Should Creative Writers Embrace AI? NAI ! Lets choose Human’Mess’n’Mistakes instead!
Yo, em dash — I feel really bad for you — it’s not-at-all fair — you’re a bohemian — mates with Emily Dickinson — a daft, loud-mouthed, dramatic, hilarious piece of punctuation, ahhh— … but AI LLMs have kidnapped you — capsized your reputation — curled you into a corporate hook — and now most people know you — but — they don’t know the real you — and — I’m sorry this has happened to you, really, em dash — it is just sad, sure — pure, y’know, ahh…
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Humans make mistakes. I think that it is now a form of protest to be mistakevorous with our writing and mistakefully write conventionally mistakeiferous unconventionalstuff. AI can boil and bubble some toilet trouble essay in say…ten seconds… and there won’t be no grammar mistakes and there won’t be any typoos and there won’t be any craZY, ‘wrong’ ideas and there won’t be no soul either. Although, soul, soul is an easy word to throw around…you can hold it by it’s bottom-s-curve for example and hook-toss it satisfactorily…but the question of what is it and why we should herald human soul over a nicely polished AI LLM word-salad bowl is not quite so easy.
So, this article will try to propose why writing absolutely anything yourself rather than using AI LLLMS (are the all-caps starting to annoy you yet? Look, their letters have soaked up all the water) helps us to understand the un-understandable ‘soul’ more than a barmecide bot ever could.
(I mistakeiferously ended a sentence on ‘could’ because…)
The Copy-Cat False Equivalence
In LLMs we have built a younger sibling’s worst nightmare: the copy cat. Wherein, we cry out to the world ‘hey stop saying what I’m saying so accurately’ and it malevolently mimics hey — stop saying what I’m saying so accurately.
I remember once being advised by a primary school teacher to not be angry at a copy cat and instead to take it as a compliment; the copy cat liked something about you, and this was their way of expressing that.
However, we cannot equate this same motivation to AI chatbots, they copy our way of chatting, our way of writing essays and most importantly our love of cutting corners not because they admire it but because that is how they are programmed: to generalise, skip to the quickest answer (even if it means misspelling strawberry) and blend the average opinions that have been inputted by select people onto interwebs into sivved juices that imitate and make your mind’s innate prompt jaded.
Sorry, that was a long sentence.
Frankly, they’re a different type of mimic… but the solution is sort of the same and applying this same solution will teach us why we write by ourselves in the first place and how to do it even better.
When you want a mimic to stop, what do you do? You say something that they don’t want to, you say ‘I’m a stupid poopy copy-cat’ or something along those lines.
Soooooo, when it comes to AI, I’m not saying we should all self-depreciate ourselves in the hopes of lethargising AI, instead I’m saying that having a copy cat wills us to write something that does not want to be copied, something honest, weird and most importantly, outsmarting and satirical!
When AI writing imitates our writing, it is not an equivalence, it is a fresh, new motivation for us to write back something that is utterly uncopyable, beautifully uncopyable, simply (u) *n +c ‘o \p =y “a &b |l )e!
Embrace your haecceity or join a homogenous artificiality?
Granted, not everybody likes writing but point supplanted, if everybody was asked to fill one page with writing, nobody’s page would be exactly the same and the more pages given, the more illuminated each human’s haecceity would become — which is to say, whether you loathe or love writing, it is one of the many human crafts which can convey our caved uniqueness into being.
Never before has this simple fact been more under threat than now. Now people can hand their haecceity to AI and be a part of a group whose pages all look the same, a hivemind that makes the scent of honey and no more.
But to reduce my slightly hyperbolic sentimentality a bit, I realise that using AI to send an email compared to writing that email yourself doesn’t change the email thaaaaat much as the email had to be written quite formally and conventionally, so, the difference is not that big. That being said, an email still remains to be your message to another human being and an email is a slippery slope that once AI can do it for you – suddenly – you feel it can do a lot more too, and you forget that only you in this moment had the opportunity of writing this email, but instead, you joined the homogeneous artificiality.
Maybe I am being pedantic.
But I think every word written by you brushes the soil off the artefact of you. An email is not just an email.
My final paragraph will now emphasise the global stakes.
3. The veritable pen moral imperative
Today and going forward, to write something yourself is to let the act of your writing be an ethical statement in it of itself. By not choosing to support systems that drain water at extortionate rates, that are causing technology prices to skyrocket, certain demographics to have power outages, supporting complete military control, surveillance and causing people to commit suacide and become even more insular…,your writing in its personal opposition is an ethical addition to the world.
Now, to face counter-arguments, yes, writing on a page uses up trees, and you could be writing on a laptop that has been unethically created and saying that everything we do will find its negative impact in the end, so why bother caring about any of it… is a somewhat valid argument.
However, the impacts of AI (as I have outlined with the list that could be oh so much longer) are simply worse, and with AI, we have such a greater choice on whether to use it; we do not need it for writing like we need paper, we have the insular surface covered already!
It can be easy to feel like your actions don’t matter, thinking what difference will I make, that computer science student is using it everyday so I can use it to edit my story one time…but…true writing has been and always will be a political force for change in the world despite whatever themes, so if you are against the use of AI in writing, then don’t use AI in writing. Period.
Why write if not for change? That’s the whole point: to change a blank page. Seeing it all generated at once is unnatural, illusory and sheathes a dark underbelly beneath.
Ditch the AI bots, embrace your ding an sich, be a mistakeiferous human, it’s more fun that way. If you don’t want to do it for yourself or fellow human beings, — then for the love of Dickinson, do it for the em dash!
Written by: Ben Lynch (ben_lynch__)
Edited by: Shaunamay Martin Bohan (f4wnfatale)
