If I ask Google anything, the first response is a generic summary or a paid advertisement. When I shop online, AI summarizes reviews, and an increasing number of news stories (and newsletters) seem to be AI-written or supported.
In case you haven’t noticed, AI is embedded in everything in a way it never was before. We are going the way of the baseline, crowd-sourced, group-think, convenience-over-everything response. Technology promises to make life easier, which is a half-truth, but it’s one many are willing to accept so as not to be “left behind.”
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The editing software available with AI is brilliant. It can do things I don’t want to do, such as organize data and complete citations. Sure, it might do so in a way that is completely wrong, but more often than not, it’s a passable attempt. This time last year, I don’t think we could’ve said that.
AI is a big, umbrella technology, after all. But its role in the literary world (don’t get me started on education) is already proving destructive.
I like to hold steady to the idea that you can’t buy the valuable things in life. It’s something my mother always emphasizes.
“I’m proud of you, honey, but … I don’t love you for what you do,” she likes to say. What a phenomenal woman, right?
AI might be able to write a blog, generate an image, provide quick and shitty research, and more. It can pretend to feel and mimic others’ feelings but can’t actually “be.”
To be imperfect and not just do what we set out to do, but be exactly as we are, is a human right. And somehow, somewhere, we learn from messing up along the way. If we go baseline for convenience, we lose the good stuff of life.
*Steps off soapbox*
*Steps back on soapbox*
Why bring this up again?
OK. Maybe you disagree, but as an artist, I love the struggle. I love/hate my typos and digressions (see above). I love my fourteenth draft better than my thirteenth, and I love my critics. I love them all because they simply are, and they are proof that I am doing work that’s being seen by other humans, which means a lot to me.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been receiving emails with lines like “This will be our final newsletter” or “We’ll miss you all!” from literary journals and literary orgs. I also notice some of my poet friends, who I thought were lifers, have The Block for the first time or are taking up things like macrame instead.
I realize that I will not stop AI. Though, I do in my dreams.
What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, however, is what I can do. What writers and artists need right now (also, what I need right now). How can I help them (me) to find sustainability and prowess?
And I keep coming back to the value of the artist’s voice and the responsibility of the whole community to honor it.
I’ve been reading submissions for a work-in-progress contest that we’re holding at Unleash, and I adore the feeling of finding a new voice that rings so authentic and clear and novel to me as a reader that I can experience life anew. This is what good literature does. This is what a single, human voice—one with purpose and fed by imagination and wonder—can do. It can enable us to see what we couldn’t before.
To try to erase this in favor of convenience is a desire that confounds me. But more than figuring it out, or trying to figure it out, I feel compelled to honor more individual voices, to encourage others to do the same, and to continue to write what I know can be replicated but can never be recreated.
I think I’ll stay on my soapbox. I like it here. I like the few extra inches it gives me, and I like the idea that I might be able to see a little further with the view. I want to see further, too, because I’d like to see beyond what’s convenient and toward the possibility that is alive for us as artists at this time.
But I don’t know exactly what that is.
I want to say … Let’s support and uplift each other from a place of mutual benefit, not mutual payoff. The benefit, after all, comes down to a true reverence and attention to a work. And the value, deeply felt, is undeniable on both sides.
So all this to ask: If you could wave a magic wand right now and get any creative wish answered or support you need (aside from cash), what would you wish for? What would keep you going?
Mutual benefit, not mutual payoff. Yes. What is more beautiful and real than work that is both?
If I could wave a wand and get any support I needed, it would be a year off work. Just to heal and write. That's it. Ha!