I was deeply moved by Brook Warner’s recent Substack, which shined a light on AI from a publisher’s perspective, Your Writing is Enough. She struck a resounding chord, that I wanted to respond from a writer’s perspective.
Brooke Warner’s article dealt with AI and publishing, but it also touched upon the over-arching crisis of humanity we find ourselves in.
It’s true that AI can do many things for a writer. It can write a book for you and even lay out a publicity plan. AI can take the stress and struggle out of creating. The thing that AI cannot do is approach the energy of numinosity.
Numinous is a Latin verb meaning to beckon or to call. When we have a numinous experience, we are having a oneness experience. Good writers are vulnerable ones, the ones that give us a glimpse into our own ragged, struggling souls, and kindle hope, making us feel that we are never as alone as we think we are. As Enrique Martinez Celaya writes in Tending The Fire, “. . . art is about the possibility of creating a transformative experience.”
“Five years ago,” says Brooke, “if you’d asked the average person working on a book project if they liked the idea of a robot generating their stories or their personal narratives for them, I think you’d have been met with bug eyes.”
When I was introduced to Chat GPT I was curious, I played with it. It could write an outline. It could clean up paragraphs. It could make pictures. It was a fun, new toy . . . but I lost interest early on, because AI has a certain tone to it, a facade of words with no real underlying meaning. AI is generated from programming, instead of organic thoughtfulness. “A little alarm goes off. This sounds like AI. I’m no longer reading the work of this author. Was I ever reading their work? Now I’m editing a machine. I don’t want to be editing a machine. What am I doing?”
And it’s not just AI, promising to make our lives easier by doing the hard work for us, it’s that we’ve bought into the drive to present ourselves as a brand, to constantly compare ourselves, to crave and collect more followers, to go viral. In this fertile ground, we are primed for AI, and it’s not only creativity that gets lost, it’s our soul.
Writing ceased being a commercial endeavor for me quite some time ago. I stopped worrying about whether or not my books sold, whether or not my posts went viral. I became a life-long student of what has mentored me more than any single person. I am a perpetual student of writing. I’ve learned that writing is not just the crafting of words or the structure of stories. To write is to be a student of the human condition, starting with one’s own self.
We live in a time where none of us have very much power. Most of us aren’t part of the billionaire club; we can’t change politics except maybe our votes will count. We are practically impotent, except for our ability to create. Music, dance, art, writing and the like have the power to awaken the soul in us and in others; the power to fill us with resilience and spirit. The heart that connects with other hearts through making art is the greatest resistance that we have in these times. And when we use AI we not only give away our power, we give away the spirit of what it means to be a human being.
“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.” ~Jonas Mekas
Story gathering delights me. I’m at a place in my life when I really can read all those books I wanted to read. Homer has shown me what story arc looks like. Seneca has cautioned me that life is short, so don’t waste your time, make it count. And writers like Anne LaMotte have helped me to find my place in teaching creative writing through work with marginalized communities.
The writing life that I embrace gives me the muscle of observation, perception, and purpose. I write daily, but it is much more than finding stories or a turn of phrase. My writing life is a doorway into the examined life. Writing is cause to mine the depths of heart and soul and find meaning in my world. Writing continuously reveals that it’s never just my story, or your story, it’s THE story, the story of humanity. AI cannot give me any of that. AI is a cold utility, devoid of soul. And yes, you can write a book with it, or create a picture, but to what end?
“When you cut and paste, you bypass the heart part altogether, and it’s my opinion that the resonant part of any writing stems from the heart,” says Brooke. Yes. What is our being without heart?
I know this to be true: Speed is the enemy of art. Sometimes we get stuck. Our work-in-progress demands to sit for a time and breathe until we begin the next edit, the next revision. So what’s the harm in using AI to jump start the process, one might ask. It’s not like AI wrote my piece, I’m just using it in the right way, to make my work better. Except that’s a lie. AI will not make your work better, because AI cannot grow you or make you a better human being.
Brooke punctuates her piece with this: “We need all the heart connection we can get, and we don’t do that via machine. We do it human-to-human, as we were designed to connect.”
Writing is a sacred path, whether you’re writing self-help or thriller, children’s stories or Substack posts. Writing reveals who we are to one another and allows for heart connection. Writing has its birth in the loss and love we experience; it’s messy and often chaotic. Writing opens us to communicate the ineffable. Writing is struggle. Life is struggle. Just as the worm struggles out of its chrysalis to reveal the butterfly, so do we.
Thank you to for igniting this flame of inspiration with your excellent piece that made me feel as if I were sitting in the room with you, nodding my head.
What about you? Are you AI curious? Have you played around with AI? Does AI have any place in the creative process? What or who do you think AI best serves? Let’s have a conversation.
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