WRITING AND AI

I left a comment on a video on YT: "If you write with AI, you're not a writer".  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEDnXfNWoIY

Here it is.  It's a pretty acceptable summary of how I feel about my own experience.

Literature is essentially the creation of a world that a reader can experience as real, psychologically, emotionally, because the writer has an inner world that he/she is continually in process of submerging in, experiencing, in a totally unique, irreplaceable, uncopiable way.

Writing is a multidimensional phenomenon, which is why it takes so long to reach the final stage: words on paper or onscreen.

AI is a more sophisticated typewriter/search engine/copy editor. It can replace difficult, agonizing steps in literary creation (turning research and imagining into the linguistic signs that create mental landscapes, architectural environments, materializing ideas --- truly creative agony) into easy-peasy cut and paste --- but it will show.

The reader will feel it. Because we humans are icebergs. AI is a great fridge/cooler. AI works with the language. But we turn the iceberg into the words that evoke the mystery that we are channeling and metamorphosing.

Now that I've written down this description of how I write, it can be fed into the training database. But this description isn't writing. Writing is creation. It is ineffably mysterious, and limitless potentiality. We train and train for years to be able to tap into it. You can't replace that with a machine that spits out text. Even if you are a good counterfeiter.

Humans are ICEBERGS.

We must experience that iceberg.

It is what gives us meaning.

This is why literature is so essential for humanity.

Why all the forms of cultural creation are the greatest wealth.

Artists make it possible for humans who are unable to experience their iceberg directly, to do it vicariously, through the artist as the bridge.

I'll leave it here, because it's a very deep ocean to venture into.

Why we can't become truly human without culture.