There was a time when I’d talk a lot about writing with writers and people who wanted to write. I’d do this at conventions and in the classes I was teaching, two things I’m not doing right now, and inevitably the question would come up, “What books would you suggest on the craft of writing?”
Everyone has a favorite book they suggest. Real ones recommend On Writing by Stephen King. Herbs will recommend something like Story by Robert McKee. Precious ones will recommend books by Bukowski or Atwood or Bird by Bird. There are no wrong answers, but my hyper-precious ass will always recommend What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, a book that has something to do with running and something to do with writing but mostly has to do with persistence.
I used to blog a lot. Like, a lot. Back when I was on Blogger I did a project called The Moose in the Closet where I did an autobiographical post every M-F for a full year with a couple of bonuses for a total of 263 stories over a year. I did the math at the end of it all and it ended up being 207,744 words for the memoir posts, alone. That same year I did NaNoWriMo and a bunch of non-memoir posts, as well, bringing my word total to 336,914 words. I also did 17 columns, edited some comics, wrote some comic shorts, etc. It was, by far, my most prolific year. But, you know, I started that year by setting aside the time and developing the habit. This is probably why What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is the book I recommend to folks who want to write - the lesson it teaches you is to just write, you’ll figure out the rest.
What I also love about What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is that it uses running as the baseline narrative that is used to talk about other things, like writing. That’s my writing style, in general - I’m going to write about a single thing but go on a lot of tangents and use punctuation how I feel like it and, in the end, I’m going to tie it all together. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see, you gap-toothed mother fucker!
I’ll get back to that.
I’ve gotten some good feedback on my first week of posting. It’s not a requirement to continue, but it’s good to see. As much as I like to say, “I’m writing for myself right now,” there’s no way that’s ever completely true. I mean…I’m posting what I write and sharing it. Hell, even when I journal I sometimes stop to think what someone would think about an entry if they find it after my death.
So thank you, sincerely, for the emails and the comments and the texts. Special shout-out to my friend Mal, who sent me two articles. I want to talk about one of them, The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. I have a job that I’m kind of good at, and that job has intersected with AI/ML for over a decade. In fact, the very first project that I was the PI on was a digital twin, a software component that performs a task the way a human would - mistakes, response time, etc. This was almost fifteen years ago now, and we had a team of cognitive psychologists who conducted interviews, helped us set up data collection events, modeled the resulting data, and created a software component that was reasonably OK at doing a very specific task as either a novice or an expert. And I gotta say - the five things that this article mentions about how to remain a human in a world of digital fakers are spot-on. I want to sort of extrapolate on several of those points and say the best way to be a human in your writing is to live a human life and to bring that life into your writing.
Liz got dental surgery this week. She got a tooth extracted. I came home from work today and she was getting out of her own car and, in the middle of the street in the middle of the day, I yelled over to her, “How’s it going, you gap-toothed mother fucker?” a phrase I never said in my life but, at the moment, I figured it would get a laugh. She was too busy taking videos of the crows that descend upon our block at sunset but that’s beside the point.
You can train a digital twin that writes just like me. You can feed it every bit of everything I’ve ever said online ever, across all platforms. You can feed it work memos and emails and everything else. You can feed it all of the data you can possibly collect from me, but it’ll never type the phrase, “You gap-toothed mother fucker.” I’ve never typed that phrase, I generally don’t type phrases that are tangential to that phrase, and it’s not like it’s a phrase that a lot of people are out there typing.
All that to say: Even a perfect digital twin is only a twin of the digital you. Even if you train it on 336,914 words written over a single year that digital twin will never call you a gap-toothed mother fucker.
When I used to teach classes, one thing I’d hear a lot is, “How do I protect my work?” This was usually asked by unpublished authors working on their first manuscript. My answer for them was always, “If someone steals your idea and does it better than you, the problem was you.”
Same for AI. If AI can do you better than you can, then you’re predictable. You don’t learn, you don’t change. The digital you is the same as the real you, and most likely the digital/real you is the same as a lot of other digital/real folks because a computer can be trained to replicate you.
We can’t fight the coming of AI-generated anything, it’s too late, it’s coming. But we, as individuals, can always beat it. Except at chess and whatnot.