In a bizarre twist of fate, I’ll be the recipient of a chunk of change thanks to a class action suit. Anthropic is a company that, without permission, used thousands of books, including Swinging on the Garden Gate, to develop its AI product. Presumably you can now tell Anthropic’s tool to write a memoir in the style of Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew and out will come not just my voice but newly generated personal narrative drawn from the ether.
In one gulp, AI has swallowed literary artistry. Plagiarism is built into the system. The few thousand dollars paid to authors who’ve been harmed does little to compensate for the long-term damage. Our voices—the textual equivalent of our fingerprints—have been stolen, and there’s no getting them back.
In the aftermath I’m wrestling with two irrevocable facts: AI is here to stay, and the results AI spits out are horrifyingly good. Cheap, easy to use, instantaneous, AI produces what brilliant writers have taken lifetimes to achieve. I use the word ‘produce’ rather than ‘generate’ or ‘create’ intentionally. AI is a machine that functions within the confines of the information it can access. It operates within what Beatrice Bruteau calls “choice freedom,” programmed to choose from what’s available and follow algorithms to combine that information. How AI works reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s description of artists who refuse to admit inspiration or lean on mystery; they fabricate within the constricted spheres of ego and marketplace, replicating what’s come before. AI is exceptionally adept at doing just that.
Not that I’m a total Luddite. I’ve used AI to write grants, afterwards feeling gratitude for the hours it saved me; I’ve used it for research and brainstorming; I’ve watched my daughter ask AI to collect her ideas into an image which she then significantly revised on the page with oil pastels, and since this wasn’t a school assignment thought this a decent use of the tool. I’m experienced enough with AI to know it offers readers exactly what we writers have spent our careers striving for: An effective product. Now we can get it with the wave of a technological wand.
What AI can never take away, however, are the gifts of creative process. My daughter used a bit of creativity when she plugged her ideas into ChatGPT and then again when she translated the image onto the page, but she bypassed the difficult, revelatory, entirely original process of generating, revising, and polishing an image from start to finish. Her art teacher wouldn’t approve because true artists value process as much as, if not more than, product. What happens within us as we create is miraculous. This is how we learn and grow. This is what makes us human. We exercise what Bruteau calls “creative freedom,” from nothing generating something through the filter of unique personhood. Who we become is more magnificent for our having created, and what we’ve created is entirely of us.
If we can get a good product by plugging in a few commands, what’s left for writers? Creative process, with all its labor, joy, hardship, and transformational potential. The writer’s transformation, I believe, is the special sauce infusing good works of literature. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” Robert Frost wrote, and AI can never produce that secret ingredient. In an odd twist of fate, by making a quality outcomes easy to achieve, AI relieves us of the burden of outcomes being our goal. We can write for the process, where the magic of writing has resided all along.