it raw scraps, half-baked dialogue, weird research notes, visual references, or a theme you can’t get out of your head. Then tell it to pick holes in them. Blend them. Push the concept into weirder territory, or rewrite the scene from the villain's perspective.
That's where the tool actually becomes useful. Not because it replaces you, the writer, director, creative, but because it acts as a sounding board to test your ideas against.
And if you’re still hitting a dead end with the tools? Close the laptop, grab a coffee with a friend, bounce ideas off a real human, gather the good bits, and give the detective another shot later.
