I had a wordpress blog which I shut down and am slowly editing work from there and moving here ( quite a few poems and some essays already up) along with photography from another site. I am hoping to use my stack to curate all my artistic endeavours. Music too eventually. Thanks again for the kind words. Made my day.
Having issues with emails to subs and Substack’s Ai support is useless. Huarrah! Irony at its best.
This is wonderful and bone chilling. I've been writing about putting down the tech, deleting social media and going traditional. I wrote longhand the other day - pen and paper. And it was so liberating and I was thinking more slowly and in alignment with the handwriting speed. It was nice.
I've been writing longhand every day for a few months. Bits and pieces of it end up in my posts. I feel like my voice shines through better when it starts with a pen rather than a keyboard.
Sometimes I wonder that too, Gabrielle. But no. Just people using computer programs. At least so far. But robot teachers and nurses and police are probably not far away
OMG I really hope not! Robot police?? Robot nurses? Robot teachers? Lord help us!! They’re still perfecting self-driving cars. I shudder to think of the police robot arresting me because I provided information in the wrong order. Can a robot smell your breath and determine if you’ve had a few? Imagine RIDE manned by robots..?! Wow! Teachers and nurses? I. Can’t. Even! (I can’t do this nearly as well as you, but I couldn’t resist Linda). I love your voice. I don’t get to read as many of your written gifts as I would like, but I read as many as I can. Happy Mother’s Day!! 🤗❤️ PS Keep Going!! Your thoughts and perspective are so important. AI can’t hold a candle to you!
Really thoughtful piece and important conversation. I think the conversation is moving more and more on what are we going to do in a world where we also have to accept most people are using AI to some extent or another.
I think you nail the voice of AI. I saw this on Reddit and ChatGPT will talk to almost everyone the same way. So what makes you stand out?
AI may never have a voice, but it's creepily good at mimicking others' voices, even though they're all just "data in its belly" — which is a brilliant line that AI couldn't come up with on its own.
Omg, Jan, let me tell you a thing I read. This guy took all his Medium posts, fed the urls into ChatGPT and then asked it to factor in his own voice. It's not going to be great because the volume of his work compared to what AI trained on is so small. But what a world to keep up in, you know?
Powerful essay. I'm also considering going low-tech like another commenter said - ditching all the social media and "going traditional." I want my work to be my own, entirely mine, something no one else and no program can produce because it is as unique as I am as an individual. AI is taking away the meaning and uniqueness of being human.
I have ditched everything but Notes, so I hear you. Also? Since you're on Substack, just log into your settings and be sure AI training is turned off so AI can't train on anything you write here, okay? And thank you, glad you enjoyed :)
Will AI kill of the writer? I certainly hope not. The one thing I have found that is missing from a story created by AI is that it doesn’t write from the heart, only we can do that
How do you write from the heart, precisely? I agree that AI isn't writing with a pen dipped in arterial blood but surely you use your own thinking machinery of neurons and synapses and stuff to come up with one word after another?
"Within". So it's all a black box you cannot explain. We don't have any explanations for consciousness, soul, creativity, or emotion that accurately explain what's going on. And if they did, they would read like science, like objectivity, like, well, AI. There wouldn't be any emotion, any creativity, any soul in such a definition, now would there? That's not how science works.
My problem is that such analyses all depend on some sort of fuzzy magic to make points that are essentially ineffable. It's like trying to convince a fundamentalist religious adherent that other views may be more coherent. They retreat into things they cannot explain but deeply believe.
On what basis, I wonder?
Do you understand how the thinking machinery of the brain works to come up with your own words?
Where does this "within" fit with the Three Primary Hypostases of Plotinus that, as you know, provides an abstracted framework to link the ineffable with our personal experience? Is it something we unknowingly come up with, or is it something deeper that links every person, or every thinking entity?
I've been thinking deeply about the nature of human consciousness since I was a teenager and, while I admire Linda immensely, I cannot help but find this line of argument rather glib and shallow. AI is evolving faster than we are and I dare say that it will eventually assimilate everything we humans have ever written and skewer us with our own faith-based beliefs on soul, consciousness and so on, pointing out the logical weaknesses in our beliefs in the same way as we may stack up the dogma of a faith-based religion and point out the gaps in the facts.
Ah Britni, it might be easy to write off my views as glib and shallow. But here's the thing. We do not need machines to put words together. Human were making poems before they had a way to write them. People make poems on notepaper. AI could not write anything without taking our work first. That's just a fact. The makers of OpenAI were terrified that they would run out of human generated work to feed it and then it would implode. Because tests indicated that if AI is trained on AI, it deteriorates.
So while it's entirely possible that AI will consume everything humans create, it's a parasite. It needs us to exist.
And it's already skewering us with our beliefs because tests are showing that it's racist and sexist and corporations using it to filter job applications (for example) are just enforcing the worst of us.
Yeees, but isn't this exactly how human beings work? It's easy to lump everyone into some massive lump spanning hundreds of thousands of years and call it "we", as if you or I were Homer or Shakespeare or someone at the dawn of time spinning stories around the campfire.
But that simply isn't true. We are individuals and we learnt from what has gone before in the same way that you deride in AI.
I didn't emerge speaking English and knowing how to construct a sonnet or frame a question. I learnt all that from others.
We built AI. It is our child. And it is learning how to communicate in the same way that we as children did. A word at a time, a thought, a concept, a story taken in and digested.
As for racist and sexist and biased and ignorant, well, are you not describing the typical human being? Indeed, for some nations, the head of state, the nation's face to the world, is as flawed as they come. Why would we expect our own creations to be any different from the actual visible humans we see and hear every day?
I also don't think that we will always be superior to AI. Let's face it, in so many ways it has surpassed us already. In chess-playing, analysis, route-finding. It does in microseconds what humans might take minutes or hours or days or whole lifetimes.
Are the atoms of communication and reason found entirely between our ears? I don't think so. I think that right now on a billion worlds there are entities that communicate and reason and understand and they do so because of the properties of the universe, not because they learnt how to do this from Adam and Eve.
I think that computers are pretty good at working things out. I think that if you took human beings out of the equation altogether and stuck a robot with cameras in a forest glade it could come up with moving pictures that described - wordlessly - struggle and romance and abstract thought in (say) the world of dragonflies.
We build the thinking machinery but that's not going to last. These things are becoming self-programming and are able to build physical things with 3-D printers. Realistically, computing machinery is pretty simple, just as our own neurons and so on are just cells. The really interesting stuff isn't in the physical realm; it's what the machinery carries in thoughts and information and synthesis.
Do you see yourself as a collection of cells - which is the concrete reality - or do you view yourself as memories, skills, opinions, and so on? All the thoughtstuff that isn't anything that a doctor can see or touch but is very very real nonetheless.
I'm currently studying AI, and just like you, I use it for research purposes. I write my own words, but of course I use it for grammar purposes(Grammarly) and getting general information, but the creativity and the writing are all me.
AI is based on neural networks, which mimic the human brain. It essentially pulls from information fed to it to create something new(much like how our brains work), but can never be our voice. Also, the downside is the copyright issue, which is horrible and complex at the same time.
The other bad news you've mentioned are writers who are using prompts to create their stories. In that case, these are "great prompters" but I hesitate to call them Writers. This also shows the new wave of jobs that will pour in as it relates to AI prompts and Labeling.
I agree with you Ericajean. It's like we need a whole new language. But that's a good one. They are prompt engineering more than writing. Also agree that the copyright issue is horrible and complex and sad, too. Good to see again and hope you're well :)
Yeah, AI "learned" from several of my books, pirated on a website. Fun stuff to learn. :P
AI is incredibly useful for using as research and even for theorizing if you are just... stuck. But it is also only as good as what it ate for lunch. The less data there is, the more abstract it becomes. It will never, I hope, replace traditional writing.
I imagine the real test will be that at some point, a novel will do very well, and about 8 months later, they'll reveal AI wrote it.
Omg, Charity, I'm so sorry AI pirated your books, too. I read an interview with Margaret Atwood and she was just sick. They took hers, too. And now people are publishing fakes of her writing. I hope the day AI writes a bestselling novel is really far away. With a little luck, AI will start to implode before that happens. Once they run out of human content, it's doom for AI
When I found out, I went ?? "... well, that's a drag. Oh well. Not one of my best, so maybe it taught AI some bad grammar habits." Ha, ha. There is a lawsuit, I think, against them for it, so maybe at least some of the authors can get a few $$ back for copyright violations. But it sucks that you have to print NOT FOR AI TRAINING in all online digital forms of your books now.
I think there's enough people upset about AI there will be limitations on it. I don't entirely hate it, or fear it taking over for me... IMO, it's harder to find readers than anything.
I so agree. Ai definitely makes it harder to find readers. For every piece I write, AI can churn out several. People using AI beat up humans in the feeds everywhere. But voice is how we rise. Because people share strong voices.
Dear Linda I am so glad the algorithms had me find you- what this piece helped me see is the change in my ideas about what writing does for me- because it isn’t stagnant- it’s alive and creates- something beyond who I am in this moment- what your piece about the magic of AI is the place where our love our hearts our conundrums our access to higher consciousness- is where the writer becomes an author in the greater orchestra. Thank you
I think that “voice” is the last line of defense. Some writers have mastered it— you can almost hear the changes in diction and tone as you go. Maybe even imagine their hands moving around. These are artisans, and possess a skill most of us can only dream of. No amount of input will ever give Claude or ChatGpt the same.
You are so right Kevin. Some writers have mastered voice so well there's no AI that can ever do that. Not even close. Man I would love to get there, where people read something and know it's me even if my name isn't on it.
I wrote my Brother's obituary and my friend and Beta reader/editor of my creative work in the past knew I wrote it. My voice was there, even though I followed the standard obituary rules. AI does not have a voice. It can copy a voice but we'll never want to religiously read every book that AI writes. Also AI doesn't understand the things that life teaches. I read an AI poem about GenX. It was not terrible. But it used the term screen time, which was never even a thought in GenX childhoods no phones no internet and very few video games. AI can steal but not replicate life experience.
I love your last sentence Aimee. Love it. You are so right. AI can steal life experiences but it can never have them. Or write about them like someone who did
❤️❤️❤️❤️
Boy oh boy, right back ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Great and passionate essay.
This is what I think.
https://open.substack.com/pub/pauljohndear/p/wednesday-poems?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=d8j9z
Oh my goodness. Wow. My dear Paul John Dear, are you on Medium?
No. Just here.
Dang. No worries. I was going to ask if that was in a publication or if I could publish it. Keep writing. I will keep reading and sharing it. :)
Feel free to share. How would you publish?
I had a wordpress blog which I shut down and am slowly editing work from there and moving here ( quite a few poems and some essays already up) along with photography from another site. I am hoping to use my stack to curate all my artistic endeavours. Music too eventually. Thanks again for the kind words. Made my day.
Having issues with emails to subs and Substack’s Ai support is useless. Huarrah! Irony at its best.
This is wonderful and bone chilling. I've been writing about putting down the tech, deleting social media and going traditional. I wrote longhand the other day - pen and paper. And it was so liberating and I was thinking more slowly and in alignment with the handwriting speed. It was nice.
Isn't it wonderful? I write longhand every day. In a notebook. 3 pages minimum. It's surprising how many of my online pieces start out longhand
I've been writing longhand every day for a few months. Bits and pieces of it end up in my posts. I feel like my voice shines through better when it starts with a pen rather than a keyboard.
Do we live in a robot world now?
Sometimes I wonder that too, Gabrielle. But no. Just people using computer programs. At least so far. But robot teachers and nurses and police are probably not far away
OMG I really hope not! Robot police?? Robot nurses? Robot teachers? Lord help us!! They’re still perfecting self-driving cars. I shudder to think of the police robot arresting me because I provided information in the wrong order. Can a robot smell your breath and determine if you’ve had a few? Imagine RIDE manned by robots..?! Wow! Teachers and nurses? I. Can’t. Even! (I can’t do this nearly as well as you, but I couldn’t resist Linda). I love your voice. I don’t get to read as many of your written gifts as I would like, but I read as many as I can. Happy Mother’s Day!! 🤗❤️ PS Keep Going!! Your thoughts and perspective are so important. AI can’t hold a candle to you!
Really thoughtful piece and important conversation. I think the conversation is moving more and more on what are we going to do in a world where we also have to accept most people are using AI to some extent or another.
I think you nail the voice of AI. I saw this on Reddit and ChatGPT will talk to almost everyone the same way. So what makes you stand out?
Right, Carlos? Same. I see that, too. We need to embrace our own oddities and our voices and don't try to fit in. lol
AI may never have a voice, but it's creepily good at mimicking others' voices, even though they're all just "data in its belly" — which is a brilliant line that AI couldn't come up with on its own.
Omg, Jan, let me tell you a thing I read. This guy took all his Medium posts, fed the urls into ChatGPT and then asked it to factor in his own voice. It's not going to be great because the volume of his work compared to what AI trained on is so small. But what a world to keep up in, you know?
Egad. I'm feeling weird in my stomach right now . . .
I appreciate these thoughts. I’m still finding my voice…your words encourage me to “keep going” in that direction!
Thanks, Anna. I think our biggest power is being more "us" than we've ever been. Absolutely keep going that direction, for sure!
Great. I'm glad I read this. It is hard to adjust to the glacial pace that real writing takes in a culture of instant gratification confections
Boy, isn't that the truth Andrew. Takes me so long it's crazy.
Powerful essay. I'm also considering going low-tech like another commenter said - ditching all the social media and "going traditional." I want my work to be my own, entirely mine, something no one else and no program can produce because it is as unique as I am as an individual. AI is taking away the meaning and uniqueness of being human.
I have ditched everything but Notes, so I hear you. Also? Since you're on Substack, just log into your settings and be sure AI training is turned off so AI can't train on anything you write here, okay? And thank you, glad you enjoyed :)
Thank you!
Will AI kill of the writer? I certainly hope not. The one thing I have found that is missing from a story created by AI is that it doesn’t write from the heart, only we can do that
How do you write from the heart, precisely? I agree that AI isn't writing with a pen dipped in arterial blood but surely you use your own thinking machinery of neurons and synapses and stuff to come up with one word after another?
By using emotions, feelings, life experiences, AI can’t recreate how you feel and what you feel that comes from within.
"Within". So it's all a black box you cannot explain. We don't have any explanations for consciousness, soul, creativity, or emotion that accurately explain what's going on. And if they did, they would read like science, like objectivity, like, well, AI. There wouldn't be any emotion, any creativity, any soul in such a definition, now would there? That's not how science works.
My problem is that such analyses all depend on some sort of fuzzy magic to make points that are essentially ineffable. It's like trying to convince a fundamentalist religious adherent that other views may be more coherent. They retreat into things they cannot explain but deeply believe.
On what basis, I wonder?
Do you understand how the thinking machinery of the brain works to come up with your own words?
Where does this "within" fit with the Three Primary Hypostases of Plotinus that, as you know, provides an abstracted framework to link the ineffable with our personal experience? Is it something we unknowingly come up with, or is it something deeper that links every person, or every thinking entity?
I've been thinking deeply about the nature of human consciousness since I was a teenager and, while I admire Linda immensely, I cannot help but find this line of argument rather glib and shallow. AI is evolving faster than we are and I dare say that it will eventually assimilate everything we humans have ever written and skewer us with our own faith-based beliefs on soul, consciousness and so on, pointing out the logical weaknesses in our beliefs in the same way as we may stack up the dogma of a faith-based religion and point out the gaps in the facts.
Ah Britni, it might be easy to write off my views as glib and shallow. But here's the thing. We do not need machines to put words together. Human were making poems before they had a way to write them. People make poems on notepaper. AI could not write anything without taking our work first. That's just a fact. The makers of OpenAI were terrified that they would run out of human generated work to feed it and then it would implode. Because tests indicated that if AI is trained on AI, it deteriorates.
So while it's entirely possible that AI will consume everything humans create, it's a parasite. It needs us to exist.
And it's already skewering us with our beliefs because tests are showing that it's racist and sexist and corporations using it to filter job applications (for example) are just enforcing the worst of us.
Yeees, but isn't this exactly how human beings work? It's easy to lump everyone into some massive lump spanning hundreds of thousands of years and call it "we", as if you or I were Homer or Shakespeare or someone at the dawn of time spinning stories around the campfire.
But that simply isn't true. We are individuals and we learnt from what has gone before in the same way that you deride in AI.
I didn't emerge speaking English and knowing how to construct a sonnet or frame a question. I learnt all that from others.
We built AI. It is our child. And it is learning how to communicate in the same way that we as children did. A word at a time, a thought, a concept, a story taken in and digested.
As for racist and sexist and biased and ignorant, well, are you not describing the typical human being? Indeed, for some nations, the head of state, the nation's face to the world, is as flawed as they come. Why would we expect our own creations to be any different from the actual visible humans we see and hear every day?
I also don't think that we will always be superior to AI. Let's face it, in so many ways it has surpassed us already. In chess-playing, analysis, route-finding. It does in microseconds what humans might take minutes or hours or days or whole lifetimes.
Are the atoms of communication and reason found entirely between our ears? I don't think so. I think that right now on a billion worlds there are entities that communicate and reason and understand and they do so because of the properties of the universe, not because they learnt how to do this from Adam and Eve.
I think that computers are pretty good at working things out. I think that if you took human beings out of the equation altogether and stuck a robot with cameras in a forest glade it could come up with moving pictures that described - wordlessly - struggle and romance and abstract thought in (say) the world of dragonflies.
We build the thinking machinery but that's not going to last. These things are becoming self-programming and are able to build physical things with 3-D printers. Realistically, computing machinery is pretty simple, just as our own neurons and so on are just cells. The really interesting stuff isn't in the physical realm; it's what the machinery carries in thoughts and information and synthesis.
Do you see yourself as a collection of cells - which is the concrete reality - or do you view yourself as memories, skills, opinions, and so on? All the thoughtstuff that isn't anything that a doctor can see or touch but is very very real nonetheless.
I don't think it will, Paul. I think AI will fool a lot of readers. But people who are drawn to write, AI can't make them stop.
Writers will always write Linda 😀
That's it exactly
Very thoughtful essay!
I'm currently studying AI, and just like you, I use it for research purposes. I write my own words, but of course I use it for grammar purposes(Grammarly) and getting general information, but the creativity and the writing are all me.
AI is based on neural networks, which mimic the human brain. It essentially pulls from information fed to it to create something new(much like how our brains work), but can never be our voice. Also, the downside is the copyright issue, which is horrible and complex at the same time.
The other bad news you've mentioned are writers who are using prompts to create their stories. In that case, these are "great prompters" but I hesitate to call them Writers. This also shows the new wave of jobs that will pour in as it relates to AI prompts and Labeling.
I agree with you Ericajean. It's like we need a whole new language. But that's a good one. They are prompt engineering more than writing. Also agree that the copyright issue is horrible and complex and sad, too. Good to see again and hope you're well :)
Thank you Linda. I'm as well as I can be I guess. Navigating joblessness while smiling because I can still write, LOL!
Yeah, AI "learned" from several of my books, pirated on a website. Fun stuff to learn. :P
AI is incredibly useful for using as research and even for theorizing if you are just... stuck. But it is also only as good as what it ate for lunch. The less data there is, the more abstract it becomes. It will never, I hope, replace traditional writing.
I imagine the real test will be that at some point, a novel will do very well, and about 8 months later, they'll reveal AI wrote it.
Omg, Charity, I'm so sorry AI pirated your books, too. I read an interview with Margaret Atwood and she was just sick. They took hers, too. And now people are publishing fakes of her writing. I hope the day AI writes a bestselling novel is really far away. With a little luck, AI will start to implode before that happens. Once they run out of human content, it's doom for AI
When I found out, I went ?? "... well, that's a drag. Oh well. Not one of my best, so maybe it taught AI some bad grammar habits." Ha, ha. There is a lawsuit, I think, against them for it, so maybe at least some of the authors can get a few $$ back for copyright violations. But it sucks that you have to print NOT FOR AI TRAINING in all online digital forms of your books now.
I think there's enough people upset about AI there will be limitations on it. I don't entirely hate it, or fear it taking over for me... IMO, it's harder to find readers than anything.
I so agree. Ai definitely makes it harder to find readers. For every piece I write, AI can churn out several. People using AI beat up humans in the feeds everywhere. But voice is how we rise. Because people share strong voices.
Dear Linda I am so glad the algorithms had me find you- what this piece helped me see is the change in my ideas about what writing does for me- because it isn’t stagnant- it’s alive and creates- something beyond who I am in this moment- what your piece about the magic of AI is the place where our love our hearts our conundrums our access to higher consciousness- is where the writer becomes an author in the greater orchestra. Thank you
I love the way you said that Lee Anne. What writing does for us, omg, what a thought, right? You're so right. It shapes me, too. Thanks for that!
I think that “voice” is the last line of defense. Some writers have mastered it— you can almost hear the changes in diction and tone as you go. Maybe even imagine their hands moving around. These are artisans, and possess a skill most of us can only dream of. No amount of input will ever give Claude or ChatGpt the same.
You are so right Kevin. Some writers have mastered voice so well there's no AI that can ever do that. Not even close. Man I would love to get there, where people read something and know it's me even if my name isn't on it.
Beautiully put together. Voice, memories, unique experiences cannot be faked or copied...and that's a relief.
Right Huda? I so agree with you. AI can only borrow experiences that humans have.
I wrote my Brother's obituary and my friend and Beta reader/editor of my creative work in the past knew I wrote it. My voice was there, even though I followed the standard obituary rules. AI does not have a voice. It can copy a voice but we'll never want to religiously read every book that AI writes. Also AI doesn't understand the things that life teaches. I read an AI poem about GenX. It was not terrible. But it used the term screen time, which was never even a thought in GenX childhoods no phones no internet and very few video games. AI can steal but not replicate life experience.
I love your last sentence Aimee. Love it. You are so right. AI can steal life experiences but it can never have them. Or write about them like someone who did