Artificial Intelligence versus "God"

In defense of inspiration, a Luddite pops off.

Welcome to Pancake Brain, a weekly newsletter about pop culture, politics, and the psychedelic experience. This Sunday evening brings us the latter.

This week I had several conversations about ghostwriting private biographies. After finishing a draft of my own memoir, I gave up whatever rib of the writer's ego was jammed into my lungs, and I now find great joy in helping other people craft their stories. I love writing as a ghost, and I can’t believe anyone is doing any of it using AI. I remember the moment I read Kurt Vonnegut’s prediction that there would be machines doing the writing someday, I’m not sure how old I was, but the my main source of information was Encarta. No way, machines could never write stories, I thought, they don’t have feelings, they don’t even have memories. Cut to today. If you are a longtime reader of this newsletter, you know that there were many years when I disappeared from the internet. I ran off to the mountains to do a ton of psychedelics, and ended up getting sent home to make peace with my mother. Long story short: I tried leaving the world, and when I came back, there was AI. When I returned to New York, the first friend who had me over for dinner and showed me his new experiments in AI art, and I thought, “Damnit, Kurt,” and forgot to follow it up with “so it goes.”

I recently interviewed with a contractor of private biographies that used original writing to create books from interviews transcribed with AI. I told the guy that I could create a compelling book from any materials, but would want to do the interviews myself, if possible. He said maybe. When I asked if I could at least transcribe the recordings myself, my potential employer said he would not stop me from doing large amounts of unnecessary work insofar as it did not violate any ethics. This is the freedom of the Luddite, to go ahead and waste time… or perhaps find value in using it differently.

Transcribing interviews can be annoying, especially when I have to hear the sound of my own voice. It takes a lot of time. I like to nearly memorize what is being said, drawing a web of feelings and concepts, which looks like many colored pens and, if not wasted time, wasted paper. I will listen to two minutes for ten minutes, and as twenty becomes sixty, there are images forming, dots connecting, a summary of themes, offering narrative arcs. And it turns out that AI can do that instantly, you don’t even have to wait. It came right to my inbox. There with a bing, at the end of our interview, was an emailed write-up, presumably performed by the same robot who had been recording our every word, having then compiled the major takeaways, key themes, a summary of what we had discussed, and action items for the weeks ahead. I looked at this thorough report immediately completing a task that takes me days, and mercifully saw the value in all those hours. The write up didn’t give me what I have at the end of my notes, which is not only studying information, but experiencing it, connecting to a sense of something beyond pushing nouns and verbs together.

I’m such a Luddite, I don’t even like asking ChatGPT for word replacements… although I did double check the spelling of “unnecessary,” which I suspect to be a prank I am playing on myself. Of course, the internet needs to be used as a source of information, but without forgetting that the questions art asks are all about the asking. To be human is to ask questions and allow the answers to come from “God,” or what you might call boring old inspiration, that which can come in an instant, but always requires time, often uncertainty, and quite a bit of patience, which I hate. And yet it’s always worth it. The not knowing followed by the knowing. The studying, the waiting, the watching and the learning. I think we all have access to “God” in the sense of the energy of life, or what you might call pure genius. You don’t have to be an artist to know genius. You can hear it, you can watch it and read it. Our bodies know the expression of genius because we can feel it. There are some minds and hearts more finely attuned to the mystery, but we all have the hook up by virtue of being alive, and we all feel it, one way or another, each and every day, after all, infinite intelligence is the place where the answers to all of your questions come from… that is, the ones you don’t ask ChatGPT.

With curiosity,
Lauren

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