So What Comes Next? Write Where AI Can’t Play

Write Into Realms AI Can’t Follow

Bluntly, here is my premise. Probability Engines (AI) can’t write beautifully. They are fed too much crap, and they can only produce the literary equivalent of tapioca. So write into the beauty, move to the country where the actual language matters, and provide an emotional and aesthetic experience that the reader needs. The reader, or at least the one that matters, will walk away from PE pulp and turn to you. Let me give you some examples.

For the reader, and maybe the writer, there is a delightful chance to watch craft working in the sections below. Watch how the author’s voice, word choice, creative decisions allow the reader to know so much from so little.

How does this relationship work and why does she need it this way? Who and why takes a child to see and engine of death and why does it require best makeup? The lyric experience of the New World is always the same, never the same for anyone, based on overload and myth. How quickly can an author both show the aftermath of a trauma and define a sibling relationship? Is a three-way relationship with death in the room different in the US South than in Ireland (nod to Joyce)? How surreal can the world of the working Scottish poor be, and still display cause and effect.

And I posit, that if these paragraphs work for you, give you some recognition, some resonance, some flicker of spirit, then you’ve discovered the difference between what a human writer can create and a Prediction Engine cannot.

Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow:

Now and then we hold hands. Now and then we stop to kiss with cold lips and warm mouths, now and then we walk on separately. We’re wearing boots. Snowdrifts have piled up on the sidewalk. And yet we feel like two dancers, gliding in and out of an embrace, a swoop into a lift. He doesn’t hold me back. We doesn’t weigh me down to the ground, he doesn’t urge me forward. One moment he’s at my side, the next he’s a little behind me.

Clyde Edgerton, Where Trouble Sleeps, A Novel:

Alease Toomey sat at her dresser, putting on lipstick, getting ready to take her son up to see the electric chair for the first time.

Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing:

I could bury myself in New York. I could see that from the boat as it went under the Statue of Liberty on a cold dawn that grew quickly behind me and shoved the fog off the slate-coloured water. That was Manhattan, already towering over me. It made tiny things of the people around me, all gawking at the manmade cliffs, and the ranks of even higher cliffs behind them, stretching forever into America and stopping their entry. I could see the terror in their eyes.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall:

Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent prayer. “Fighting again, or was it your father.”

Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop gouts of blood; yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a cloth, for the Devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter his servant.”

Neil Gunn, The Silver Darlings: There was an old way of life behind them that had produced in the centuries proverbial sayings and rhythms of poetry and music. But this did not help many of them now-for when despair found its ultimate rhythm, the eyes inclined to stare and the hands to fall. [Not just a matter of lyricism, but a key symbol of the book’s theme. The break of the past and the ruthless onset of modernism.]

Robert Penn Warren, The Circus In The Attic, The Circus In The Attic

But she lived. And she had married Murray James, a foreman at the furniture factory, a man ten yeas older than she, a big quiet man, very strong and very kind. He satisfies her in every way better than Jasper Parton ever did, and she loves him better, even, than she every loved Jasper Parton. She knows this, and she knows that now, at last, in this way she has truly killed poor, vain, cheap, laughing, eye-rolling, heroic Jasper.

Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing:

Something really weird was happening in the Gorbals – from the battered hulk of the Planet Cinema in Scobie Street, a deepsea diver was emerging. He hesitated, bamboozled maybe by the shimmering fathoms of light, the towering rockfaces of the snow-coraled tenements.