Can AI Write Us?

I’m terrified that ChatGBT has a hold on our humanity. I think we all are. 

We’re confronted with it daily. The way it has stolen all our language and boiled it down to a templated sentence structure and all its em dashes — I used to love em dashes — but ChatGBT is rendering them the mark of the beast (the mark of inhumanity, the mark of machine-made meaning). 

While I sift through a backlog of projects, I mentally sort out which of them I’m comfortable handing off to the machine, at least to help me compile lists and orders and templates from which I will edit and try my best to humanize a language that is eloquent in its emptiness. 

Maybe we need to be reminded that it’s all just numbers, running in the background. 

This makes it an adept tool for the mundane: the ordering of words that matter very little in the grand scheme of anything. An email newsletter full of events and deadlines. A social media post, reminding people to buy tickets to some inane event that will pass and in a year, I won’t remember. 

It’s wonderful that it efficiently excels at tasks like this, so I can free my mind for the writing that makes me feel something like a human, even while we all are drowning under a lightness of language that means less and less, the more it churns out. 

I scroll through the slides of text my friends send me on Instagram. I reconcile with the cadence of the algorithm — the ordering of words that tells me yes, a human started here, with an idea worth having — but a machine wrote the story, wrote it in a way that it feels familiar. Waves pulling me under again and again. 

Swipe to the next slide. The next. 

It’s always too long, but it does a great job of building to a climax — a key takeaway — the drop you’re supposed to feel in your gut, before you’re on to the next post. 

I digress. You see? Even thinking about the spiral has me back in the spiral of thinking about the spiral. 

Where is our humanity in all this? Where do we end and begin, when language and symbol and communication is lost to the ether? 

I think of Milan Kundera’s, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Written by a man who loved language, who understood its foundational role in our societies and interpersonal relationships. A man who wrote about love and loss, while he was really writing about war and the politics of his day. Can the machine do this? Can the machine accidentally or even on purpose, tell the story of humanity while it writes a love story? 

ChatGPT can write about paradox in beautiful cadence pulled from the litany of words already written about the nature of something we cannot understand. So what is it parroting back to us? Our own sadness and hope and vital truth? It’s only numbers. It’s all just a mathematical attempt at replicating the creativity of consciousness. 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a character named Franz posits that  “We have more and more universities with more and more students...sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries...culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.” 

Even then, even when he spoke of books that could be touched only by a human hand, he already knew that we are drowning in an excess of words. An extreme and unquantifiable weight, which ultimately breaks and becomes light. 

When there is so much of something that it cannot stand under its own weight  it snaps, losing all its worth. This is why one banned book means far more than “The billions of words spewed out by our universities.” 

In the age of all this lightness, here is where we come in again, messy and human, to rescue ourselves from this epic undoing. 

The machine may recognize the universal arcs that make up the backbone of every myth, movie, and story, because it has unfettered access to the patterns that emerge in everything ever written. But what we have, the thing about symbols and language that keeps us so heartbreakingly human, is the weight of our own experience. Love, or a striving towards it, is the beating heart of tension and drama that makes us feel something real.

And what do heaviness and lightness and language have to do with love? 

We all stand on a stage, bearing witness to our personal catalog of symbols. The ones we gathered up over a lifetime of bare feet in real soil — human hands that touched green, living things — that were scraped and bruised and healed by water and teeth-sunk-deep in real food, dripping with the rawness of sunshine and rain and sticky, textured dirt. The stuff that grounds us makes us most equipped to tell stories that resonate and thrum with the beating heart of a breathing earth. So we stand on the stage, holding all the things that matter most and we let them spill out of our arms, out of our mouths, desperately trying to connect a meaning that is so often lost in translation even between us, between people who love each other in this only-human way.

Like the books in the library, like the words churned out by an AI language model, the symbols hold paradox: an excess and lack of meaning. The weight of anything lies in the interpretation. Kundera writes about a simple hat as an item that carries a lifetime of meaning for Sabina – a woman – a love interest – a symbol all her own. Sabina cries at the sight of this particular kind of hat. A lifetime of meaning written on an object in a language only she understands, “And so when she put on hat in his presence, Franz felt uncomfortable, as if someone had spoken to him in a language he did not know...What made him uncomfortable was its very lack of meaning.”

If your lover still tries, after ten years to fully grasp why the sight of a particular hat makes you cry and laugh at the same time, then no machine will ever come close to replicating the depth of your experience. It may rattle off a sentence so perfectly curated that it hits your ears (your eyes) and makes you think for a second that your story doesn’t matter in this cascade of endless distilled facts and lessons about spirituality, about the habits of high performers, about gut health, about relationships and attachment styles and the benefits of 15 minutes of sunlight first thing in the morning or how these 10 ChatGPT prompts changed my life.

Are you feeling lighter yet? Do you feel free under the weight of all this excess? 

Or does it make you, with some kind of burning fire in your belly, want to run like a mad man into the front lines with your own words in hand, crafted from the decay of your own experience?

What do you know that cannot be threaded into existence by any formula or thing that came before you? 

Tell me about everyone you have loved. Tell me about the time you saw God, or the dream that you cannot yet put into words. The beautiful, winding, spiral of images that you cannot express without colors you wish you could make up, pluck from a universe parallel to ours because there is some depth to you that you will always be excavating with a pen or a brush or the late night drawling of your voice in all its fluctuations, telling a story over a meal cooked from scratch under the soft glow of a warm light that flickers because you forgot to replace the bulb, again.

Language, the symbols that prevail throughout and across all cultures and tongues, is ours to steward. We can use it in good doses, or we can give it away too quickly, until we are depleted of the thing that gives us life. Like water, it is heavy and necessary as often as it is light. It can carve and destruct as much as it can feed what needs to grow, as much as it can quench an ancient thirst. 

How do we take it back? How does the soul prevail through all the binary threads that spit back automation and ever-perfect curation? 

I know you have ChatGPT open in a tab right now. 

I know you just scrolled past something that you saved because it felt relevant. Will you return to it? Or will it be lost in the library of over-production? 

There are limitless conclusions we might arrive at, and the extreme availability of it all, on our social media, in our email inbox, in e-books and podcasts and online courses – all of this direction makes it nearly impossible to see a line through to our own center. 

I think that if we close the tab for a while, if we simply write in a voice that is uniquely ours, while we still have it, then we will begin to honor the power of our own stories. Our personal symbols. The ones that make meaning, that tell us our own endings when we listen closely. All the wisdom we need is hidden within language – inside the heaviness of our humanity.

In Milan Kundera’s beautifully human words, “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

—PS, thank you ChatGBT, for locating this quote that I remembered, but failed to underline. 

What a wonderful use case.