Today, I opened a post by someone I’ve been following for a long time, and was surprised that she was so obviously admitting to using AI in her works.
My first thought was betrayal, because how could you turn our art into something that now creates an apprehension to pick up something new, to give the small sliver of time we have for leisure to a new author or new novel that may very well suck your soul rather than give more of it.
For so long, I’ve thought of it as a threat to me, and my written expression. If so many people are so easily putting written works out into the world, how will mine be found?
But after a quick click of the unfollow button, I realized it’s never been about the invalidation of me, but the invalidation of writing and the reason to write in the first place.
Writing calls upon the little tiny moments that make up a life. It calls to the emotions drawn from a hand gesture, the way the sun hit you just right on a Sunday afternoon in April. It calls upon the heartbreaks and the victories. The grass stains and the record crackles as you slow-dance in the kitchen to your favorite song.
It’s raw, and in its truest form, it can make you understand someone else, wholly different from you, down to their core.
Writing is human.
And what happens when you dehumanize art? The only thing we have left that makes us different from the metal and the rocks and the bubbling magma?
We disconnect more from a world that already feels incredibly disconnected.
We lose the one thing that keeps us as a mankind.
The Collins definition of Art says, “…for people to look at and admire or think deeply about.”
And how does one go about getting that feeling; when you escape into a painting’s brush strokes, when a melody swoops you up into the clouds, when a sentence makes you feel like you’re not alone even for just a moment, when it’s made by metal?
“Learn it, it’s our future,” we’ve all heard it before.
But what happens to that future, when the way we connect isn’t that soul-binding, gut-wrenching, belly-laughing human connection anymore?
xx Jo