The Grasshopper #51: Voice, Mediocrity, and the Future
There’s no stopping it
I recently read a piece on Medium (paywall, maybe) by Linda Carroll about an AI app called Ghost that can mimic the style of famous writers of the past, if they are out of copyright.
I don’t agree with her judgment that these imitations are convincing. I’ve read most of the originals and found these results unconvincing. But this is the tip of the iceberg and it will affect your life. It probably already is.
But this is not a doom and gloom issue. Not yet anyway. I was struck by the mediocrity of the writing samples she offered and it was immediately apparent why, at least to me. The voices were weirdly dead, flat, lacking the spark of life.
Given that they were ‘written’ by algorithms, that’s not surprising. Every writer struggles to find our voice, that which makes our work interesting, compelling, and memorable. When we find it, the writing just seems on target.
You’ve probably heard me mentioning voice on a regular basis. It is a core aspect of writing, and any creative work, but it can’t be taught, at least not in conventional ways. People talk of finding their voice, not learning it.
It’s what makes a sentence from a Hemingway, a Murakami, or even a Tolkien immediately identifiable. But ask me to identify what makes it work and you now have a problem that is much harder to teach to AI learning systems. It is possible they will work it out themselves and then we may have a new species on our hands.
At the risk of becoming metaphysical, a risk I like to take once in a while, voice comes from the soul or something equally hard to pin down. I happen to believe that nature may be far more sentient, or aware of itself, than many humans think. Some Buddhist teachings even find rocks sentient, though operating at a very different pace than us.
Writers tend to be a little obsessed with self-awareness. We work in secret unless we choose to share our work. Until that point we are immersed in our own world, one we made with the simplest of tools. This is why I am a big advocate for getting your work out there. It helps us see it from different perspectives and learn from that experience.
AI is the story of the future but there are certain things about this future that could be very strange, especially if younger people lose the ability to hear authentic voices in the worlds they consume. A sort of global acceptance of mediocrity, the ‘good enough’ problem.
Part of the reason I write The Grasshopper is to help us get past good enough to the best I can do at this stage. Not to critique ourselves into paralysis but to begin to recognize when we are getting there.
Does anyone get there? I’d argue yes, but don’t ask me to make the case. It’s like The Force. You got to feel it (yes I stuck a Star Wars reference in there).
Darkness and light
Today started out sunny, breezy, and very mild in the mid-sixties, which is amazing this early in Western New York. But as I was writing the words above it got very dark and thunderstorms are moving in.
I hate saccharine writing like the relentlessly upbeat make a buck stories that pollute online writing. The world can be intensely sweet but we would not even know that sweetness if it didn’t have the contrasting darkness. Writing, like many things, requires balance.
The way you find that balance may be the way you find the voice I spoke of earlier.
Big thunder outside right now. I love it. April.
I seldom sit down and write these newsletters in one sitting. I see writing them as a gift, a break where I make the rules. But it’s Saturday and I’ve already done about 1400 words so I need to recharge the engines.
Before I call it a day, I want to circle back to my headline topic. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, famously when told 90% of television is crap, replied that 90% of everything is crap. These days, with things like CharGPT, I’d revise that to 99.99%. We’re already getting flooded with mediocrity.
It’s our challenge to cut through the crap.
Complaining isn’t going to change the future
There’s a lot of handwringing going on about AI and what it will do to humanity, and especially creatives. I’ve come to the conclusion that worrying about it is a waste of time because we are not stuffing that genie back into the bottle.
Change happens.
Rather than worrying about the future, we should be noticing what makes our work uniquely human and refining that. I know that an army of software engineers are trying to figure out how to detect AI-generated content but I’m guessing it might stay one step ahead of them.
Right now it’s moving so fast that we can’t be sure any new writing is entirely human (this is!). AI for art, illustrators, filmmakers, and musicians is creating some truly strange stuff because it basically just jams a bunch of stuff together.
I am seeing articles on how you can use AI to ‘improve’ your writing. I’m not a Luddite and the temptation to spend more time messing with it is in the back of my mind, but I know that the only way you improve your writing is doing it. And reading great writers wherever you find them.
I’ll be honest, I don’t read anywhere as much as I used to. But no one read as much as I used to. When you’re younger you vacuum up all forms of information. But eventually you become more discerning about what to devote your limited time and attention to.
That same discernment applies to what we choose to write about. As my readers know I am big on having niches that you focus on, but I also think those topics find you and, like life, are constantly evolving. For example, if our US politics ever calm down and get back to pre-Trump normal, I probably won’t be writing about politics so much on Medium. But some other focus will come along.
Though I don’t see any end to the political turmoil in the foreseeable future.
I like to have one big book going at any given point. During lockdown it was Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That one took a long time to consume but it was worth every minute. Right now I’m reading Wade Davis’s Into The Silence, which tells the story of Mallory’s tragic attempt to be the first to climb Everest and the horrendous losses of WWI that preceded it and affected British mountaineering for at least a generation.
It’s quite an amazing book, very thoroughly researched and readable. Davis has the enviable job title of Explorer in Residence at National Geographic, though he says he is seldom ‘in residence’ because he is out exploring.
Well, this issue got pretty random. I’m not sure how I got from AI chatbots to climbing Everest but that’s how my mind works sometimes.
Did you write today?
Martin Edic
1211 words
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I do have a question Martin, maybe you can address it in your Medium post. After the judge admonished Trump and his attorneys along with every participant in the Trump show yesterday, to abstain from making potentially inciteful comments then later that same day Trump held a press conference and called the D.A., the judge and the judges' family hateful names and said they should be the ones prosecuted. Those statements are inflammatory! That's all it takes for Trump followers to act out and there has been extra security added to the court officials and they have received, even before the arraignment, death threats, why isn't he being slapped with contempt and tossed behind bars to rethink his words?