A bountiful and beautiful hello, Reader!
You've probably heard this; that heard fiction writers often don't know what a character will do next until the writing commences. The writer will even be quite surprised at something a character does.
Artists say the same thing. They don't know what will appear until they start the artwork.
Even when the writer or artist can imagine and picture what they're aiming for, the creation only comes to life when we begin.
It's as though there's life inside our body that's only revealed through a secret code.
And that secret code is only revealed through some secret action that's only revealed in the moment, not ahead of time.
It's certainly true for me. I'll have a vague idea of what's on my mind, and then through the action of writing my cloudy thoughts become clear.
It's like magic
Which is not to say there's no struggle.
It's more like the struggle IS the magic.
And the magic is made of the puzzle and obstacle course and mystery and adventure.
The magic is in the struggle, and the struggle is in the magic.
Yeah, sometimes the writing flows forth like a gift from who-knows-where.
But other times the good stuff is hidden behind one attempt and one draft and one edit after another.
It's often grueling, and that's okay. Somehow this is the magic.
And here's the magic of the magic
No writer or artist expects the magic to be of the "poof, it's done" variety.
We expect it to be more like "I can't believe I get to spend my time like this because I really love doing this, even though it's a lot of work."
So this is just one of the growing number of issues I have with Ai: there's no magic and no struggle.
Okay, so yes, I do want an immediate answer when I ask the google something like, "When did Columbus sail the ocean blue?"
Obviously I could also look it up in a book like we used to do—it's not as though we didn't already have the ability to find information.
But yeah, instant info is nice. You might say we're addicted to it at this point.
1492
But if I want to paint a picture of Columbus out there sailing the ocean blue; or write a poem about Linda, who made Columbus's pantaloons; or spin a tale about about a rat named Otis who was also on the ship Columbus was on, then I'm going to tap into the magic and the struggle of putting on my thinking cap and letting my imagination loose.
Because honestly, instantly getting something that used to take a load of thought and hands-on work just for the asking lacks magic.
And hey, "struggle" in this context is the same thing as "work" and "journey" and "process." Etc, etc. etc.
You get my drift.
But Ai doesn't get that drift. Ai has no story of its own. It has no journey, no struggle, no magic, and obviously, no actual life.
When we ask Ai to just do it for us, we miss the juicy parts of what we're trying to create.
The tirade escalates
But what's worse—and by worse I mean godawful at the lowest, most godawful level, is that when we're asking Ai for help writing, Ai has plagiarized its content from countless writers over countless centuries.
Maybe even me.
This is unethical. It's wrong.
Same thing for artists. The work of countless artists spanning centuries and centuries has been copied and stolen. Straight up.
Also unethical, also wrong.
We're not talking fuzzy ethics here or simply taking a few liberties. We're talking wrong.
I was at a meeting with a writer who, along with a friend, fed some of their pre-Ai-era writing into one of the Ai-powered Ai detectors (oh, the irony).
The program said that yep, their writing was Ai! But how could that be when it was written before Ai?
Aha!, the two of them said—it was because their writing had been plagiarized to create Ai.
So naturally Ai recognized it.
This is not a good sign.
Boring
So, my fellow traveler, I'm bummed about Ai. You can see that.
It's dumming and numbing us. It's dulling us. It's cutting off our magic and short-sheeting our journey.
It's teaching us to be okay with crappy interpretations of what real humans made. It's conditioning us that "fine" is actually really good.
It's making us boring.
Never mind that I'm not the only one wondering what the next batch of kids will be like—I'm talking about the kids learning Ai prompts in school.
But are kids still learning how to actually write, or mostly only learning to tweak their prompts and shore up Ai's bullshit output?
Here's to the lucky forthcoming kids who won't, for the life of them, be able figure out how to stroke Ai just right. Maybe they'll help keep future generations from making boring desirable.
But oh yeah!
There's the data centers, coming soon to hundreds of thousands of acres near you. And me.
Google just mowed down 400,000 acres of trees in Finland, in fact.
Illegally.
250,000 acres in one area plus 150,000 acres nearby. But you know how these monstrous corporations are—it's the old "we'll pay the fine later, we can afford it" attitude.
Corporations are plugging billions and billions of dollars into Ai, alongside their continual and escalating egregious treatment of our shared home and precious resources, all for the enrichment of someone who's not you and not me.
What I recommend you do with your riches
Of course, if you or I had billions of dollars I bet we'd spend them otherwise.
And while we may not have that much buried in Mason jars in the backyard, or hiding out somewhere in the Caymans, we do have an endless capacity for creativity and intellectual growth.
The more we of our creativity we spend, in fact, the more we have.
This is how human creativity works. This is how human ingenuity works. This is how the brain works.
The more we use our riches, the more capacity we have to create more.
So spend those human riches that you have within: Use your imagination, learn things, make things, explore, dream, wander.
The power-and-money hungry act like theirs is the only game in town and that they're going to whoop up on the rest of us.
But in the beautiful, grand scheme of things, the creative and creating human is endlessly richer.
I'm on a little bitty mission here, just me and my keyboard, but hear me
Ai is a trap. We're being lied to and used, as usual.
Don't fall for it. Go back to doing things the old way when you can.
Simply put: Don't create with Ai. It stole its robot brain from human creators.
And also simply put: Using Ai for what your God-given brian can do is abiding by the abuse of our shared island home like nothing we've seen so far.
Don't feed it. Don't encourage it. Walk away whenever possible.
Convenience and innovation are great. Theft and abuse are not.
Tirade over.
For now.
I sure appreciate you joining me today
Keep the faith and stay shiny,
Coco
P.S. Be a human. Do human things. That's what I'm up to. ↓
