08. Writing Against the Machine

trying my first uh solo podcast out here we'll see how it goes um it's largely because i didn't figure out how i guess this week but that's all right you know it's just like let's roll with it and see where it goes it's an opportunity um and an opportunity to share some thoughts on a few things i'm just sort of gonna riff here about um I think we're in this moment where AI is getting questioned on every level and becoming this sort of bellwether for people's politics, how they relate to capital, how they understand the future and the possibilities of the future or the lack thereof.

And it's certainly been center stage in the discourse recently.

And I've been thinking about it from the perspective of a writer and a poet and how I was having a conversation with a friend recently about reading AI writing and how it's such an alienating experience and how even when it's effective in conveying information, it's maybe well-written, well-constructed, what have you, it's still an extremely...

it lacks a, I mean, obviously it lacks a human quality that, um, I don't know if we understood until we had to start reading AI writing how much humanity can really be expressed in writing and how obvious it is when it's taken away.

I mean, of course, we've read the bureaucratic language and certain forms and things we may have filled out, but... to read something that is a personal piece of writing or an article that's meant to convey information in ways that historically have only ever been conveyed through a more creative voice, I think alerts us to the preciousness of great writing and that we are in a moment where I was saying it to someone recently.

I mean, I think the humanities are what can save us, not materially, perhaps, in terms of, I think the fight against AI is really about labor versus capital and people refusing to let these data centers move into their towns and wreak their ecological and electrical and all sorts of resource damage uh probably crazy things that they're emitting in the air too um and you know the spiritual and creative rod of them and the fact that they're in schools now and kids are you know, the issue of cognitive surrender and then kids losing their ability to convey their own thoughts and even think for themselves.

But I do think, yeah, so what I, yeah, you'll see what, you'll see how ADHD, my mind is doing a solo pod without an interlocutor.

But the reason why I say that the humanities can save us here is because they are a way back to communicating human to human uh on a broad level right like our ability to reach people feels um in some ways easier than ever because of social media and the proliferation of these sorts of tools but it's also harder because we live in this alienating, overwhelming, overstimulating attention economy where even if we get someone's attention, it's usually... through screaming into a short form video clip.

And I mean, I'm bombarded by this propaganda.

I don't know, I don't just mean political propaganda, but I think this like influencer propaganda.

Anytime I open up my social media of people just screaming at you, trying to convince you to accept their way of viewing things, to believe that their way of doing things in the world is the right way and you're doing it wrong.

And it's just not, you know humans used to be able to you know when reading and writing were our ways of primary ways of connecting with people that we didn't know there was of course you still had to convince your reader to stick with what you were saying but there was an intrinsic buy-in when someone picks up whether it's a newspaper or a novel or a poem, that they're there to have that connected experience.

And yes, they might be trying to get information, but they're also trying to understand that information.

It's not usually just to pull out facts and figures.

And AI is obviously extremely good in condensing things down into facts and figures as if that's really the kind of knowledge that we as humans are looking for.

When in reality, trying to understand the world around us, already an overwhelming enough proposition in this day and age.

But I think what we find is we have to do it through connecting with others' experiences.

We don't really have a grasp of what's going on in, say, Israel-Palestine until we hear firsthand accounts.

Our minds cannot wrap themselves around death tolls, and we can be stunned and horrified by them and still ultimately numb to them because there's no...

There's no digesting the sort of numbers coming out of, you know, that conflict or the Iran war, the Ukraine-Russia war.

And we as individuals simply can't comprehend it.

But when we hear firsthand accounts from people who are suffering at the hands of these violent regimes... then we can begin to kind of get our bearings and develop a coherent politics, a way of seeing in the world that is not just caught up in superstition, that is caught up in, you know, I guess you could say like the Trumpian mind of whoever was the last person to talk to him is the one who he often believes, right? That's sort of, early childhood gullibility that I think we're entrained to, well, if you're young, never grow out of because of things like AI and Instagram.

I'm not the first person to talk about this problem of how do we find reliable sources of truth in this day and of age but i think it does start at least for for individuals it starts within their own experience and learning how to digest information in a way that is not just like toxifying to their own system totally overstimulating totally overwhelming because we lose our uh or maybe never develop our barometer um for what feels true what feels like it's in alignment with our values integrity uh what have you and so when we're being bombarded with information that is really exists to convince us of something um to sell us things i mean AI writing is one of those examples, but humans themselves have become, because of our influencer culture.

I saw a funny post just recently about imagining if Jane Austen was alive today, she'd have to do like a TikTok dance to promote her books.

So we're all caught up in this attention economy, it feels, whether we like it or not.