Keep Going...?

Some thoughts on being a writer in a world filled with AI

I was writing about a cool thing writers do, which was inspired by a story I read about Vincent Van Gogh but I lost my way because AI kept intruding on my thoughts and trying to shape that piece was like trying to meditate while your kids keep yelling mum, mum, look at me, mum, mum, are you listening, mum??!!

So I set it aside to think on later when my mind is clear. Which is what writing is. Writing is thinking. Wrestling to give shape to our thoughts and sometimes writing is how we figure out what we even think in the first place.

For the longest time I kept telling myself keep going, keep going…

But it dawned on me it wasn’t. It wasn’t going anywhere, much less where I wanted it to and I think that’s worth recognizing so I set it aside to come back to later when I can read it with a clear mind or maybe when there’s a nice breeze in the window.

Some days AI really gets under my skin. It’s just everywhere.

It’s in my comments on Medium. It’s on the leaderboards at Substack. Do a google search for something, it’s there too. Go to open a support ticket and you have to jump through five levels of Dante’s Hell to get past the AI that says it can help but can’t.

And I don’t hate AI. I don’t. I use it for research, too. But cripes, it’s everywhere.

I wrote a piece on Medium about an interview with Keanu where he talks about AI and says corporations don’t give a f—k about paying writers and he’s not wrong.

So, there’s AI everywhere you look, including the feeds at Medium and Substack and on the leaderboards and when a writer is struggling to get seen in the flood of AI you know what we tell them? Keep going. We say that to writers, in a motivational way.

I see it on notes every day.

In these heartfelt little notes that say things like — “keep going. Maybe no one is reading your writing today but keep going and one day someone will find it and it will resonate. Keep going, keep going.”

And I think it’s worth thinking about what “keep going” means.

To me, it implies progress. Going is a verb. A motion.

My kiddo went to art college and the teacher would walk around the class watching the students at their canvases and making comments like oh my goodness you have the light perfect, keep going, keep going.

But other times? She’d stop them and say stop. Don’t keep going. Let’s look at this. Where is the sun? Where are the shadows? And the student would see their mistake and say ohhhh! Fix their mistakes. Then keep going. You know?

I think that’s worth thinking about.

Because it’s really easy to think “keep going” means keep doing exactly what you’re doing over and over hoping one day it will pay off, but what if the thing you’re doing isn’t every going to get you there, you know?

What if your shadows are in the wrong place?

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Here’s what one of my readers told me.

He said he uploads a photo to Claude and asks it to write a story about the photo and it does. He said they’re pretty good, which made me curious so I tried it. I uploaded a photo to Claude and asked it to write a story about the photo—and it did.

In seconds flat. Gave me a 1200 word story in seconds flat.

So I asked it to write another and another and another and it just kept churning out stories based on that photo and pretty soon I was the woman crouching on top of a car while dogs snarled in some Stephen King horror so I started feeding the dog.

I started giving the AI prompts about the people and circumstances to weave in and it never hiccupped, just spit out another and another on command. It made me see the allure of AI. Especially to people who struggle to put thoughts into words.

It was fascinating, how fast AI spit out stories. But also horrifying.

Because here’s the thing.

Writers (for the most part) strive to make forward progress but there’s no forward progress when people use AI to do their writing. There’s not. Not at the art of writing, anyway. At prompt generation, sure. People get better at knowing what to type into the prompt box to get the result they want. They get better at feeding the dogs.

When I fed the dogs, the stories got better but none of them were my words. Oh sure, I can edit some of them. But I didn’t write those stories. I didn’t. You know?

Like, if you pick up a man with a helicopter and drop him on top of a mountain, is he a mountain climber? When he’s standing there with all the men and women who labored and toiled to get to the summit, can you count him among them?

I don’t think you can. I don’t think that man is a mountain climber.

But when it comes to AI, people who use it think they are writers.

Every time I say things like that, people who use AI wag their finger and say I don’t understand because they had notes and ideas and observations and they participated in the process and what I want to do is hand them Hemingway’s last book.

The book he made notes and outlines for and ended his life with a double barreled shotgun before it was done. So his son finished the book and it’s not the same. It’s not Hemingway’s words and it shows. Not the same. Not even a bit.

AI is only writing to someone who thinks the end result is all that matters.

You know who that person is? The reader. Because study after study after study shows humans can’t tell AI from human writing anymore. Even linguistics experts cannot accurately tell the difference anymore. People read AI, think it’s human.

And that’s the world we are writing in. You and me.

Scratching out words while someone else types in prompts.

And then people say “keep going, keep going” and no one is saying where is the sun, where are the shadows? And let me tell you what that means in a world filled with AI. It means finding your voice. What light and shadows are to art, voice is to writing.

That’s where real writers win.

When human beings write, they develop a voice.

And human beings are drawn to voice. We get to know a voice.

I can read a poem and say that’s Richard Siken or Mary Oliver or Tom Hirons. I can read an essay and say that’s Lyz Lenz or Jessica Valenti or Joan Didion. No one else can write horror like Stephen King. They can write horror. But they can’t be him. No one can write Hemingway. Not even his own son, his flesh and blood.

People develop voice. People who use AI will never develop a voice.

AI never develops a voice or style. It can’t.

That’s why voice is the only way writers can win.

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There’s a town in China that was known for producing the world’s best art replicas. The town is called Dafen and every day, thousands of artists sat copying the works of famous artists like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Van Gogh.

The people who ran the factory in Dafen figured out how to create the best quality replicas in the world.

Know how they did it?

Assembly line. I saw a photo and it made me unbearably sad. Every artist learns one piece. One paints the collar. Pass it on. One paints a sleeve, pass it on, another paints the face, another the hair, another the fingers. Pass it on. Pass it on.

That’s how people lived. Sitting in a sweatshop hour after hour painting the same one little piece over and over because they have bills to pay, because they need to eat. And at the end of the line, a perfect replica. Line up ninety nine replicas with the original and the average person won’t know which of the hundred is even real.

That’s the world we’re living in, except now it’s AI not sweatshop workers.

People don’t understand how AI works.

But when you understand how AI works, you begin to see your edge as a writer.

People make comparisons based on limited understanding. They say things like if humans read books and create stories based on them, why would it be any different if AI does the same thing? Except that’s not what it does. That’s not how AI works.

Let me tell you how AI works.

It works pretty much like the factory in Dafen.

Except instead of pieces of a painting, it assembles pieces of someone else’s work.

When AI was trained, they took copyrighted work without consent. All of Wikipedia. Entire news media sites. They took copyrighted books from pirating sites. Downloaded in entirety. Everything downloaded in entirety.

If you doubt me, ask ChatGPT to tell you the first sentence in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit or The Handmaid’s tale. It will give it to you. Just data in its belly. As AI ate people’s work, it created what it calls tokens. A token is a strings of words. Two words, three words, a sentence. A paragraph, a page, a chapter.

Billions and billions and billions of tokens.

Pulled from copyrighted works.

When a “writer” enters a prompt, the response you get from AI is not writing, it’s math. AI is a program on a machine and how it works is probability generation. It doesn’t even know what it’s saying. It’s just running math calculations.

And then it plucks out “tokens” from other people’s writing.

Puts it together and it reads pretty enough.

But it can’t develop a voice. Because the voice of AI will change from piece to piece depending on whose writing the AI program plucked tokens from each time.

Once you understand that, you see the path to growing as a writer.

And it’s not to just keep writing. It’s not to “keep going”

It’s to keep honing. Sharpening the pencil. Sharpening the knife. Reading every paragraph and asking how to make it tighter. How to make the opening stronger. Which words to cut to make your voice stronger, which anecdote to add, how to make your personality shine through because the most powerful tool you have is your voice.

In a world full of AI, I believe voice is the only way humans beat the machines. AI will never have a voice. That’s why yours matters so much. Love to know what you think!

“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald