The Grasshopper Issue #85: Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Writing as self-therapy and the AI prompting game

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, when I started focusing my Medium writing on politics and climate issues, there was a bit of a backlash against ‘doom and gloom’ writing. Two of the best and most popular writers there were focused on writing about the darkness in the world.

There is certainly enough of it to keep even a prolific writer busy. Those two writers, who were coming from very different places, were both seemingly beset with demons, hence the doom and gloom label.

I found myself getting dangerously close to joining them, in part because it was pretty easy to go there, but I have a streak of dark humor in me that kept me from the very serious voices they used. 

As Medium made changes that seemed designed to punish popular writers who wrote about serious subjects, both writers decamped for Substack, leaving behind tens of thousands of followers on Medium. That had to be a hard decision but I suspect both are doing just fine.

It got me reflecting on why readers are drawn to tales of darkness and why writers write about it. I think it comes down to a kind of therapeutic cleansing, writing and reading as self-therapy. I eventually decided I did not want to go that route and I would try to put at least some positive spin in my pieces about some pretty awful stuff.

I have an ongoing debate as I write about how much of myself to inject into my opinion writing, how often to use the first person, and what to reveal about my personal life. I think my choice to write this newsletter came about because I wanted to get more personal while writing about being a writer.

Then I started an unexpected personal journey this year when I decided to quit drinking and write about the process in another newsletter called The Remarkable. The writing is very personal and I have worked hard to be honest about the ongoing experience of quitting an addiction.

It has been an interesting experience for me to air my linen in public and I believe it has been healthy for me to write about this personal change. My stated goal was to reach one or two souls who might find value in sharing my experience.

Though that newsletter has a handful of subscribers, it has been a very gratifying thing to get feedback from others who have had similar experiences. I have realized this was my way of finding something communal to help me, a kind of support system online.

Therapy, in other words.

Writing, like any other creative pursuit, is by nature a very personal thing. Making the decision to get very personal with it was a challenge for me because I’m a relatively reserved person when it comes to my personal life. Or so I thought.

Now that I know that writing about myself is not a negative thing, I think my writing in general has improved across the board. And, as a reader, I’m more open to similar writing, especially when I can see how hard a writer is working to balance the personal with the universal.

Finding that balance is pretty critical to growing through our work. For me it has meant removing some self-imposed limitations that were keeping me from expressing my true self.

In hindsight, creating The Grasshopper was the first step in this little liberation process by writing directly to the reader one on one about something I love and injecting random ideas into the conversation that often turn out to not be random at all.

As the cliche goes, everything is connected. One of the reasons I encourage publishing your work is that it builds your connections, not unlike building a neural network based on new experiences or skills. Writing has power to change you if you let it.

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

–Kurt Vonnegut

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Moving on from the dark side (or maybe towards it), I’ve been gradually getting up to speed on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI). I don’t land in the fear camp or the game-changing wonder camp; I’m more interested in it as a potential source of work for writers.

Large language models (LLMs) are the technology underlying AIs such as ChatGPT-4, and I won’t even attempt to explain what an LLM is or how it came to be. The complexity of the concept used to design these things is literally mind-boggling, and tells me there are some very interesting minds out there creating them.

As interesting as that conceptual design is, we really don’t need to know how it works, in fact one of the biggest benefits of ChatGPT is that it eliminates the requirement for tech knowledge entirely. It basically shoves that incredible design into the background and simply responds to human language to get things done.

This is where I’m supposed to remind everyone that this stuff is not infallible and using it without applying human intelligence to the results is a recipe for trouble. When it screws up, it can come up with some pretty awful or silly results. Results which are rightly called ‘hallucinations’, an interesting application of the word.

You’ve been warned.

There is a lot of speculation about AI chatbots replacing writers and in some cases it can, but I’d be a lot more worried if I was a software developer, because these things can generate code really fast with only a prompt in plain English to guide them.

In fact I came across a quote to the effect that human language would be the next software development language, i.e. ‘the next coding language will be human’. I’m sorry to say I do not know where I saw this or who said it.

Which gets me to the concept of prompts and how they can impact writers as a related skill. In AI terms a prompt is the request made to get the AI to do something and writing them effectively is becoming a marketable skill.

Yes, you might be able to make good money writing instructions to a thing, but it’s not that simple. Take replacing those coders for example. Anyone could come up with a prompt to build an app but for that app to be truly useful, you would need to understand software, user interface, and user experience design.

Those design skills are not something the average writer has or can learn quickly. For background, I have, in a past life, worked in three small software companies where it was not unusual for me to be the only employee without those skills, a non-programming marketing person.

But my core task was explaining the benefits of the technologies we were making to non-technical people in simple and compelling terms. This also happens to be what several categories of writers, including copywriters and technical writers, are doing.

If I decide to get into the AI Prompting business, which I’m not ruling out, this might be an advantage from an experience perspective. The other advantage I see as a requirement for the job is the ability to quickly find things via internet (Google) search queries, another skill that a surprising number of people are bad at.

Lest it seem weird to pay people six figures to write simple instructional sentences, that is pretty much what a lot of those ad writers and their employers are charging to do something very similar. So maybe there’s an opportunity out there for us starving writers.

If, in my reading, I come across more tidbits about this I’ll share them. But try not to simply decide AI is an enemy to writers and humanity in general. A lot of fear is about not understanding that which you are afraid of.

You might as well get to know something about AI because it is going to be embedded invisibly into every technology we use from toasters to cars and that is not in the future, it is here now.

I’m choosing, so far, to view it as an opportunity.

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I’m a day late getting this Grasshopper into your inboxes and I’m going to blame the holiday season. My best friend had a big party to celebrate her recent 70th birthday over the weekend and I spent a lot of time helping out and then recovering yesterday.

The party also served as a holiday event, hence my excuse.

In about two weeks we’ll reach the winter equinox and the days will start to imperceptibly grow longer, adding more and more seconds of daylight with each rotation. This signals to me that the winter is on its way out, even though the reality is the worst is yet to come.

But I still can pretend.

Did you write today?

Martin

1484 words

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~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share your support. Please check them out.

If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!

Believe me, it makes my day. M