Should People Use AI When They Write?: No

The power of imagining depends upon something distinct from me. – Rene Descartes

There is nothing more magic and beautiful than lines forming across paper. It’s all there is. It’s all there ever was. – Charles Bukowski

In a small room, a woman sits at an even smaller desk. There is nothing except a bed, an old lamp, and a few books. She rests her chin on a blank notebook, staring at the patterns in the wood, listening to the wind knock on the walls. She contemplates heeding its request. Opening the door to let life in, leaving the desk and the suffocating room behind. There is no clock in the room. But she can hear ticking. She laughs. She feels like she knows she is imagining things. She pulls her hair, throws her head up to the ceiling, and rocks back in her chair until it almost hits the floor. Enough – A voice loud enough to silence all the other voices in her head. You know what to do … She sighs, yeah fucker, I do, stares at the pen – brings it to the empty page.

This woman represents anyone who is a writer. She may even be one of your favorites, who, before writing the book you have lovingly encased on your shelf now, suffered in that very room. The room is a metaphor for the mind – a place we all visit – a place we can’t leave. Sometimes, when we go into our rooms to create, it is a palace of color, fireflies of ideas aimlessly bobbing around, our hands clamoring after them with open mouths. Other times, we are greeted by the stark, desolate room of our aforementioned heroine – empty walls, white pages, an ethereal wind tapping on the doors of our future. It is this room that we are most confused. But it is also in this room where the greatest miracles happen. When a person can create something out of nothing, that is when they are a writer. Tomaž Šalamun reflects on the progression of creation in his poem “Writing”:

Writing

poetry is

the most

serious

act in

the world.

Just as

in love,

everything

is revealed.

The words tremble

if they are

true.

Just as the body

trembles in

love,

the words tremble

on the paper.

When we write, we must be as vulnerable and honest as we are with our lovers – the two are synonymous. Humanity is a messy subject. We are soft bodies caught in life-long storms of indecision, passion, and our own egos. A writer, and a good one, expresses this universal aspect through their craft. The only way to do that is to take it as the most “serious act in the world.” An act we definitely cannot entrust to the hard tailed, ambivalent codes of a computer – the antithesis of a human being.

In Aldous Huxley’s landmark 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, a futuristic society exists where people are not birthed but created – genetically engineered to fit their class systems, and placed in a society of placated individuals under the influence of “soma,” a happy drug. They use this drug, a lack of human intimacy, and other deprivation tactics to avoid strong feelings or opposing beliefs – anything that would put a stable society at risk. In a conversation between The Savage and The Controller (their names say it all), The Controller says, “That’s the price you have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.” The Savage replies, “But they don’t mean anything.”

The “feelies” and the “scent organ” could be compared to really, really bad TV and movies today. It’s not that this fluff hasn’t always existed. It’s just that, with the intrusion of AI in the arts, its capacities reign unchecked. AI can spit out a piece of fiction, poetry, art, film, or whatever you can think of at will. The more we use it, the more its database grows and the more power it has.

AI is more than input and output – it learns, and its algorithms use what we give it to emulate us. In Keith Holyoak’s article “Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?” for The MIT Press Reader, he writes, “Computer programs can now learn from enormous sets of data using methods called deep learning. What the programs learn, and how they will behave after learning, is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to predict in advance.” When it is just as easy to create a poem, write an essay, or paint a picture, as it is to Google a simple question, what does that say about the value of art? What does that say about the way we attach value to art?

I was having coffee with Motif’s poetry curator, Jaybird Walker, the other day, and, of course, AI spilled into the conversation. We both lamented under the trees, discussing how AI is taking over, allowing the next generation of students to scrape by without thinking critically. He squinted at me from under his hat across the table, “I thought AI was supposed to help us save time so that the artists could focus on their art, not doing the art for us.”

You’d be amazed at what happens when you allow yourself ample time to sit with something in that scary room of the mind. The act of melting the mists of an idea into a cohesive piece of writing is sacred. So join the woman in the room, close the computer, throw it out the window, whatever – stare at your own walls and wait until you feel like something is standing on your chest, and the only way to release the pressure is to pick up the pen and write like an electric bullet is flying down your arms. •