Some Thoughts On AI And Writing

AI can write pretty words, but it’s not a human being digging just a little deeper, mining their life to make art from their experiences.

Yesterday I read a story called She Died With Two Subscribers and by the time I was done, I knew why it had over three hundred hearts and growing like a rhododendron overtaking fields, which is a phrase I’m going to tell you about in a minute.

It’s about a young man who inherits a log cabin from an uncle he didn’t know he had so he moves in imagining some current day Walden and goes to a tiny store to stock up on food, meets an old lady with a Volkswagen sunflower bus who says she has a Substack and I laugh a little. Couple paragraphs in, I’m not laughing anymore.

So the man looks her up and she’s not hard to find because her name is unusual and her posts aren’t posts, they’re just sentences she writes when she gets up every day, like the first one is about making maple pancakes and the second is about having leftover pancakes and wishing her daughter was there to enjoy them with her.

By the end I’m staring at the screen, tears rolling down my cheeks and I just wanted him to have maple pancakes nevermind that it’s fiction and I know it’s not the maple pancakes it’s that today would have been mama’s birthday. If she was still here.

And I know you know exactly what I mean because we’ve all read something that tapped into something buried inside our soul because the two surest ways in the world to connect with another human being are words and music.

Then I read a piece called Ai and the nonchalance epidemic which is an art history student talking about art and history, science and magic and how creatives have always tortured themselves in the exploration of what life means while RFK Jr is going to bring back medieval diseases and how Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind Studio Ghibli, has always championed art for art’s sake and won’t even use CGI, nevermind AI.

Right in the middle, she says she was on campus, heard two frat-boys towering behind her having this conversation…

“Are her quizzes online?”

“Dude, I hope so. If chatGPT can’t pass them for me, I’ll drop the class.”

I sighed. By the end of that piece, I understood why it has over sixteen hundred hearts nevermind that it’s a little rambling because sometimes the best people kind of do ramble a little. And you chase behind, running through the woods two steps behind them and when you finally get to the clearing. You can see. Where they took you.

ChatGPT can’t do that. You know that, right?

It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back to rhododendrons. Yesterday Roman wrote a piece about crying and learning to feel again, nevermind that he’s always felt deeper than most folk even know a person can feel. But anyway, it had this line in it, went like this:

Your heart is rhododendron overtaking fields. Devouring the rusted tractor. Swallowing furrows and habitations.

Read that and I’m not imagining rhododendron because it doesn’t grow where I live but in my head I’m seeing the old tractor abandoned at my daddy’s farm and the old car by the side of the road just before the turnoff to the cemetery where I bring my daddy peonies every summer and how they’re both all overgrown with green now.

And I think that’s how I want my heart, growing wild like that.

Like rhododendrons overtaking fields, devouring a rusted tractor, swallowing furrows and habitations.

I don’t need to tell you who Roman is by now. He’s my editor, my co-editor and my friend and much like Miyazaki, he wouldn’t use AI to save his life because it’s not art and I don’t tell you to read his work because he’s my friend I tell you read his work because he uses words the way Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet used paint. To make art.

And I think when we find someone who inspires us to be better we should shout their names to the rooftops and if there’s someone who does that for you please would you share them in the comments?

Sean Dietrich is another, goes by Sean of the South. Makes writing look a lot easier than it is. Read a piece like Heaven Can Wait or Evermore, Baltimore, get to the bottom of the page and wonder how someone can make you cry so easy.

And you whisper thank god, thank god that woman pulled over for that boy.

AI is never going to do that. You know that, right?

I wrote a piece on Medium, scheduled for Sunday, about kids using AI to do their homework. Seventy percent of kids age 13-18 use AI and they’re not getting caught because they know to tell ChatGPT “write this like a seventh grader” and they know to tell ChatGPT to throw in a couple of typos, maybe mix up their, they’re and there so teacher chuckles, knows that kid really and truly wrote the paper.

What those kids don’t know is that “cheating” isn’t the problem, the real problem is that they’re not learning critical skills and of the kids using AI, 63% of parents said they didn’t even know their kids were using AI and I wish I found that hopeful but I really don’t because half of Medium is AI now so I guess adults think it’s okay, too.

Here’s what someone told me. They said I should quit grumbling about AI and just accept it because AI is a great way to “refine” your writing.

So I pasted one of my pieces into ChatGPT and asked it to “refine” my writing because I was curious what that looks like and ChatGPT told me the writing is very powerful and doesn’t need refining but it rewrote it anyway, said perhaps I’ll like the edits.

I did not like the edits.

It italicized all the dialogue and added a few conjunctions to join my short sentences into longer ones because that’s how the homogenization of writing works.

I don’t profess to understand why people use AI. I don’t. I guess it lets a kid say he or she got a high score without doing the work, like that’s some kind of win. I guess it lets an adult pretend they’re a writer without doing the work. I don’t know.

Sometimes, people just get a buzz from getting away with stuff. I don’t know.

One person messaged to tell me I am being unfair, because it’s THEIR ideas they’re feeding into ChatGPT and I laughed. Oh, sweet summer child, you think it’s about the ideas? Oh hell, no. Ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s what you do with them that matters.

It’s the slog, the work and the learning. Writing a thousand words and realizing they are all crap and when you delete the garbage and fluff and nonsense, there’s only one good paragraph left standing so you start over. And over. And over.

It’s the digging into the heart, into the soul to put words together in a way that says something meaningful. AI doesn’t have a soul. It can write pretty words, but it’s not a human digging just a little deeper, mining their life to make art from experience.

If a helicopter picks up a person, drops them at the top of Mount Everest, they did not scale the mountain. Take all the selfies they want, they did not scale that mountain. Say whatever you want, people using AI to do their writing didn’t either. And I gotta tell you, I think the view is even more glorious for having expended the effort.

Maybe that’s just me. But I don’t think so.

Love to know what you think.

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P.S. I hope once you get down here, you’ll go back and click every link I included because they will move you, and that’s a promise.

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