AI Can't Write
Writing is the human expression of being. And AI just can't.
Photo by eldhose kuriyan on Unsplash
Stephen King and his son Joe once engaged in a literary exercise, comparing the first lines of great books. This idea inspired a classroom activity for at-risk high school seniors in an urban school where I taught nearly 10 years ago. My pick for greatest opening line of all time? No contest. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Yes, there once was a time of unpainted dwellings and smoke houses filled with salt-cured meat when our twice-great-grandfathers harvested the ice from frozen rivers. “The ice man cometh.” Or, if your abode was too deep in the backwoods, you went to him.
“Writing is telepathy,” King tells us in On Writing, but it’s something else as well. Writing is discovery. It is a child’s first time barefoot in the surf, an April day when the icy water shocks us into unmitigated reality, the way a defibrillator shocks the heart into sinus rhythm.
Only humans and animals can discover, but despite the many images of chimps at typewriters on the internet, only humans can write about life because the human experience can’t be replicated. Or defined. Being human naturally spills over the edges of conformity (no matter what age or agenda-bearing society is selling it). A child knows this. The lines are arbitrary. It is human creative license that takes the Crayola and pushes the envelope, obliterating someone else’s idea of utopia.
Creativity is messy.
Facing the firing squad, the fictional Columbian liberation chief, Colonel Buendia, smoked his last and mused upon a time long gone and his own childish joy touching the icy cold stone chunks chipped with a chisel and a hammer as one would carve a sculpture into limestone. It wasn’t the technology that captivated him; it was the thrill of discovery. The tactile shock of the cold bricks of ice brought the political animal Buendia had become to the first moment he had lived outside of himself, and in the process, redefined his purpose, opening his mind to the possibilities. Discovery.
When an academic researcher named Janet Emig said, “Writing is learning,” she was also saying that writing is discovery. It is the anticipation of creation that leads us into the next day, the sacred act of unleashing something into the cosmos that never existed before. The most fundamental creative act is self-expression. Songs are excellent examples.
On average, most commercial songs run about three minutes. But how many times have we found one particular song that encapsulates what it is like to be us? The act of writing a song is a lot of trial and error. You have to write a lot of bad tunes to finally mine your life for the truly great ones. The best songs are often collaborations, even if those of us streaming the tune or firing up the turntable don’t know the back story. Country songwriter Rodney Crowell told a room full of songwriters how the hit song “What Kind of Love” was actually built by collaboration over time and dimensionality. Roy Orbison sang unintelligible gibberish into a microphone to begin the process and died shortly after. The recording, preserved on digital audio tape, was sent to Crowell. In a West Coast studio, Crowell reached an impasse, unable to replace Orbison’s nonsensical words with meaningful lyrics for the chorus. When Joni Mitchell walked by, she heard Crowell struggling and gave him the hook. She suggested to Crowell, “Why don’t you just say, ‘What kind of love / makes you go out in the wind / And the driving rain?’”
The history of humanity is collaborating to reach, together, a higher plane of truth and beauty than any of us could reach alone. Iron sharpens iron. Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” was a throw-away tune, rife with Ozzy’s “mistakes,” which became the selling point. “The Heart of the Matter” performed as a solo project by Eagles drummer-singer Don Henley, started with Mike Campbell’s guitar intro, took shape with J.D. Souther’s opening lines, and found its purpose with Don Henley’s studio ad-lib as he mused on the heartbreak at the end of a long-term relationship.
The manuscript of Stephen King’s Carrie lay in his office trash can until rescued by his wife, Tabitha, who knocked off the cigarette ashes and told him, “Finish this.”
There is no genie in a bottle come to save us from ourselves. We must write. We must speak. It’s in our DNA. Making meaning out of the chaos is our calling.
Shakespeare didn’t need legislation, a team of IT programmers, and a data center to write Hamlet. Because Hamlet is about the struggle to act, to express oneself in spite of grief, self-loathing, and indecision. Or, perhaps our self-expression comes as we make meaning of our grief, self-loathing, and indecision. Human life is messy. Writing should be too.
The act of creation is known only to humans and reflects the true “self” back to us in relation to others, our environment, and the cosmos, even the Creator, or Source, if you prefer. In the human crucible of experience, amidst the analysis and creative synthesis of all we learn, we call the shots. Is there an ultimate creative force influencing our actions or inspiring us to greater heights? Each individual gets to decide this. As humans, we will not stand for an institution, group, government entity, or political party demanding worship of a god. We have laws against it. According to Plato, Socrates gave his life for the right to question everything and taught his students not to accept the Athenian government’s insistence that all citizens of Athens must believe in the gods. The right of the individual to engage with ourselves, other humans, the environment, and God — as one wishes, or as one does not wish — has always been considered sacred.
But how can we escape the tyranny of a unknown god in the form of AI when it comes with the twin temptations of convenience and instant gratification, all the while replacing, redefining, and dictating human expression? We have already created the oxymoronic boondoggle of “content creation” across innumerable online platforms. Sheer, vapid volume pandering to vapid audiences has replaced the depth of meaning explored by humans from Homer to the Psalms to Shakespeare.
But we divorced the act of writing from purpose and meaning long ago. Henry David Thoreau lived to see the proliferation of the telegraph in the 18th Century, the earliest form of text messaging. Like a prophet, he predicted the loss of something sacred when the first telegraph message came into a New England railway station: “Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough,” it read, an out-of-context conversational non-starter he feared would cause a seismic shift in how we perceive human experience. Mass production of facts would demand an instant response, which might explain decades of western anxiety. Thoreau wrote about his fears in Walden. He decried the unexpected fallout from the railroad which created something entirely new: standard time. This new technology reinvented human experience, turning the clock into a god. Chronos, mostly likely.
In the 21st Century, the youth of Western culture have all but abandoned reading, writing, and thinking as the pillars of knowledge, while learning is reduced to content, truth replaced with emotion, and purpose exchanged for a bottom line. In the meantime, truth is treated as conspiracy theory while skin care products are sold with the religious fervor that we would expect to accompany the discovery of the Holy Grail. Our society worships the body of youth and the god of convenience, denying the human spirit within. Where are the writers and creators who help us find our highest selves? Where is hope in the struggle of living?
And now we face an existential threat.
The exponential growth of AI as holy Oracle.
AI can now act as our therapist, our teacher, our lover, our edge, our servant. It can replace us as student and employee. AI cleans up the mess we call “living” so we don’t have to endure it. Companies are now selling an AI version of deceased loved ones to the grieving. However, the sheer quality and volume of creative works born of grief cannot be calculated. It is as if we are all on a quest to bow to the least-skilled computer programmer and participate, willingly, in suppressing all that makes us human.
As far as creativity goes, we simply don’t need to create anything anymore. We don’t need to draw on lived experience, connect with collaborators, and dig deep into the soil of the human soul to create. We can use AI to “write a song.” The algorithm works much like George Orwell’s song-generating “versificator” in his novel, 1984. Of course, this is of no more challenge than going to Lowe’s, sitting down before a clerk with a computer, and giving both a few parameters to virtually design a living room. Did you actually design or create anything? No. Has the living room changed? No, of course not. But these computer-generated experiences are rapidly replacing lived experience. Still, the suicide rates have never been higher. In our quest to sterilize human existence, we have cursed our frailty, never stopping to realize that out of frailty is born the struggle that gives rise to inspirational heights of existence.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes a conscientious decision to go to war with the enemy within his own family. He gives his life to prevent the tyrant king from poisoning the kingdom of Denmark. His dying words are about passing along his tragic story to those who live after him. “Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.” In other words, “Get it right when you talk about me. Tell the truth.” When Horatio picks up the poison cup, Hamlet jerks the chalice out of his hand. Hamlet says,
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind
me! (V.II.377-380)
This is a human writer’s dilemma likely born from a wounded author. Where there is no authentic life, no wounds exist to drive the individual to find purpose. The result is the death of a legacy of meaning and the rise of conformity, which is, and always has been, its own tyranny, born of endless mediocrity.