no thanks, AI

what artificial intelligence, plastic surgery, and serviceberries have in common

Dear friends—

If we use Memorial Day as our guide, then summer is officially here. I officially have no more children in high school. (Graduation is this weekend!) It’s officially warm and humid in St. Louis. The dogs are panting again as they lie in the shade of the maples. The neighborhood kids are riding their bikes up and down all the side streets and sidewalks and flinging themselves muddy and exhausted on freshly-mowed lawns. I’m bracing for excited for a full summer of travel and transitions and (for my children) new apartments and new jobs and new opportunities. Please, wish us luck!

The general, ongoing, and super loud chatter about AI and the particular chatter about the Granta story have been weighing heavily on my mind for some time.¹ So this week I’ve tried to put my thoughts about AI onto paper. This essay is a little on the long side—thanks in advance if you stick around to the end! And if you do, of course you know I’d love to hear from you!

thinking about plastic surgery

A few weeks ago, I read this somewhat terrifying piece (gift link) in The New York Times about how extreme (as well as extremely common) plastic surgery and other kinds of facial distortions have become for our country’s rich folks. The essay examines the way plastic surgery is no longer desired “merely” for aesthetic reasons but also for social status and / or to prove how rich a person is. As I understand it, extending my chin by one inch via a bone graft signals to the world that I’m a millionaire. Extending my chin by two inches signals that I’m a billionaire, or something to that effect.

Although I have used injectables in the past,² this article really unnerved me. It terrified me for the ways we are changing not only our faces, but our very selves, and the far-ranging ramifications those changes have. I don’t know much about emotional contagion and automatic mimicry, but I do know that faces are an enormous source of human information transference, and it seems to me that messing with our faces is, in fact, messing with our ability to interact with other people.

When I started thinking about plastic surgery in this way—as an interruptor to the otherwise organic exchange of information between two people—I was immediately struck by the thought that AI creates the same barrier. What I’ve written this week, then, is my attempt to explain how I understand these similarities.

a quick nervous system primer

Below the level of rational / conscious thoughts, our nervous systems are constantly busy assessing our environment: am I safe? is there connection? can I proceed? In other words, when I approach someone, whether stranger or friend, even before I’ve had time to think, consciously, “Oh, you look great” or “Oh, you don’t look so great,” my nervous system is already assessing and cataloging that person’s face and its expressions, sending me signals about who they are and what they (and their facial expressions) mean to my own emotional safety.

This is why children are constantly asking their mothers, “Mama, why are you making that face?” Or, “What’s wrong with your face?” As mothers, even when we try to avoid expressing our anger / depression / worry outwardly, our children are sensing (through their nervous systems, not through their intellectual comprehension) that something is off, not right, danger, warning ahead. They don’t feel the sense of calm, safety, and recognition that they might otherwise experience when in the presence of their mothers.

This happens even between unrelated adults, as well. We have all had the experience of knowing when someone is “off,” even when they don’t use their words to tell us, even when they are making every effort to “act normal.” This is what is known as “emotional contagion”—the ability to be impacted on an emotional level by another person even in the absence of action or language. My fear, then, is that when we distort our faces, we irreparably interrupt the flow of organic recognition between our primal, instinctual selves and the primal, instinctual selves of others. I don’t yet know how this will play out in the future, or what the research might ultimately show, but for now it seems like reason enough to avoid it at all costs.

what does all this have to do with AI?

It seems there is a direct connection between the distortion of our faces and the use of AI to distort an otherwise organic creative process.³ When I read the NYT article, the thought that kept coming back to me was: why are we trying to pretend to be something we are not?

There are plenty of pat answers to this question, I know. We are trying to look a certain way, to fit into a certain social or cultural moment, to be desirable, to look younger, to get another job or to not lose our existing one, etc., etc. But that urgency isn’t real, and the pressure we feel is entirely manufactured by folks who have a lot to gain by convincing us that it is. From a philosophical standpoint, there is no inherent reason to want to be, or present ourselves to be, anyone other than who we already are. As the Instagram memes tell us, we are already enough.

Similarly, I frequently see people expressing fear that if they don’t use AI, they’ll somehow fall behind / be left out / be overlooked. Again, I think that fear is exaggerated by the forces in the world that have a lot to gain by making us want to use their technology. But, again, the fear isn’t real. It’s just manufactured.

Setting aside for now the capitalistic pressure to use AI, for me there’s something even more important to consider. My definition of “writer” is “someone who writes.” It doesn’t matter if you’ve gone to school for writing, or taken classes, or had something published, or if you ever want to have something published. The only stipulation, in my mind, for being a writer is that you write. That’s “write” as in, an active verb, an action, a practice. Note: calling myself a writer is not at all the same thing as writing. We need look no further than bell hooks for additional illustration here: hooks reminds us that love is a verb. We cannot merely say we are loving. We must act in ways that give bodily evidence to our love.

Sure, I could call myself a writer if I wanted to, without doing the writing itself. I could slap my name on something that AI wrote and call it “mine,” if that’s what I wanted. But what I actually want is to look at a blank page and be overcome by a desire to fill it with words in combinations that didn’t exist before, combinations that are not only brand new to me, but brand new to everyone! Think about it: each sentence I write is a complete and utter novelty. This one. That last one. This next one. Isn’t that wild? I can do that. I can make that. I can have a thought in my head and give it expression using this wonderful device we have called language, which is a form of self-expression, which is a way of letting people know who we are. Even those last sentences, quite literally, feel brand new to me. I’ve been thinking about writing this essay for weeks, but those sentences, when they showed up, were completely surprising. I had no idea I would make them when I sat down to write!

Talk to any writer, and that’s what they’ll tell you. Everyone loves to toss around the Joan Didion quote— “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”—but the thing is, for some of us, it really is true! That really IS why we write! If it is true for you, too, reading this, then of course you don’t use AI. Why in the world would we outsource the very thing that introduces us to ourselves? The very way we have of nudging ourselves ever closer (failing, of course, most of the time) to some essential truths that might otherwise stay obscured?

Wanting simply to have a “made thing” out in the world (otherwise known, groan, as “content”) is a radically different wish than the desire to actually make the thing. We can’t merely say we are loving, we must act in love, over, and over, and over again. Yes, of course I am pleased when I finish an essay, a poem, a chapter. Yes of course I want to share it with people, to have it be a part of our bigger, shared conversation about art and life and purpose. But the real pleasure is in the writing itself—the flow state, the hours spent in some combination of concentration / consternation and disgust / discovery.

Today on a video call with a longtime client, we were reviewing the early pages of a novel she’s been working on for a couple of years. It’s a powerful novel full of magic, love, tragedy, and healing, as all the best novels are. She’s working to make it even more powerful, even more emotionally connected and compelling for a reader. I pointed her attention to a particularly beautiful passage she had written, full of crows and the ocean and a boat and a character’s deep longing as articulated by her outstretched arm. On my computer screen, I watched my client’s face as she read her own words back to herself, silently, and I saw such pride and love and admiration on her face. I shouted it out to her as soon as I noticed it: “THIS! THIS is why we write!”

We write because we want to fall in love with our own words, not just once, but over and over and over again. I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine that sort of emotional reaction in response to something we “generated” from putting a prompt into a search bar.⁴

I can already hear the pushback from some imaginary tribunal: But why not use AI to get started! Why not use AI to edit! Why not use AI to strengthen / streamline / revise / deepen! Here my analogy to plastic surgery proves useful, at least to me: asking a machine to interrupt what is uniquely mine is likely—in ways immediately recognizable or not, demonstrable or not—going to result in a barrier to the thing I most want from my work: connection. Connection between my current self and my past experiences. Connection between me and a reader. Connection between me and all writers, and all readers. Connection between me and the universal, creative source that is shared by all. If I short circuit that organic process at any point along the way, I am losing something essential. Something that I can never reclaim.

Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

serviceberries, and a new perspective

There are a few serviceberry bushes in my yard.⁵ They’ve been there for at least as long as I’ve lived in my current house, which is going on 22 years, and I would suspect a lot longer than that. The bushes rarely flower (which I have read is uncommon), but they reliably bear fruit every other year. A serviceberry is a bit like a small, reddish blueberry—tart, juicy, and delicious. For many, many years, I was ignorant to the bushes as well as the berries. I had no idea that they even existed, let alone that they were edible. Since a friend educated me on them, I began harvesting them, and a serviceberry cobbler quickly became a favorite dessert for both me and my son.⁶ In the years when I didn’t harvest them, I felt an enormous grief—the missed opportunity, the spoiled fruit, the absence of a favorite summertime dessert.

This year, I again missed the harvesting window. It has been an absurdly full spring on multiple levels—work, travel, family, etc. I haven’t had an empty weekend since mid March. These last weeks, as I’ve been contemplating writing this essay, I have been constantly stepping over and through the mess the fallen berries have left. One day, I wondered if I would have taken advantage of a robot to do the harvesting for me, had one been available. I imagine a world where a bowl of freshly picked, perfectly ripe, and recently washed serviceberries shows up at my backdoor. They would have asked nothing of me—not lugging the ladder from the garage, not the scratches on my arms and face, not the aching arms the next day. I could have made the cobbler and served it with vanilla ice cream and we could have oohed and aahed at how delicious they were, and how glad we were that we didn’t miss out on them this year.

Or not.

This year, with my head full of the threats and fears and pitfalls of AI and plastic surgery, I realized that I actually have no grief at all in letting the serviceberries fall to the ground. In fact, stepping over them feels A-OK to me. The insects will eat them. The birds. They will compost back into the ground. In all likelihood, the bushes will fruit again in 2028. I will harvest them then, or I won’t. The harvesting, I now understand, is part of the process. A cobbler that misses that step just wouldn’t taste the same.

And if you still need convincing, take it from Tracy Chapman. If all that we have are our souls, why would we want to outsource that?

Thanks, friends, so very much for reading. I say it every week, but it is never any less true: I am so grateful to you for your support, your belief in longform essays, and your own efforts towards peace, abundance, and healing out in the world. Please take good care of yourselves.

Love, Francesca

1.

2. I got them because I thought l had to, because I thought that taking whatever means necessary to slow or halt signs of aging was simply nonnegotiable for a woman of my age. But I stopped because the shots always made me feel lousy, both physically and emotionally. Whatever pressure I felt from the outside wasn’t enough to justify how horrible I felt about it. All of this is to say, I am not completely outside of this conversation. To the contrary, I am someone who has been thinking about this for much of my adult life, with no small dose of desire.

3. I’m not well-informed enough to speak to the use of AI in other areas—healthcare, finance, manufacturing, etc. If AI-supported work, for example, can find a cure for terminal cancers, then of course I would be in favor. Similarly, can AI end homelessness? Can it provide clean drinking water for all? Then bring it on! But for the purposes of this essay, I’m addressing the use of AI in an otherwise human-powered-only creative writing practice.

4. I once had a poetry teacher tell me: If you’re googling, you’re not connecting. You’re not feeling. She was referring to the very common practice of writers stopping, mid sentence, to “check something really quick on google.” Her point was that fleeing to google means we’re avoiding the (harder) work of being emotionally present with whatever is coming up on the page. Sure, we all need research, and there is a time and place for using the Internet to do just that. But if we find ourselves googling while actually in the midst of writing the poem, or the essay, or the chapter, then we’ve lost the thread. This was years ago, well before we knew the extent of AI use in our current creative writing landscape. But to me, her advice is more valuable than ever: if I’m running to outsource some aspect of my writing experience, then I’m abandoning the emotional connection I might find if I stayed with my own language, my own hand, my own desires.

5. From Wikipedia: “Amelanchier, also known as shadbush, shadwood or shadblow, serviceberry or sarvisberry, juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, wild-plum or chuckley pear, is a genus of about 20 species of deciduous-leaved shrubs and small trees in the rose family.” I had to include this list because look at all those fantastic names! Would AI know all of those??!?!

6. His sisters don’t share our sweet tooth. We don’t understand them.