Change, whether you like it or not
Life is made new in regular cycles, some of which we’re only now starting to understand. The cells in our bodies renew and replace themselves on a pretty regular timeline. Even the bones that currently provide the scaffolding for your body aren’t the same bones that were doing the job a decade ago. We are quite literally not the same people we used to be.
I changed all manner of things about myself in the last twelve months, some of it against my will. Changed my contact prescription. Got a new computer. Shifted to this new blog format. (Haha, actually, no. The new blog format isn’t working out yet.) I changed a lot of my eating habits. In September, which is already somehow less than two months away, there will be a new book coming. It’s a psychological suspense/thriller, which is a new genre for me.
Despite all those changes, deep down in these relatively new bones, I am the same old me. This presents a variety of problems, but the primary one is that new things wear me out. Blame my OCD or my age, but adjusting to new things requires so much effort. Some new things, I refuse to put any effort into at all.
Take generative AI. I see people saying that it’s the “future,” but I’m not interested in it being my future. It’s not just that I’m a writer. It’s not just that we now know that a great deal of gen AI was trained on work that was outright stolen from its creators and rightful copyright holders. That’s all bad enough, and I talked about it here on KCUR.
The main reason I’m not interested in gen AI is the lack of humanity. It may have been built off the work of real humans, but gen AI itself has no humanity. As an atheist I don’t talk about the soul as a spiritual thing, but I do believe in the concept of the soul as an indelible aspect of living, thinking, feeling creatures. Our art is drawn from our experiences, our insights, our beliefs about ourselves and others. I believe there’s a bright red line between what human beings create, and what is created by computer programming.
As both a creator and someone who enjoys other people’s creations, I’m not interested in crossing that line. AI pictures and prose don’t interest me, and the increasing prevalence of it on the internet gives me the urge to flee. I’ve already fled several social media platforms this year, but I mean The Urge to Flee This Hell of Our Own Making, the Internet. Deleting my website, my blog, all my social media, all my apps. Cancelling my streaming services and going back to a little cellphone that only handles texts and calls.
Some days I feel like going full J.D. Salinger, except probably without the seducing college students who write to me, and also without never writing a book again. (All those rumors about a safety deposit box full of manuscripts turned out to be bunk, didn’t they?)
I imagine myself typing up my stories on a computer unconnected to the internet, sending them off to my agent in a box, and never again looking upon what AI is likely to do to the arts and society. In the meantime, I’ve got a new book to promote, so I guess I better keep blogging. On the off chance that people still prefer to read books written by humans.
