Anthem for Analog(ue)
Productivity vs humanity
This is a non-fiction rant. Crossworlds Fantasy Friday will return next week with a tale about crofters and a kelpie, but today I really had to get this off my chest. I understand that people use AI for many different things - creating images to accompany their stories, for example. I have my own opinions about that too, but this post is (in the main) about using AI to produce fiction.
Artificial intelligence is (almost) guaranteed to make you more productive, they said. It can process vast amounts of data, organise your workflow, make prose out of prompts! It can save you time, it can give you IDEAS!
Oh, ideas, is it? I said. Fantastic. Brilliant. What a relief to finally have a tool that can relieve me of the burden of creation.
Maybe, in a few years, AI can look at the sunrise for me and describe the colours of the breaking dawn, and how it would have made me feel if I had witnessed it. In the future, could it create a video of my daughters dancing so they wouldn't have to learn the steps, or simulate their uncontrollable laughter when they are no longer able to think of something to laugh about by themselves? Will AI be able to send me a quick synopsis of my life in 500 words or less? Could it draw me a picture of how the world would have looked if we had all chosen to use our own minds instead?
You’re overreacting, they said. You’re being dramatic. AI is just a tool to help us be -
By all means, tell me again just how productive AI can make me. I don't say you're wrong. I only say that you don't understand the extent to which using it will un-make you. It might begin with a few parameters on a Friday afternoon when your brain feels like cotton wool, but it's a slippery slope. The more you ask of it, the more it will take from you. Until, somewhere down the line, you will no longer be a human being, a human thinking, a human making, creating. You will be a glorified programmer, perhaps. Or perhaps you will be the one who is being programmed. After all, those ideas won't be yours, that output won't be yours, you will no longer be thinking for yourself.
What is it that we call those things again, those tools we use to help us achieve our goals, which move and give every appearance of being sentient, yet cannot think for themselves? Ah, yes - machines.
When you give AI the time-consuming, monotonous tasks, you lose the foundations of your work. It is no longer a labour of love. You will never discover all the rabbit holes and tiny journeys your mind could go on during the process, because there will be no process.
(Laborare est orare. To work is to pray. To put in the hours is to touch the divine.)
When you give AI the task of coming up with the rough ideas, the big picture, the plot, how much are you really giving away?
Your art?
Your heart?
Your humanity?
Oh, but I’m forgetting how productive you will be. You will leave the likes of me in your productive dust.
And I will be glad.
Leave me far, far behind. Please. Leave me standing on a mountain, looking out over the broken and beautiful city, with only my thoughts, my words - my own words - to keep me company. I will write them on scraps of paper, I will scratch them into wood and stone. I will raise my voice and shout my imperfect, uncurated, unrated words to the sky.
They will rise and fade like the cry of the eagle, like the howl of the wolf, for they come from the same place: a primeval place of instinct. The eagle cries because it is an eagle; the wolf howls because it is a wolf.
We create because we are human.
We are human because we create.
NOTE
This is my personal opinion, from my own unique perspective. I regard the insidious and haphazard way in which AI (as a creative tool) has been introduced as nothing short of terrifying. I've heard several interviews with leaders and CEOs in the field, and all of them have described this new tech as 'scary' or 'disturbing', but none of them have let that come between them and making money, and being 'first'.
I know some of my colleagues at the office are using AI to save time, and others to actually do their work for them, which seems incredibly short-sighted to me. I'm staring at a future where I lose my creative job to a machine, and instead become a gatekeeper for a piece of software, checking its output for 'good' English.
I'm angry when I hear my daughter telling me about kids in her class using AI to write their essays, and the teachers not even realising. I'm sad when she tells me that, actually, there wasn't that much difference between their 'work' and hers.
I can understand kids cutting corners, though. What riles me most of all is the people who use AI to write articles and stories and books that they are CHOOSING to create. I believe you can call yourself a writer if you produce the written word, no matter what the standard of your work is. We're all learning all the time, and some writing will always be better, more engaging, more well-structured, easier to read, etc. than other writing. But is the ten-year-old kid who writes a story about a ghost in the attic any less of a writer than Gabriel García Márquez? I don't think so. They are both weaving stories out of words and their own imagination. They are both, by definition, writers.
My bottom line is this: If you use artificial intelligence to turn your ideas into sentences and paragraphs and pages, if your words are NOT drawn from your own imagination, your experiences, your love and fear and pain, you are NOT a writer. Don’t call yourself a writer. Don't you dare.