A Few Thoughts on AI and Creativity and The Brave New World We Find Ourselves In
The publishing world is awash with conference sessions, articles and essays, and talks about the problems and possibilities of AI. Some people are dead set against it, others have embraced it fully, and still others try to broker a middle ground, though they remain confused about how to use it responsibly.
Full disclosure: I’m pretty much in the first category, with the caveat that I understand AI might reliably and genuinely help people with some tasks (though I have yet to utilize any of those tools). I do use it for notetaking during my lengthy zoom sessions, so I have dipped a couple of toes in the waters of the middle ground, but I’m not sure notetaking AI is the same as generative AI, which is what we’re really talking about here. We should learn to distinguish between software systems that are helpful (like spellcheck), and which many people call AI, and generative AI, which seeks to replace human creativity, thought, and research.
At Maverick Independent Book Reviews, we’ve stated clearly that our reviews are based on a real human reading the book and crafting a review using their own brain.
And I’ve also just created a statement at my publishing company that outlines our policy around AI, just to be clear to the world about what we expect from the writers we publish and our standards for ourselves as editors and fellow creators:
We understand with the advent of AI, many creators are using AI to generate ideas and writing and illustration, sometimes fully and sometimes as a base from which to launch their own creation. At Catalyst Press and all our imprints, we are committed to publishing fully human-authored and fully human-illustrated books, from beginning to end. Likewise, our editorial processes are fully human. While we have no wish to judge the processes that creators take, or that other publishers may accept, we prefer the imperfect, grace-filled process that is human art, with all of its foibles and weaknesses as well as its ability to soar us to the height of beauty, truth, and human emotion. No matter how intelligent and creative AI becomes, it will never be human. To the best of our abilities and knowledge, understanding that we may not always recognize the difference between something that is AI-derivative and something that is fully human-derivative, we stand with human creators, editors, and publishers.
In this article, I don’t wish to revisit the handwringing of the group I tend to be in or consider the glowing praises from the group that consider themselves all in on AI. Many people have capably outlined the dangers of AI to writers, while others have capably professed the possibilities. In the latter camp, people are still working out rules and guidelines for what it means to use it “responsibly.” What I want to talk about instead are the questions raised for me by two established writers who confessed, one with some shame and one with pride, to using AI in their writing and my thoughts around the repercussions I noted in both cases.
1. Let’s start with the noted writer who confessed with some shame her use of AI.
This particular writer is an academic and public intellectual, so while her background might be in academics, her writing is for a general audience. She stated she had started using AI some time ago to organize her thoughts about given writing tasks, assigning AI the job of collecting what she needs in order to write her essay or article. In other words, she sends AI out into the ether to gather the varied pieces of information or points she might make about a given theme or idea, and then she uses that to write her article.
What she had discovered, with some alarm, was a growing sense of incapability on her own part to now do that anymore—something she used to do regularly in service of her writing. Now it seems her brain has shut down that part of her creative engine. She cannot gather ideas and organize them herself.
After reading her post on LinkedIn, I thought about the element of surprise and serendipity in writing, how the best writing requires a writer to experience the joy of discovery. In the process of gathering their varied and far-flung ideas, examples, and harnessing those to the written word, a writer’s best work occurs when they don’t know what the end result will be, when they allow themselves to roam freely through the deep recesses of their minds and through the deep recesses of ideas and research that other writers have presented, and then they bring those together, through their own brain’s processes, in service of what they’re writing.
In a conversation with my publishing company’s other editor, Fourie Botha, I likened the process of writing to horse taming. Listen, I’ve never tried to tame a horse, but I imagine that to be a very good horse trainer, it requires a lengthy and enduring relationship with many horses over years—years—so that when you encounter a horse that needs taming, you can intuitively begin a process of figuring out what that particular horse needs in order to be tamed. It isn’t a one-size fits all. You try different things, and if it doesn’t work for that horse, you try something else. You’re willing to experiment. You’re willing to fail and then get back in there. There is no cookie-cutter list of things to do that engenders success. There is no short cut in this process of knowing many horses intimately and working with those many horses over many years so that when you encounter a new horse, you can gather all the many tools in your arsenal of experience that allows you to figure out and tame a new horse.
Taming words in service of a piece of writing is similar. There is no shortcut for a writer. You must have spent many years in the company of words, of other writers’ manipulations of words, in order to have an intuitive feel for how to harness words in the most powerful way you can. You also must have spent many years traveling and exploring in the world of ideas, you must have marinated and soaked in the world of ideas for years—years—in order to gather thoughts from the wild corners of your mind and put them on paper.
If you outsource that process to AI, you cheat yourself and your reader from the wisdom and truth that is only found in serendipity. You cheat yourself and your reader from the outcome that only occurs through that process of feeling your way through all the things you’ve learned and experienced in the past, which have become integrated into your very being, as well as what you’re learning and experiencing in the present. This is what writing is. This is what art is. It is the writer finding the diamonds hidden in the soup that has been simmering in your brain all of this time and bringing them out to the world, polished and whole.
Yes, I’m mixing a lot of metaphors here. But hopefully you get what I’m saying. And mixing metaphors is part of the wholly human process of writing anyway…
2. Now let’s move to the writer who freely admitted, almost with pride, his use of AI for all of his new writing.
This writer is a celebrated writer for National Geographic and the New York Times, among other publications. He’s become a politician and currently is running for office. I won’t mention any other identifying characteristics because it’s not really important who he is. In a talk he gave that I recently heard, he instructs AI to gather ideas and points from all the things he’s written in the past in order to construct a new piece of writing.
While he didn’t elaborate on this, it seemed he thinks this gets beyond any kind of moral qualms about using AI to write. He’s not stealing other people’s ideas or writing, he’s actively instructing AI to use his own past writing in order to generate new writing.
OK, so that’s not plagiarism. But it is lazy. And also, it doesn’t allow him to evolve as a thinker.
If you’re merely cannibalizing from your past ideas and writings for new writing, are you growing your ideas? Are you building upon them? Are you allowing the ideas to swell past what you once thought to become something new and, hopefully, better? I would say no.
What if a poet did this? “OK, AI, analyze all my past poems. Now write me a new poem, in my own voice, on the theme of nature.” What if a fiction writer did this? “OK, AI, analyze my past novels/short stories. Now write a thriller short story based on character x, y, z, discovering a, b, c.”
I’m sure my lack of knowledge of AI is showing here. Maybe your prompts need to be more specific than this. Maybe not. But a writer who does something like this is not, in fact, generating something new—even if they aren’t stealing from another writer. And they aren’t allowing themselves growth as a writer—or as a human being.
I was at a conference this past week. I spoke at length about the problems with AI with a vendor who sat near me. She mentioned how there is no shortcut to growth as a human being. You can’t outsource the process of failing and then changing, becoming a new and improved human. It’s an individual process of struggle. We can’t check out our brains if we want to be fully human.
I would hesitate to say my thinking on this is final. I’ll grow and evolve like any other human, alongside the explosive growth of AI. But certainly for now, I’m going to keep showing up to the computer on my own steam, and I’ll encourage all of my writers to do the same. AI is getting better and better, but it will never have a human soul.
P.S. An irony that I am aware of: When writing these posts, I go to Canva to create an image for the top of my post. I’ll ask Canva to help me find images that somehow relate. What I don’t know is how many of these images are AI-generated. I suspect a lot of them are, including the one I have at the top of the post today. What do I do with that? What would you do with that?
P.P.S. Next year, we’re publishing an amazing picture book, SnowPal Soccer by Lisa Maria Burgess. One of the things we’re mentioning in all our promotion and marketing materials for the book is what a treat her book is because the artwork is not digital. It’s analogue. In a world where we’ve become accustomed to digital artwork (much of it created painstakingly by artists who just happen to be using computers to create their artwork, and much of that artwork is astonishingly beautiful, by the way), I have found my eyes are drawn in marvelous ways to this analogue artwork. It almost feels like a big breath of relief. Check it out.