Diary, “The Other Machines in the Garden,” Entry, 12 Aug. 2024
Adventures in the cliché factory.
On August 9, wanting to say something about influencer-inflected social media and its relationship to writing and money-making,
wrote a thoughtful piece called “The Machine in the Garden.” For you it didn’t provoke much of a reaction. You’re used to the idea that writing should reach a minimum standard of quality before you show it to other people. Agents, editors, peers, readers. One of your old professors — the one who got a Pulitzer — used to begin every workshop by asking people not to fill up the world with useless words. That not every sentence is interesting, and that not every thought needs to be expressed, seems uncontroversial.Other people disagree. From the reactions you’ve seen, you might think Sundberg wanted to make Substack great again; you might think she’d told all the pretenders to log off, or told them point blank that their real, authentic lives are not worth living, let alone monetizing. None of that’s true. She simply asked questions. Why do all these informal, confessional diaries sound the same? Is it fair to ask people to pay for your unfiltered thoughts and unedited grocery lists? She asks about people co-opting the title of Writer without caring what it means. These are people, she seems to say, who want to monetize themselves the same way influencers do on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. She never said they’re not writers. She didn’t say anything hurtful or incorrect. She did say, “I don’t want to send boring content, I don’t want any type of dropoff of subscribers, and I definitely don’t want to become trapped on a platform I don’t understand.” She explains her positions. She sources thoughts from her friends (one of them responds with an all-time great Ken Marino bit from The Other Two).
You didn’t take anything she said personally. You respect her. How can you feel any other way about someone who wants writing to be good, interesting, incisive? Other people are mad, though, and as you read through their comments, you couldn’t help but wonder what these say about the people commenting. Many sound insecure. Are you saying I’m boring? Are you saying I don’t belong? Are you saying I’m not a real writer?!
All of it made you think of something else, though: A.I. How easy is it to “create content” now. You can pivot to writing today because you don’t have to write anything to do it. You have a friend obsessed with this kind of thing. He tells you all the time how he can write hundreds of thousands of words when before he couldn’t write a sentence. All you have to do, if you want to become an influencer on Substack, is ask ChatGPT to write you fifty-two ideas for newsletter topics. You can help it narrow your audience to something like travel writing, for example, or you can ask it to help you branch out into subjects you have no business writing about whatsoever. Once you have the topics you can ask ChatGPT to write the posts. You can clean them up. Put in details about your dog or your kid or you girlfriend to make them look human.
It goes deeper, though. Since the advent of word processing, writing has changed in subtle but unmistakable ways. People have made programs to transcribe your voice to text with startling accuracy. They’d made tools to help you track scansion for poetry. They’ve made massive programs to help people organize and write very long documents like books. These A.I. writing partners — Grammarly is a good example — are everywhere. But they’re really an outgrowth of things like spelling and grammar checks. Right-click synonym finders. Autocomplete. Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, and now that the tools are thinking, too, that’s something to consider. You’re not arguing for a return to typewriters and white-out; you’re not a Luddite. You use Whisper to transcribe audio files. You turn off grammar check but use spellcheck. You never allow writing under your byline if a large language model has touched it, though. Yet you can’t condemn A.I. outright. All tools are measured by their users’ intentions. People who use A.I. to outline their writing because they have dyslexia are using the tools for a different reason than those who use it because they’re too lazy to try or because they want to be famous. That’s also true of people who put their writing behind a paywall — something you’ve considered for a while — because they don’t want people training their own large language models on your content. You may feel queasy about being ripped off but not have pretensions that you’re writing the greatest art of the twenty-first century.
Anyway, the question of who belongs, and who can claim the title “writer,” is facile at best. Everyone who writes is a writer. That’s to say everyone who makes a good-faith effort to see and understand, to unpack and clarify, to demystify and imagine and create, those people are writers. If a fresh-faced writer needs some of these training-wheels in the form of A.I. to help them start, so be it; however, don’t think because someone engineered a paragraph from a prompt that they’re a writer. Writing is the other side of the coin from lectio divina. Writing is a kind of language-based mindfulness. Try as it might, A.I. can’t engage in any kind of mindfulness because it doesn’t have a mind. At least, not yet. Let’s burn one bridge at a time. You don’t think we’re too far away from Robo-Shakespeare, but that’s another nest of vipers. The other machines in the garden. At the moment, anyone interested in writing, any human person who wants to write, you think that’s a good thing. Anyone willing to do the work no matter how they start should be encouraged. Maybe some will fall off, but who cares? Maybe people will write something bad. Again, so what? What could be better for the world than more people reading and writing? What could be better for the world than more people caring about good, true, honest, creative, strange writing? Taste takes care of itself. A sincere writer (as opposed to a cynical influencer) will find readers who share their sensibilities. So, if a reader takes anything away from this, you hope they take away that they are welcome, that all voices should feel welcome in a serious writing community, and that they should look deeply at their world and the people in it, because that’s the first step to becoming a writer.
The second step is to write.