The waters we are swimming in now

As a working songwriter, I have gotten used to the suspicion that creative work is not really work at all. This suspicion stings—but I’ve gotten used to it.

I am now wondering, with the arrival of AI, are artists going to have to experience a new kind of suspicion? A suspicion that our “work” is not even our own?

I have been taking risks in “putting myself out there” for many, many years now. But this feels new — to be “putting it out there” alongside an ominous and infinite vault of AI. And regardless of my opinion of AI, the entire landscape of creativity has already changed beneath my feet.

This did not fully hit me until this week, when I got an email from one of my readers, suggesting that I had used AI to write my newsletter. I read and reread their message in disbelief, trying to distill any other possible interpretation. I wrote back to them, but haven’t yet gotten a reply.

Back in March I was flying home from a recording session for a record I was producing. At the Boston airport, the security person put my ID in the ID machine, took a picture of my face, and the machine spat my ID back out. “You’re a non-match,” they said. They tried it again, same thing happened. “Yeah, you’re a non-match with this ID, I’m gonna have to have a manager come and take a look.” I stood there thinking, what happened to me in Maine? Am I not myself anymore?! I went to a recording studio in the Maine woods for 5 days and now I am unrecognizable to this computer?! Eventually, a manager came and held up my ID, looked at my face with their own eyes, and waved me through.

As I sat with my reader’s email, it all felt a bit like that. For my own writing to be spat back out at me — “you’re a non-match”.

I am so grateful that I get to spend so much time in gardens this summer, my own and several others that I work in. Tomatoes and cucumbers just make a whole lot more sense to me than just about anything else these days. Maybe we’re just at that point where we need to be more explicit. We’ve already been doing that for a long time with eggs and apples and beef. Local. Free-range. Pasture-raised. Organic.

I do not use AI to write newsletters to you. And I do not use AI to write songs. But when I received that email from one of my readers, it woke me up to the fact that AI is simply part of the waters we are swimming in now, in a very insidious and heartbreaking way. The LLMs (Large Language Models) of AI have been trained on writing by real people. And now, real people are being suspected of using AI to write.

It makes me think of the Wendell Berry poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”. Back in 2018, when I was preparing to release my first solo record, I named my record label Mad Maker Studio, inspired by this poem. Here are a few lines, but I really recommend reading the whole poem here.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

And, as Wendell Berry says in his book Home Economics, “the more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.” May we have the courage to continue to show up as our natural human selves in this increasingly artificial world. May we write for the joy of the work, may we sing for the sake of the song, may we make art that belongs to the realm of the uncaptured, unfiltered, unprocessed, and unnamed. May we tell our own true stories with bravery, and may we receive each other’s true stories with openness.

xo

Maya

P.S. There is an Anaïs Nin quote that I have loved for a long time — “we write to taste life twice.” If you haven’t tried writing in a while, I encourage you to just jot some things down about a memory that you have, and see if you discover there’s a taste that you didn’t notice before. Things will emerge just from your perspective, just from time simply passing — and sometimes details and emotions appear just by taking the time to look and see what’s there. Fresh grapes become sun-dried raisins. Maybe sorrow tastes more like gratitude. Maybe it’s even more bitter than you remember. Maybe it’s even sweeter.

www.mayadevitry.com