*I apologize for the ridiculously low and gravely voice. Allergies taunt my voice, so I sound like I’m doing a voice over for a 1980’s movie trailer!”
Going to a museum is, for too many of us, a tedious thing. We wander the galleries the way we’d shuffle the aisles at Target, or wander an outlet mall, mostly unable to put together a coherent sentence about what we see in front of us, or why any of it matters.
I remember going to the Art Institute of Chicago several years ago, specifically to see Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Standing in front of it, I was overwhelmed by its beauty, and by the care of its presentation in that gallery.
A young couple walked up next to me, and the woman said to her boyfriend “Wow, that’s so cool,” and they just as quickly wandered away. Don’t get me wrong, the painting is cool. But she didn’t know what, exactly, made it cool, or why it’s considered a masterpiece. To be fair, I knew the painting, I knew about Seurat’s technique using pointillism, but I didn’t know much about Seurat himself, until later. Worse, I was illiterate about almost everything else in that amazing museum. There is no foul in not giving a damn about museums, or finding this, that and the other thing cool.
A museum, like a good book, should make you want to know more about what you’re looking at, to open its covers, so to speak. Galleries are built for this, to give people space to consider a work in context, alongside the others near it. It takes practice, patience, and choice. Without some connection to art, to history, to language, a museum is pretty dull. I still feel dumb when I don’t “get” something. But I’ve learned to slow down and let it reach me on some level first, and once I feel that connection, I go looking for the rest.
Writing, like standing in front of a work of art, is about describing reality: a place, a person, a thought, a feeling, an insight, past or present. Good writing isn’t just clean and legible. A grocery list is clean and legible. Good writing has the potential to move us. It takes dumb patience, at least for me, because writing is a bit like squinting into fog, like canoeing across a lake where the horizon’s disappeared into the vapor. I paddle forward, or think I do, and often end up somewhere that wasn’t on any map.
But these days writing, like reading itself, seems a bit old school, because now we’re all mesmerized by the flickering magic in our hands, the fifteen-second video, news reduced to masticated
AI has quickly allowed everyone to become the best writer. And what a loss. The idea that we should all read like college educated English majors, or novelists, is to lose our originality. I’m no Dickens or Steinbeck, but now I can run my writing through an AI overlay that mimics the greats. I don’t need to fight with an idea anymore, or learn a new thing. I can tell my AI buddy what I want it to say, and then claim that’s exactly what I was thinking, that’s what I meant to write all along. The AI is just helping me say the thing I was already thinking. I sound knowledgeable. My sentences are, well, they’re perfect. But that’s the problem. AI doesn’t do anything original.
What’s the point of thinking at all, when the machine can do it for me? What’s the point of writing, when it writes it for me? What’s the point of making an argument that used to require me to think, damn it, think, when I can offload that onto the LLM? I no longer have to feel dumb, because now I’m the smartest of all the smartest people that have ever been smart. Perfection isn’t human.
But making mistakes in my writing is part of honing not just the sentence, but the idea, the thought. The malapropism, the clumsy sentence, the paragraph that circles back on itself twice before it finds what it’s trying to say. What makes the mistakes important is that they’re evidence. Evidence that I was thinking, working something out, failing, working again. I wrote it, maybe it sounded stupid, so I wrote it again. Or I didn’t. A well written AI sentence is always a straight line. It’s always right. An AI writer is a groveling servant: yes master, you’re so smart, yes, you make the right point. A sentence I wrote without the AI gimp is more likely to be a crooked path, and that means I was there. It also means it’s more likely to be interesting.
My house is filled with stacks of books, and the collection is always growing. I read some. I read others. A few I finish as soon as I get them. Books are an old technology. They require slow thinking, thinking through, fighting with, crying over, being outraged about. When I turn to my AI instead of my book, or the page, or my pen, aren’t I abdicating my responsibility to learn, to arrive at what I’ve learned honestly? I’ve earned the insight.
I don’t like AI to write for me. I like it as an editor, to correct language and flag structural issues, ask questions. I write in my own words, my own version. To do otherwise is to choke my creativity, to shortcut the journey through the thicket, to guarantee I learn nothing about my own thought process.
I’m a hypocrite, of course. I use AI to create cover images for my podcast, because I don’t draw or do graphic design. I could learn. That’s too laborious. I could hire a designer. I can’t afford that. I use recipes to cook, rather than experiment or learn things the hard way, through years of trial and error. There are people “making music” with AI who can’t afford a band, who don’t write music, but who write lyrics. On and on.
But what AI can’t do for me is think. It can’t think through my ideas, or shape them, or use them in a style anyone would recognize as mine. Because AI is always, and forever, must be right.
Here’s a beautiful sentence written by Wendell Berry:
Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
Here’s how AI “fixed” it:
Some nights, in that loneliness, I swung among the scattered stars, held by nothing but a thin thread of faith.
Why the changes? “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness” is three separate ways of saying the same thing before the sentence even gets moving. “Some nights,” “in the midst of,” and “this loneliness” are all doing the same setup work, work that could collapse into one move.
“Swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith” stacks a lot of clauses between the verb and its object. By the time you reach “faith alone,” you’ve had to hold “swung... among... at the end of... thin thread of” in your head the whole way. Spoken aloud, that’s a lot of suspension before the payoff word lands.
And “faith alone.” Is “alone” modifying faith, meaning only faith, nothing else? Or is it echoing the loneliness from the top of the sentence? As written, it could be read either way, and the AI didn’t think you wanted that ambiguity.
Well, yes. Berry wanted the ambiguity. That was the point. AI didn’t rewrite the line to be better. It rewrote it to be right. But the original, for anyone who knows his work the way I do, is unmistakably his. In a future where AI does all the writing and all the thinking, everything becomes derivative. Every voice sanded down to the same one.
When I set out to write about what happened to me, my first words were little more than a hammer and a nail, bludgeoning the putridity of the claims against me. Anger given a pen, or a keyboard, will write reams of invective, crude and uncivil. Expletives as expression. Fire, and only fire. Running an AI engine through hundreds of pages of what I’d written was a lesson in humility and restraint. It kept pushing back, sanding down, clarifying, reducing my hostility. I hated it. But it gave me the most important insight I had about my own writing: that it would represent not just how I thought, but how I wanted to be perceived. I was angry, and had every reason to be, but that was skin, not bone. By writing angry, and seething with contempt it was predictable and banal. I might get across my rage for the wrongful and immoral things done to me, but that just feels good and goes nowhere, and it isn’t original.
That’s the thing about AI. It can be a useful tool for reflection, for replaying a line back to you, for questioning a premise. But the moment it takes the pen from my hand and writes the perfect sentence for me, I’ve forfeited the journey, and will never paddle out to that unknown outer bank, the one that can only be reached by word, and by time. My journey, as painful as it was, as dark as anything I’ve lived through, was an invitation to create something beyond a description of events, what happened, when, where. It was a chance to transcribe not just what was wicked, but what was good, beautiful and kind. And to do it with some measure of my own hand toiling on the page. To be original, in a way my accuser and her handful of supporters never had to be, or maybe, they never could.
