Bucking the Trend
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Each day AI seems to creep further into every facet of life. Searches on the internet return AI interpretations at the top of the list. When I receive a Gmail message, AI summarizes what was written. When I reply to a message or begin a new message, AI offers to “Help me write.” AI has become part of art, music, film, medicine, coding, science, mathematics. There is no facet of modern life that seems to be free from its “help.”
But, judging by the Emerson quote above, the trend to have machines do the work for humans has been going on for some time. Who among us thinks these days that we should know the stars in the sky (unless they’re astronomers) or tell the hour by the sun? We’ve given up on those skills. Will the next few generations likewise give up on art, music, programming, and writing?
The AI tsunami is part of a tide that’s shaping individuals into predictable consumer units. The internet tracks us and sets traps to trigger purchasing. We are urged to take part in the feeding frenzy ourselves, to optimize our websites, with the help of AI, so that we can rise to the top of the food chain.
AI’s Large Language Models, based on all that has been written before, can write well about anything well-known. On new or difficult subjects—so my Quantum Mechanics professor assured the class—it writes garbage.
The trend (and trending is a goal in social media) will have AI replying to AI-authored emails. Words will be ground up like ingredients in a recipe until all the individual flavors blend into a single uniform blandness. Everyone will write like everyone else.
When people are all the same, they’re more predictable, and that’s good for those peddling products.
So what can writers do to buck the trend? AI won’t go away, barring a nearby gamma-ray burst or other catastrophe. It will probably become harder and harder to avoid it in our writing programs. But we must remain determined to write what we want to write, and not what AI wants us to write. (Not that AI has any feelings or desires, but it exerts a steady pressure of suggestions that tend to make all writing uniform.)
We are not giving up our cars, but we can go out for a run. We will not give up GPS, but we can still spend a night in the desert learning the stars. Likewise, though we cannot banish AI, we can still write with our own voices.
After this issue, in order to carve out a little AI-free space, I plan to return to human-made illustrations for Abyss & Apex stories. In keeping with that resolve, the illustration above is a photo of me and another runner on the Delaware & Raritan Canal towpath, snapped by fellow runner Iveta Blazej.