Writing was already a technology before AI

Artificial intelligence may be the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself—which, as we do well to remember, was called into question by Plato in the Phaedrus through his myth of Thamus, the king who rejected writing when the god Theuth brought it as a gift to humankind. Thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised, but a bane, because it would allow people to offload their rightful task of thinking, knowing, and remembering onto an external crutch, thereby encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom.

As Neil Postman pointed out when discussing this myth, while it’s true that every technology involves some kind of trade-off, most of us would probably disagree with Thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a profound net benefit for the human race.

Today, with the advent of large language models, we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our interactions with communications technologies, and we are once again called upon to make a judgment with serious consequences.

Writing is already a technology. The real question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing makes possible.

As a writer, can you use AI without losing your soul?

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve published a new essay at The Living Dark titled “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?” It’s an attempt to think through the question of whether writers can use artificial intelligence without surrendering the deeper source of their work.

The essay begins with my recent foreword to Youri Hermes’s The Art of Unwriting, then moves through the questions of unwriting, the daemon muse, creative flow, AI as a machine-muse, and the difference between assistance and abdication. It also touches on my own changing relationship to AI, including the way my thinking has been shaped by writing, teaching, and my current work in higher education.

My provisional answer is yes: a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul. But only if AI assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

The essay isn’t a manifesto against AI, and it’s certainly not an endorsement of the flood of machine-generated slop now filling the internet. It’s an attempt to think carefully about the line between using AI as a tool and allowing it to replace the living inward act by which real writing happens.

You can read the full essay at The Living Dark here:

Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?

The Living Dark Reader, No. 2, Is Now Available

The second issue of The Living Dark Reader is now available at my Living Dark newsletter.

This issue clocks in at nearly 100 pages and gathers essays, reflections, fragments, and related materials for slower, quieter reading away from the restless currents of the live online world. Its themes include longing, selfhood, anomalous experience, language, writing, and artificial intelligence.

The anchor essay is “The Autumn Longing,” an extended meditation on the transcendent longing of sehnsucht that has been nearly two decades in the making. Other essays explore the self that remains beyond our worldviews, the witness behind the stories we inhabit, sleep paralysis and the boundaries between science and the supernatural, and the alchemical power of words in the age of AI.

The issue is available as a PDF for paid subscribers to The Living Dark. You can read the announcement and find the download link here:

The Living Dark Reader, No. 2

The creative ebb and flow of writing

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:1 min read

Some of my most unexpected writing, the stuff that arrives with power, flow, and inspiration, has come after a few days or weeks when I have felt deeply deadened and bereft, as if abandoned by the creative spirit. This creative ebb and flow is distinct and repetitive enough across the years to constitute a pattern, and one that I can’t help but find striking and worth mulling over.

It’s as if the times when I wonder whether I’ll ever write again, and even if I will ever want to write again, represent an inner ebb tide, with the water of the psyche receding in preparation for a tidal flow. The subjective, conscious experience of that ebbing is a feeling of being totally becalmed and even averse to action, especially creative action like putting words on paper or screen.

Eventually, if this lasts long enough, I just give up and accept that I will not be writing anymore. And then, without fail (or at least so far), writing happens again, and with intensity. Learning this cycle has been an ongoing discipline of self-discovery and self-acceptance as a being rooted in the creative action-and-retreat cycles of the cosmos itself.

On writing the personal to express the universal

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

As writers, we would do well to remember that our art conceals a hidden paradox: What is most private and personal in us is also the most universal. Our deepest truth, which seems to be the most hidden and idiosyncratic thing about us, is actually what resonates with all people. In our writing, it’s when we delve deeply into ourselves that our work makes a profound connection with others.

Haven’t you experienced this in your own life as a reader? Don’t you find that when you come across writing that is palpably personal, writing that clearly shares the writer’s most intimate views, thoughts, and feelings, that’s where you can see yourself most clearly? The sense of connection is practically hypnotic.

This is why pandering to others in an effort to appeal directly to them and/or to extract their money is counterproductive. It alienates the reader and makes the writing sterile, whereas the act and art of writing honestly instills life in what we write, which transmits its energetic charge to our readers.

The psychologist Carl Rogers put it well in his classic 1961 book On Becoming a Person:

I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.

For a deeper look at this phenomenon, not only in the art and craft of writing but in the practice of spirituality, see “The Writer’s Paradox: Personal Is Universal.”