On Writing, AI, and Blood

On Writing, AI, and Blood by debgrant

• Thought triggers from the Hollywood writers’ strike, the AI explosion, and my own love-hate relationship with writing and quotes from the introduction to the book Reckoning by V.

• The Hollywood writers’ strike is about wages, opportunity and freedom as most strikes are. But the fear of AI is a new element of terror. The possibility that many functions of writing could be accomplished adequately and more cheaply by the rapidly advancing technology of AI is no longer possible. It is here.

• When I was a young child, I wrote a story about a magic pencil named Tac. Tac was an ordinary No.2 school yellow pencil but with a winking smile on one side of its eraser head and a frown on the other. Tac’s magic came from the thumb tack on the top of its head. If the thumb tac was pulled out like an antenna, Tac could help its owner’s hand write magnificent stories. If the thumb tac were removed or pushed too far, Tac lost all its magic. I have believed from a young age that writing was compelling and risky.

• Since my magic pencil days, I have written plays, hundreds of poems, articles, essays, papers. I have written over 2000 sermons, published 10 books, been writing online blogs sometimes daily, sometimes weekly for about 28 years. To me, writing is messy, painful, terrifying in its transparency and vulnerability. It is agonizing to market. Devastating in its rejection. Sports writer, Red Smith said basically writing is really quite simple; all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. He wasn’t wrong.

From Reckoning by V

“In many ways this book is shaped like grief. It’s associative and fragmented and out of time. It gathers as it flows. it cares less for logic than heart. It has its own trajectory. And so, this is also a book about writing.”

“Word by word I eked my way into existence. Each line of a poem, each essay, each play, article, book has been a bulwark against my imminent disappearance. And as you might imagine, an existence built on the accumulation and arrangement of syllables, nouns, and verbs is a most precarious proposition. For the risk, of course, is that the reader will not understand or value or respect what the writer has written, tossing the writer into the fiery and ragged pit of further rejection and loneliness.”

“One is always failing at writing. One is always one step, one word, away from writing what one actually meant to say. And that gap, that cavern of impossibility, is in some ways more debilitating than any original pain. For it is ongoing proof of one’s singular stupidity, incompetence, and failure to make any meaning at all. Writing is dangerous business.”

“Someone once said you have to be madly grandiose to write, to believe others would truly be interested in your thoughts. But it could be that writing is survival. A way of cornering the mess, refusing to be swept away in another’s tyranny, a cry in the dark. We do our best. Uttering as close to the bone as possible. Venturing further and further into the dark room of truth calling us to be its accomplice.”

• I don’t know what effect AI will have on the art and profession of writing. I am even more terrified that people in general read less. So it is also a matter of economics. Supply and demand. Writing does dare as V wrote - to venture into the realm of true calling us to be its accomplice. So it is a matter of the truth. What is truth? How does it reach us and course through us? It may be that our writing lives and our human life will come down to a matter of what, in fact, is coursing through us. The difference between Artificial Intelligence and human beings comes down to blood. Jesus may have been on to something…the truth bleeds.

Peace,

debgrant