A Blunt Conversation About AI Writing

Almost half of Substackers are using AI now. Can we talk?

Anguish, by August Friedrich Schenck, 1878

Last week Substack said that in a survey of over 2,000 Substackers, 45.4% said they’re using AI. Within writing communities, for and against AI has become a topic of contention and I want to talk about the reality of AI writing.

I’m going to start with a make believe story. Humor me, okay?

It’s 1889 and Vincent Van Gogh is standing at the window of the asylum absolutely drunk with wonder because a fairy godmother gave him a magic easel.

Just put a canvas on it and talk to it, she said. It will paint.

Then she twirled around three times and disappeared.

Draw the moon, he says and voila, a moon appears on the canvas. Draw a farmer’s field, he says and voila, a farmer’s field appears on the canvas. He is stunned.

At first he gives it simple commands. A moon. A tree. A farmer’s field. A pretty woman. Because it’s new and he starts simply, as we humans often do with new things. But it doesn’t take very long before he realizes what he can do with this magic easel.

He looks out the window and starts describing what he sees.

You’re looking down on the city, he says, and the houses are tiny. He looks at the canvas and responds to what it’s creating. The houses are too big, he says. The city should occupy twenty percent of the canvas, the sky is eighty percent and like magic, the houses become smaller and the sky grows bigger, dominates the canvas.

The moon isn’t full he says, it’s a crescent moon and watches as the painting changes. Add a halo to the moon, he says and it appears. And make the whole painting tinged with yellow so it glows golden and it does. He claps his hands and says yes, that’s exactly how I visualized it and happily lifts the canvas from the easel. Magic!

Did he paint that painting?

What a ridiculous question. We all know artists don’t paint with words.

Only writers do that.

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This morning, a reader called me an “Ai-complainer” and I laughed. Out loud.

I don’t hate AI. Truly I don’t. AI has the capacity to do so much good for humanity.

AI can look at medical imaging and pick out cancer cells faster than humans. A medical group in Mount Sinai is using AI with 94% accuracy to predict development of liver, rectum and prostate cancer. Maybe catch it before it’s a death sentence.

I’ve lost loved ones to cancer. I’ve wept on the floor of a hospital. I get it. I’m all for AI helping save our loved ones and save our dumb arses from ourselves. The University of Southern California is using it to halt the decline of endangered species. Please save the bees, AI. Because if the bees die, we all die too.

Do I have ethical concerns about AI?

Damn straight I do.

It troubles me that copyrighted work was used to train AI without compensation or consent. It troubles me that AI models were trained on pornographic images and now AI can and does “undress” women and children for fun and profit. It troubles me that pedophiles are using AI to make deep fakes of real children and we can’t stop it.

It troubles me that AI consumes vast quantities of fresh water, our most precious resource. It troubles me that AI is an entirely unregulated industry and it troubles me that AI is predicted to take more jobs than we realize in the next couple of years.

But that’s the way of humanity.

The same man who gave us the Declaration of Independence kept slaves. Steve Jobs changed the face of computing while refusing to acknowledge his own child. We are complicated beings. We have the capacity to do both good and bad.

Let me tell you the reality of AI, okay?

Let’s peek back in on the Van Gogh story.

That magic canvas made him wildly productive. He has twenty canvases lined up against the wall. And if he were to show them to people, most wouldn’t know.

A few might. But less than you think.

Here’s the amazing thing. Most people wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t. They’d say I don’t care how he created that, it speaks to me. They wouldn’t care if he made an amateur attempt at painting and asked the magic canvas to fix it or if he just let the canvas paint the whole thing from scratch based on his description.

They care that it speaks to something inside them.

That’s how it is with AI generated writing.

Many of the top Substacks are AI generated writing. In the AI report, Substack said of the 2000+ Substacks they reviewed, 70% are paid and roughly half are AI. People are paying for AI generated writing. Because it speaks to them. So they’ll pay.

And you know what? I don’t care. I’m not protesting the existence of AI and I’m not protesting that some people choose to use it. That’s their choice.

I don’t want to live in a world where we aren’t free to make choices.

Let me tell you what I do care about.

Because I think it matters.

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A lot of people think writing is about an end result. It’s not. Writing is a process.

But I’m talking about the craft of writing, not the act of writing.

The English language is a strange beast and we have words that mean more than one thing, sometimes contrary. To dust can mean to add fine particles. Dusting a cake with confectioners sugar. It also means to remove fine particles, like dusting the furniture.

Writing is one of those words.

The craft of writing is as old as humanity. Long before there were printing presses, there were people scratching words on papyrus or whatever they had.

Ernest Hemingway wrote the ending to A Farewell To Arms thirty nine times. Over and over to get the words right. That is the craft of writing.

In a 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, he said “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try put the shit in the wastebasket.”

If you’d given him ChatGPT, I truly don’t think he would have used it. Because the craft of writing mattered to him. He’d happily throw ninety one pages in the trash to get one good one. Throw thirty eight endings in the trash to get one good one.

Patrick Rothfuss took fourteen years to write The Name Of The Wind. After the book sold ten million copies he said he rewrote it so many times he lost count. Dozens of times, maybe even a hundred times. Fourteen years, rewriting that book over and over. He said with every rewrite his skill as a writer got stronger.

That is the craft of writing.

Isabelle Allende said writing isn’t a choice, it’s a calling.

Poe said it’s an obsession and Kafka said a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. Margaret Mitchell rewrote Gone With the Wind thirteen times. Harper Lee rewrote To Kill A Mockingbird so many times she threw it out the window and wept. Then she went outside and pulled it out of the snowbank and rewrote it.

These are my heroes. The people who understand how my atoms connect.

This week, a reader sent me a twenty four page manifesto about AI.

He said we need to accept AI. We need to stop looking at AI as “cheating” and we need to see it as the future of writing, a way writers can “augment” their writing. He called AI a tool and said we need better language around AI.

I don’t care about the language.

Why are you trying so hard to convince me?

There are many motivations for using AI. I get that. Some people use it to produce better quality than they can without it because they’re not strong writers. Some people need to produce volume they can’t produce without AI. Maybe to sell a product or because writing doesn’t pay particularly well. I understand that.

Here’s what I don’t understand.

Why can’t those people understand my motivation? Why are you trying so hard to convince me that what you’re doing is the same as what I’m doing? Because it’s not the same. Not even a little bit. No one gives me my words. I find them inside.

Can I be blunt?

I don’t think the problem is that writers don’t accept that AI is here to stay.

That argument is a straw man.

I think the problem is that people using AI don’t understand that to some people, the craft of writing is what matters. The slow and painstaking development of skill.

I am one of those people.

And I don’t want to see the art and craft of writing become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of productivity or profit. So I do the only thing I can. I write about it.

I’d love to know what you think.

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity...

— Sylvia Plath, Mary’s Song