A month ago, as part of my new year’s resolution, I prepared a Substack account. I wanted to write something on it as soon as I would be pain-free for 24 hours. Today, I started a short note with the intention to announce the delay of my first essay. It turned into a short piece about storytelling.
What would change in a writer’s daily routine when AI achieves not just proficiency, but creative mastery of a language?
Everything, perhaps.
Any writer’s ‘finished product’ will use its market value as a mere product. If a reader can choose to read a tailor-made story that she will like with the highest calculated probability, she has no incentive to pick another story. And that story, of course, will be written by an AI.
The reason to read something from a certain individual writer is that we feel a personal connection with that human being, in the way only very few do feel with an AI (a notable exception is Google’s Blake Lemoine, who got suspended for it). Writing is the make-belief of that personal connection. This has always been the case. So what will change?
Nothing, perhaps.
So wee* keep on writing long, honest sentences, suspending the gnawing awareness of their inadequacy, and suspending the dreadful idea that our words only make a difference because of the mere fact that they originate from us. That mere fact is empty: it is not our efforts that matter (our efforts are a million times surpassed by the machine) but the attachment of our name to it. Our name: just another token. I think of Sartre’s Nothingness, our mere existence that precedes our Essence. We create a product that has non-zero market value only because our name is attached to it.
And what is it all for? A machine could have ordered all our words in a more attractive way. Why can’t machines make more attractive names?
Living writers, one might conclude, have to move beyond attraction. They might enjoy a last stand in the complexity of meta-writing, as masters of ironic distancing tokenizing their ideas in the last remaining way they deem unreachable by the machine. Their effort might ironically be re-interpreted as the reason for the long silence that follows them: they cultivated the truth that nothing new is sayable.
Yes, I hear you countering (good!): But writing is a form of life. It doesn’t matter that a machine does it better, and that I can’t sell it unless I turn my name into a brand. It is the natural behavior of the language animals that we are. It is a trail we leave behind until the next rain washes it away. I agree. Writing can be a spiritual act. When we wander in our minds we encounter no limits – that fact is uncanny, its exploration we can call living freedom. We can feel one with everything (I love the joke of the Buddhist at the vegan sandwich stand, saying ‘make me one with everything’) by becoming the creators of a narrative that has no perceptible boundaries, where we are everywhere at once. Writing is not just the craft of storytelling, it is the art of our involvement with the story we tell.
Beware: This is the way religions are created. We can tell ourselves a story in which we are so involved we prefer it over our own lives. That is how powerful writing is, and can still be, if we understand it as a spiritual practice.
Writing is play, and play is the essence of being human. It is campfire stories with technological crutches (if I suggest here, to my readers who also write, that we gather around a campfire and tell each other stories, would you?). It allows us the folly of imaginary friends who are entirely accessible to us (or its mirror image, jhwh) and the suspension of loneliness.
After all, writers and readers are each other’s imaginary friends. And we have more loneliness to suspend than is dreamt of in an AI’s philosophies.
- Anti-AI watermark. We are the wee ones.