some non-poetic thoughts on prompt-based text generators
Writing is a social contract between writer & reader that only the writer is obliged to uphold: you write forward across space & time & hope the words find a home in the heart or mind (or maybe both) of whomever reads your words & for this reason & this reason alone writing is an innately human endeavor, like most artistic endeavors.
AI & LLMs are not writing machines; they are algorithmic word probability machines that can only regurgitate what they have consumed. Yes, what they do is impressive, but it is not writing. There is no sense of authorial presence in what an AI/LMM churns out, no sense of authorial intention or personal sensibility; there is no there there.
The friendly, constructed persona of the machine is a lie intended to get you to engage more, to feed the machine so it can turn out more glurge & slop & extract both human & natural resources in pursuit of enriching technocrats who worship consumption as their path to self-aggrandizement. Siri is not your friend, Gemini is not your pal, Claude is not your savior, and ChatGPT is not your ticket to personal connection or an actual education. Grok does not grok.
In "What Makes a Personal Essay Personal", Lynn Z. Bloom does an exegesis of Brian Doyle's brief essay "Joyas Voladoras" wherein she identifies elements of the personal essay that I think apply to all good human writing:
- Evidence of a mind—at work, engaged with the world, and at play with the ideas in play [curious and able to live with uncertainty]
- A voice, very likely conversational, intimate, personal, quirky, that sounds as if the author is talking directly to the listener, reader
- Tone(s) and register—range—of voice, as in music, with myriad of variations, large and small
- Vocabulary—choice of words, literal and figurative; images, allusions—precise and evocative
- Structure, organization—whatever the pattern, of an infinite variety of possibilities, it grows out of the author's individualistic conception of the topic, analogous to a musical theme and variations, rather than from a formulaic grid
- Implicit background—evidence (trace or more elaborate) manifestations of the writer's gender, age range, nationality, culture, values, assumptions, sense of humor (or doom)
- In combination, these comprise the authorial persona—and thus the distinctive human presence that characterizes personal essays. The features also connect the authorial persona with a host of other communities—linguistic, discourse, cultural, literary, ethnic, national, and many more.
No AI or LLM can do this. Only humans can. Only people can connect, only people can understand on a deeply interior level, only people can interpret their lives, draw meaning from experiences, be stunned to silence by the profound, appreciate the subtleties of art, fall in & out of love, suffer the traumas inflicted by other people & ourselves. Only people can see themselves reflected in the thoughts & words & eyes of another.
Writing is one of our ways to process these experiences & share our lives & thoughts & feelings with others. Writing, like art, like song, like dance, is how we express what it means to be alive. No machine can do that; the ghost in our machines is not an emergence but an echo, hollow, fading.