AI Writing as a "Good Fire"

Sometimes a hellish inferno purges the brush to the benefit of the forest

If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on is that there are too many hot takes on AI writing—which really doesn’t seem to be affecting our daily lives as much as the initial bombastic claims of last year.

Sure, my professor mom is forcing her medical school students to handwrite essays in-class due to several students trying to pass AI essays as their own. Medical. Students. Future doctors. What a pack of dangerous losers, amirite? Let’s not allow those of such low character and inability to do basic research stand over us with the surgeon’s knife, agreed?

And yes, there are little AI chatbots and editors popping up on LinkedIn or Quora or wherever you digitally roam. Is anybody really using these things? Impossible to tell.

But friends and associates have shared with me AI creative writing resulting from prompts. A post-apocalyptic fantasy prompt led to a story about a plucky female protagonist and her trained falcon resisting an evil warlord. An essay using the John Henry versus mechanized steam drill fable as an allegory for human versus AI writing framework was quite coherent and straightforward—with all the syntax, point-counterpoint pattern, and grammar the high school grading rubrics love. AI even massaged the scattered bits of a recalled potent dream into a coherent narrative as an interpretation.

The simple fact remains that I—as a guy who writes creatively for a living—have yet to be impressed or threatened by any AI writing I’ve encountered. But I do think AI writing represents a direct threat to those who profit from or are wed to the ruthlessly dominate writing philosophy of my lifetime, i.e., ”writing as a craft”.

Writing as Craft versus Magic

“Writing as a craft” is inarguably the dominate ideology across the developed world in sectors public and private, academic and business. More than any literary style or genre or philosophical perspective, the clearly natural sciences-inspired idea that we can marshal reductive reasoning, pattern recognition, and structural purity to completely master and understand writing and story is the idea of this literary age.

Writing as craft has been pounded into my brain as the only way to think about books my entire life. There is a structure. There is utility, as the writing will go to work for some profitable venture after all: good grade, business report, socio-political ammunition, sales, etc. Most keynote speeches from bestselling authors I’ve attended laud writing as a craft. Andre Dubus III, a literal carpenter, notably leaned in hard.

But, hear me out… what if craftsman writing is not the only way to view the creative writing experience?

What if, rather than this modern innovation being a liberating and enlightening path to full mastery of the human experience, we’ve narrowed our minds and potential in an unprecedented way? For the sake of argument, let’s imagine the antithesis of a technical, craftsman approach to writing steeped in the methods of contemporary natural sciences and reductive, material reasoning. Forget the formula for a hypothetical alternative.

The antithesis I come up with is magical writing, magic simply meaning as the Merriam-Webster dictionary states, “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.” I feel the disdain from a certain person as I write the words. Unease. Superiority. The defenses are up. But I appeal for a moment of indulgence.

An example of magical writing is the Hindu epic Ramayana, categorized as such in-part due to the methodology of the marijuana-smoking Vedic monks who dreamed up the Indian saga from a sacred space. I love the Ramayana and, yes!, for its prose. So often we examine texts in the scholarly sense, but so rarely for enjoyment. But there’s a demon king attempting to seduce a princess. A gigantic monkey carries a mountain. There’s a man, Guho, whose spiritual power is so great he cannot leave his forest or else the entire world will spin off its axis. A banished prince awakening his inner self as an incarnation of a god (Krishna). The most epic archer v. archer showdown in all of story. There’s no shortage of interesting and amazing visuals and concepts. This stuff shouldn’t be homework, it should be in the Marvel cinematic universe.

Simply put, there is a more expansive and original imagination with, yes!, nuanced and layered themes in the Ramayana than the majority of books published this century that I’ve picked up. How is this possible?! We have the formula! We are the master craftsman, soberly whittling our sticks! How could these pot-smoking Vedic monks from millennia past dream up this incredible stuff while we collectively are struggling to make a worthy Rings of Power Season 2—even with over a billion dollars invested?

Perhaps we’ve allowed a certain writing, and by extension storytelling, method to become overly dominate. It is this craftsman writing, much like how the artisan craftsman faces automated manufacturing machines, that AI is revealing with its effortless mastery.