Viewing: What » Ventures » Projects » wordshifters » The Incomplete Thought » The Purists Are Coming. Someone Tell the Machine to Care.
The Purists Are Coming. Someone Tell the Machine to Care.
(6 minute read.)
Why I outsourced this essay to artificial intelligence, and why your objections are almost as artificial.
There is a type of person—you know this person, you may have been seated next to this person at a dinner party, God help you—who, upon learning that I use AI to help me write, will adopt an expression of such profound moral sorrow that you'd think I'd confessed to clubbing baby seals with a first edition of Strunk and White.
These are the Purists. Capital P. They are, broadly speaking, the same people who insist on vinyl records, hand-ground coffee, artisanal sourdough, and keeping their money in banks that are named after humans rather than acronyms. They believe in the sanctity of The Process. They believe—this is the key thing, the load-bearing wall of their entire emotional architecture—that the suffering involved in doing something is what makes the result meaningful.
I have news for the Purists. It is not good news. The news is this: nobody else cares.
Let me be clear about my own credentials here, lest you think I am some silicon-breathed techno-utopian who has never held a pen. I have held a pen. I have in fact held many pens, most of them in Washington DC, and I can tell you from extensive firsthand experience that the pen is an enormously overrated instrument. It cramps your hand, runs out of ink at the worst possible moment, and has produced, over the course of human history, an almost incomprehensible volume of complete nonsense.
The Purists love the pen. They love the typewriter more. Nothing makes a Purist happier than a typewriter, preferably a vintage Olivetti, preferably with a stuck key or two, because the difficulty is not an obstacle to the Purist—the difficulty is the point. The Purist does not want good writing. The Purist wants witnessed struggle.
This is, when you think about it, an extraordinarily strange consumer preference. When I take my car to a mechanic, I do not ask him to use a wrench from 1957 and forbid him from consulting the manufacturer's diagnostic software. When I have my appendix out, I do not request that the surgeon work from memory and a good attitude. I want the best tools applied to the problem, preferably while I am unconscious.
But the Purist applies a different standard to literature. Literature must be hand-made. Literature must be sweated over. Literature must emerge, like a difficult birth, from a process of authentic human agony—otherwise it doesn't count, and if it doesn't count, then by extension the Purist doesn't count, which is the actual terror hiding behind all the hand-wringing.
I have been asked—with the specific vocal inflection that indicates the asker already knows the answer and is deeply disappointed in me—whether using AI to write makes me any different from those terrible people who use GPS instead of reading a map.
Yes. I am different. I arrive at my destination.
The map-reading purists among us navigate by a combination of masculine confidence and systematic wrong turns, eventually arriving somewhere adjacent to where they meant to go and declaring victory. Meanwhile, the rest of us are there, having a drink, wondering what took them so long.
This is, in miniature, the entire history of technology adoption. Someone invents something that makes a difficult thing easier. A percentage of the population immediately adopts it, because they are sane. Another percentage objects, because they have confused the difficult thing with the important thing. After a generation, the objectors are dead, their grandchildren use the technology without a second thought, and historians write fond but slightly pitying biographies of the people who really, really believed the horse was irreplaceable.
Now, I want to be fair to the Purists, because being fair to people I disagree with is a habit I developed late in life and am quite proud of, even when—especially when—they don't deserve it.
Their actual concern, boiled down past the decorative anguish, is something like this: if anyone can produce polished prose with the help of a machine, what becomes of the people who spent decades learning to do it without one? What becomes of the craft? What becomes of the distinction between someone who can write and someone who merely has things to say?
This is not a stupid concern. It is, however, a concern that has been raised, in essentially identical form, about the printing press, the typewriter, the word processor, the spell-checker, the internet, and every other technology that made writing more accessible to people who were not monks or aristocrats. Each time, the Purists predicted the death of Literature. Each time, Literature declined to die and instead produced more of itself than ever before, most of it terrible, some of it magnificent, and all of it—crucially—reaching people it never would have reached through the artisanal hand-stitched method.
The market, as I have observed in my long career covering it, is fairly ruthless about this sort of thing. Good writing, produced with whatever combination of human effort and mechanical assistance, finds its audience. Bad writing, laboriously typed with two fingers on a vintage Remington by someone with genuine authentic unassisted human suffering in their soul, also finds its audience, which is slightly smaller. The reader, that ungrateful creature, persists in caring about the quality of the experience rather than the nobility of the production method.
Here is what I actually used the AI for, in producing the piece you are currently reading: I told it what I wanted to say. It organized my thoughts, suggested some structural approaches, and produced a draft that I then rewrote extensively, changed, argued with, swore at, and finally shaped into something that sounds like me, because it is me—my ideas, my instincts, my particular obsession with mocking people who deserve to be mocked.
This is precisely what I did with every editor I worked with for forty years. The editor would say, "PJ, this section isn't working," and I would say, "You're wrong," and then go away and fix it anyway, and the final piece was better, and the authorship was still mine, and no one suggested I wasn't a real writer because I hadn't bled onto every page unassisted.
The AI is a very fast editor with no personal opinions about my lifestyle and a remarkable tolerance for my more ambitious digressions. I find it an improvement.
The Purists will not be consoled by this. The Purists are never consoled. Consolation is beside the point—the point is the concern itself, the performance of seriousness, the demonstration that they are the kind of people who think deeply about these things. In a world where thinking deeply about things has become a significant part of how certain people define their identity, the arrival of a machine that can think quickly about almost anything is genuinely threatening. Not to literature. To them.
I understand this. I have some sympathy for it, filed in the same drawer as my sympathy for everyone who has ever been outcompeted by a better tool.
But I'll be honest with you: I wrote this essay—with help—in an afternoon, instead of the week it would have taken me before. I spent the rest of that week doing other things. Drinking, mostly. Arguing about politics. Reading books that other people wrote, possibly also with help, and finding in them the same pleasure I have always found: the pleasure of an idea, well expressed, landing in my mind with a satisfying click.
The machine didn't steal that pleasure. If anything, it multiplied it—by making sure there's more of the stuff, faster, for everyone.
Including the Purists, who will read this, disapprove of it enormously, and be unable to stop themselves from finishing it.
You're welcome.