What follows is a lightly fictionalised diary — a composite producer at a composite venue — but every task in it is real, and so is every mistake. This is what the first week actually looks like: not a revolution, just a Tuesday that goes slightly differently.
Monday
Set up an account with the settings checked (this took ten minutes and was worth it). First real test: yesterday's programming meeting, recorded with everyone's blessing. Paste the transcript: "Turn this into minutes — decisions, actions, owners, our house style." Ninety seconds later: minutes. Genuinely good ones. It caught an action I'd missed. It also confidently renamed our associate director, which is how I learn the first law of this technology: fluent is not the same as right. Fixed the name, sent the minutes, saved an hour. Feeling: suspicious of how easy that was.
Tuesday
The quarterly funder report. I paste in our activity spreadsheet (numbers only, no names) and my scrappy notes, and ask for the narrative section. What comes back is eighty per cent usable and structured better than my usual version. The remaining twenty per cent matters — it described a workshop programme "reaching diverse communities" when what actually happened is more interesting and more specific, so I write that bit myself. Emboldened, I ask a factual question about a venue we might tour to. The answer is detailed, confident and, on checking, partly fictional — the venue's studio space closed years ago. Second law: it's an assistant, not an encyclopaedia. If I need facts, I look them up; if I need my own facts reshaped, it's brilliant.
Wednesday
Access day, by accident. Alt text for thirty production images — a job I have felt guilty about for two seasons — takes forty minutes instead of a day, and I fix maybe one description in four. Then the co-production agreement: "Explain clause by clause, plain English, flag anything unusual." It flags a termination clause I'd skimmed. I check with the actual document (third law: the original is always the truth), then ask the other party about it. Best hour of the week, and nobody's job was threatened in the making of it.
Thursday
Hubris day. I ask it to write the poster copy for the spring show. What comes back is grammatically immaculate and utterly dead — "a vibrant celebration" of something, promising to "delight audiences of all ages". It's not wrong; it's nobody. (We've all seen this copy.) So I try the other direction: I write four ugly, true sentences about why this show got me, and ask it to cut them to forty words without losing the anger. That works. Fourth law: it polishes; it doesn't originate. The idea has to walk in the door already alive.
Friday
Tallying up: roughly six hours saved — minutes, report, alt text, contract, assorted reformatting. Nothing it produced went out unchecked; twice it was confidently wrong; once it was useless. And here's the surprise nobody had mentioned: the win isn't brilliance, it's stamina. It never gets bored. The jobs I do worst are the jobs I do tired, at 6pm, resentfully — and I've just handed the resentful layer to something that doesn't feel resentment.
What it never touched, all week: which shows we programme, what we pay artists, the difficult phone call to the director, the moment in the rehearsal room when everyone went quiet. The week had more room for those, not less. That's the honest report from day five — the job intact, the Tuesday transformed.
The image above was AI-generated — as ever, we'll always tell you.