A Writer Unafraid of AI
I love friends with whom you can bring your whole self. They see you, they love you, no judgements.
And I love when those same friends bring a depth of curiosity and reflection about life and the world. I love when it’s inevitable that when you spend time together, you can’t help but get into deep and philosophical conversations about life, growth, healing, purpose, humanity.
The topic of AI came up last night with just such a hang.
And I woke up the next morning with these words spilling from my pen.
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The quality of a thing seeds at the origin and then transmits from there.
The “thing” could be a company, a product, a brand, a new technology, a social media page, a piece of art, a piece of writing.
When you read something ChatGPT has written and you feel empty, hollow, or nothing—that is because of the quality imbued in the thing from its origin.
When you listen to a piece of music and feel moved to tears by the beauty, that is because it is imbued with a quality seeded in its origin by the consciousness of its creator.
The other night I was listening to Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, one of the most magnificent pieces of music ever written, certainly for the theater, and personally, I think it stands on par with the greatest music ever written. This is a piece of music/lyrics at times poignant, heartbreaking, tender, dark, vengeful, soaringly expansive, funny, witty, playful. It has angelic purity next to the darkest dissonance. As I listened, I felt all of this in me, I felt it touch me and move me in a way that activated the depth of my humanity, from joy to despair. Only human creation can do that. Or—the creation of the divine. Call it nature, if you will. Call it God. Call it the universe.
The other interesting moment for me listening to Sweeney Todd was that I had the very vivid memory recalled of a friend, Gary, singing the song “Johanna” in a production of Sweeney Todd I was in back in 2008. It was one of my favorite experiences of my 20s and one of my favorite theater experiences, and it was a tremendous gift to get to hear Gary sing that song each night. He is one of the kindest and most amazing human beings, and he has one of the most extraordinarily gifted, effortlessly beautiful voices you’ll ever hear. My point here is: The gift of his art, his creation, and the way it danced and layered onto Sondheim’s creation, was still with me, so much so that not only was the memory clear as day, but I was hearing Gary, feeling his essence and the beauty of his gift, as I listened and as I cried, 3,000 miles and fifteen years from the original thing, simply listening to a Spotify track in my office.
All art contains seeds that come from the essence of its creator. This means the ability of art to transmit through time and space, reach inside the cavity of someone’s chest and touch something there—move us, change us, illuminate us, and give us new meaning about what it means to be human—that can only occur from the transmission of one human heart to another.
So when people ask me if, as a writer, I’m nervous about AI… no, my loves. Not one fucking bit.
AI cannot write in such a way that the humans reading it feel the energy or essence of the writer in the transmission. AI cannot write witty, humorous, dirty limericks for someone that reference Cole Porter lyrics. AI cannot write the nuanced human characters and profound themes of a book that stands the test of hundreds of years. It cannot write Stephen Sondheim lyrics to “A Little Priest.” (Please, please do yourself the favor and go listen to “A Little Priest.” Then, I challenge you to head over to ChatGPT and tell it to write a duet for male and female voice in major key waltz time, with long-held, whole-step dissonances at the ends of phrases, with the lyrics listing dozens of professions utilizing humorously rhyming double entendres with the implied suggestion of what they would be like baked into pies. Make sure you tell it to include witty, dark, depraved humor and playful, perverse flirtation between the two characters. Write back and tell me how it does. 😂 )
At the end of the day, AI cannot write something that transmits the depth of someone’s heart and the unique flavor of their essence, and sends it through time and space to land in another human and explode open with joyful sparkles.
Why? Because AI cannot bottle your essence. It cannot. It cannot express the magic and mystery of the human experience that all the great artists and philosophers through all of time have been called to share. If you need a poem written merely in correct and rhyming form with appropriate subject matter included… knock yourself out with ChatGPT. (Then compare it to great poetry and fall over laughing.) If you need a functional essay on a topic you don’t understand… go right ahead. (P.S. Your teacher will still know if you don’t understand it.) If you need technical writing to deliver facts in accepted technical jargon with a clear functional purpose… by all means, save yourself the time. But these things are not art. Art is not utility. It is not merely the correct arrangement of words or atoms. It is also not a fluffy, nice-to-have, novelty moment where we can forget our serious J-O-B-S for a moment and make some cute A-R-T. (Totally stole that one from Brené Brown.) Art is a reflection of our humanness and a call to expand more in it. It is how a consciousness, a divine intelligence that is far greater than our little human minds, can flow through someone’s unique individual consciousness to create something that then ripples out into the world and changes someone else. As Seth Godin wrote, "Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”
So let’s let ChatGPT work on solving problems like trash and clean water for everyone. Can it sort and answer a percentage of our emails for us? Great. But good lord, let’s please stop with the stories about how it will create its own art and render artists obsolete. Sondheim, Rumi, and Miles Davis are rolling with laughter in their graves.
To be honest, right now all of our glorifying and supposing and predicting and worrying about AI… isn’t that still a human narrative? It’s a human created narrative that, frankly, ceases to exist if we cease to tell it. The technology itself loses its power if we opt not to use it.
Honestly, I look around this world and I see so much misapplication of human genius: We’re creating things that harm others, harm the planet and animals, driven by greed. We’re creating things that numb, distract, and disconnect us from our bodies, from nature, from our inner intelligence, and from our better selves. So much that we’re creating is seeded with bad consciousness and intentions.
And we need to take responsibility for it. It is up to us how we do things. What we create is a choice. How we do it is a choice. The consciousness and intentions behind it ARE A FUCKING CHOICE. So. Let’s each make something great with our choices. Something that has the seeds of love in it. The seeds of the truest and best parts of us in it. The seeds of devotion instead of greed. Of beauty instead of vapid lifelessness. Of authenticity instead of fake-ness or manipulation. Of human connection instead of separation. Of pristine integrity instead of catering to the lowest common denominator. Of watering and tending instead of plucking.
Maybe, maybe, if we can execute this moment of technological advancement with the very purest consciousness we can muster, AI can be used to help humanity on a scale that we could never execute manually. Maybe we also recognize that there are moral moments where the inventor should, indeed, destroy his creature. Maybe we recognize that, while technology can be a useful tool when used correctly, ultimately we are here to evolve our humanness, not engineer the most impressive shit and strip ourselves of that humanness in the process. Maybe we need a big dose of humility to realize that the capacity of the human mind is more like a drop of water in an ocean far more powerful and intelligent than we are.
Let’s not forget that the consciousness, the intentions, the integrity, and the authenticity of anything we create can be felt by those who encounter it.
So as we stare down these potential timelines, where we seem to be creating increasingly more possibilities of destroying ourselves as a species, we will need the artists and the philosophers, the seers and the oracles, more than ever. Because we will need our humanness to survive.