Why (A.) I. Write
Where A.I. infers Artificial Intelligence, Alternative Ireland, Augmented Idiot, or simply some kind of electronic literature centric creative writer coming back into the light. I originally agreed to write this piece as an article in 2019 for an online publication, I subsequently left my job, my mother passed away during the pandemic, creative and writing plans sundered, thus it fell off my radar… until now.
George Orwell (1946) and Joan Didion (1976) famously authored individual versions of the same article: ‘why I write’; both meditations on their individual writerly creativity, motivations, and methods. More recently (July 6th 2022) Elisa Gabbert wrote a similarly titled piece for the Paris Review. Here I break with my own mostly ‘non print’ creative writing practise to write my own quirky version of those essays.
Contemporary International discourse on creativity is often acceptably populated with a smattering of technical terminology; Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Blockchain, Gamification, etc, the English language is continually refreshed, refurbished, ‘Gibsonized’ yet our consensual hallucination certainly will not dissipate solely as a result of these injections of newly invented acronymic jargonizations; AR, A.I., DLT, ML, HDD, since as humans we.. adapt. Language itself won’t reduce in communicative value, nor become banjaxed by being colloquially bandied about social media or IRL for merely ‘proper bants’.
Yet are such pullulating phenomena merely a measure of modern linguistic evolution enriching language, increasing conceptual complexity, morphing meaning in our said matrices and thus extending our internalized or intellectual responses, or somehow sharpening our collection of cerebral splinters as language itself starts fragmenting under collective uncommon use, and consequent (mis)understanding in any Burgessian sense(lessness) of it? In my once ever-evolving social(ly) mediated contexts where my own Hiberno-English might be more a fluid form of ‘Terra Nova Engerlish’ un-categorised within universal language sets by developers and researchers. Certain more personal meanings, methods, and motivations of any Irish writer of electronic literature may be deemed irrelevant, utterly and rightly ignored, subject to inferior terms and conditions, deliberately and/or (un)consciously set to remain (in)completely the same.
Therefore questions arise, what actual value, worth, or validity is there in asking students in today’s creative writing classes, workshops, or elsewhere to wonder why Orwell, Didion, they, or I (might want to) learn to write, try to write creatively, even create ‘difficult’ work, let alone to somehow entice them to strive towards creating their own electronic literature? Does the fact that recent A.I. projects require natural language processing modules to provide an efficient interpretive interface, meaning that contrary to the usual counter culture trends of linguistic fracturing or full disintegration, a more precise use of language is now required, at very least precision (in terms of experimentation) is required to ensure some novelty of the outputted image.
Reading Gabbert’s article I can understand why some employ an almost century old assertion from Gertrude Stein that most people mentally live in an era preceding the actual times they currently inhabit, justifying why many new, novel, or beginning writers outside formal writing classes, are often still drawn to older, traditional, more straightforward ‘trusted’ perhaps non perplexing non difficult non-complex non experimental standard writing methods. Low cost simple pen and paper is available to the average bear who initially rejects the tautological temptations of electronic amanuensis.
For modern beginning writers to read Didion emphatically state: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means” could strike as solely self-centred. Yet that essentially creative centrism appears to reinforce the oft workshop quoted E.M. Forsters: “How do I know what I think until I see what I have to say.” An egotistical emphasis remains on some moderate expression of an essential me as thinking I, I, I, of all versions of why any writer such as, he, she, they, you, Skudents, or I myself, would even want to write at all.
Contemporary writing pedagogies encountering the milieu of technologically enabled networks also routinely enlists the concepts of Bolter’s writing spaces or the 70+ year old thoughts and writing of nuclear scientist Vanavar Bush to ignite non-linear relational thinking about links, bits, html, hypertextual futures, subsequent discussions about spatial turns, data stories, developing blogs, UX, HTTP. Pedagogic essentials envisioning the written exploration of the modern management of converging orality, literacy, plus now state-of-the-art computer technologies.
The managerialization of university teaching in recent years has compelled some campus-based teachers of creative writing to develop and present clearly defined objectives, strategies, KPIs, learning outcomes, knowledge propositions and accountable deliverables, designing ‘fairly inflexible’ structures and content for lesson plans, etc. stringently based on required metrics originating in a budgeting department or similar haunt. Such mandatory administrative acts may coral and control and while containing that ironic Oulipian influence they also have the potential to efficiently eviscerate any prospective conversational spontaneity and consequent opportunity for the necessary exploratory serendipity, faster than a contractor reformatting his pornography filled hard drive. (A once witnessed occurrence where a temporary worker was found ‘taking advantage’ of free internet access).
Whether you reside on the near side of prescriptivists or are a distant disciple of descriptivism; thinking, times, and technology, like our language and societies in general, have significantly, i.e. paradigmatically, if not almost post pandemically, evolved since that original why I material was published. Today an academic writing a gmail to a prospective print publication sees google offer the writer suggestions as to how she can ‘correctly’ complete her sentence. A litany of little licentious blue lines in Microsoft word have already invaded the virgin whitespace, argued with, or assaulted an expressed tense and individual proper sense of spelling or grammar via an optional right clicked pop up dialogue box, left hanging is her sense of proper grammar, any grammar sense, the sense itself in any grammar, grammarless sense, senseless grammar, does it really come from usage? adherence, institutional alignment, a tensely subconscious yearning for tenure and subsequent certain sensuous softness of previously promised precious campus comfort, manners, decorum, respect, lines within lines, within further lines, crossing the line, a paper-thin preventing of a full blown invocation of some sapir-whorf like internal indexical shoutfest of ‘shut the font up’ frustration, enough with these blue bloody lines already, anyone today trying to write like Stein in gmail ends up with a page of Paul Klee.
Writing platform Grammarly claims 20 million people use it to improve their writing. Whether you think such a platform improves, sanitizes, or standardizes is entirely subjective, what it does do, like lesson plans, is keep you within its lines, on its rails. That may allow us to agree an initial terminus that language technologies and A.I. in particular, will, can, and do, directly and significantly affect contemporary composition, creativity, making, editing, and ultimately any form of personal writing that involves machines within and outside the academy.
A consequent phrase extra mural machinery may manufacture an ominous siege mentality in a sector already dealing with sustained administrative invasion and commercially configured conquest criteria. It is no longer any kind of conceptual stretch post Haraway to state that any writer herself has potentially become augmented. For me therefore ever present A.I. promises to provide a self -referential inherently complex context in which to consider technologies impact on contemporary writing and on both the author and the processes of teaching other beginning authors.
Should we further recede into the concept of writing itself as a language technology, mediated mirrors of thought, inscription as materialised ordered thinking, in those respites of unordered classroom conversation we can be invited to develop our own personal critical capacities by striving to hold both opposing views simultaneously and finding some personally comfortable mental mechanism to achieve that. Working on finding your voice only becomes necessary if you actually have something to say.
We willingly recognize that the semantic web brought the necessity to abstract language using more ‘technical’ language. Whether here we might argue for or against craft and art versus science and technology or the Phoenicians as our first algorithmic culture, thus accountants as our first written storytellers, it actually becomes a test of whether we are ‘really’ being allowed to think through and argue at all in a binary sensitive/insensitive era where much popular discourse itself has become dominated and undermined by unfounded assertion, lies damn lies and the deliberate erosion of the value of clarity and truth. Constrained conflation occurs when the writing spaces themselves tighten and conceptually contract. Brown University as origin of electronic literature was also origin of the student safe space. The contextual question arises: are modern linguistic myths of conflated Langtech, techlang, both birthing black boxed blank pages ?
Are faulty folios trying to fly horrendous chimeric concepts, putting some plugged in pixeled Pegasus into play, only to soar sophically into creative writing’s intellectual airspace. Whether any of this triggers concerns about divining digital language art or re-visitations of some semiological analyses of image and text by Barthes, some mumbled summary about metalanguage or scathing similes subverting surreptitious code matters, maybe theory in this first instance actually matters least ?
Is acknowledging any assaults on thinking over assaults on feelings an act of ingrained academic privilege? Any Kirschenbaumesque non ephemeral material making mechanism acknowledging Hansen now a technically augmented and acknowledged Simondonian fact that all drama is (data)based in conflict… All struggle codified and solidified, alphanumerically staged in open access e-books as nonperformative conformist monologue… awake to cultural constraints but sleeping at the wheel. Arguing for any distilled digitally dharmic idea from someone who began to code in my teens, prior to ‘language’ or grammar, ‘Ideas’ were the would be writer’s stock in trade, Ideas and Language are our only currencies in the bank of time.
MID JOURNEY(MAN)
The undulating quest to discover some original way to linguistically express and communicate complex ideas became this writer’s meandering pathfinding problem. Travelling the MIPTV convention floor with my Octal Plot Partitioning Scheme (OPPS) comedic framework, delicate digital diegetic delimiter first developed in 2007 for an interactive television series I wrote, I observed almost every single acquisition executive glaze over, even during those short snappy pre-Bandersnatch nontechnical introductions about vision.
The nascent theoretical elements of my PhD thesis Digitalvitalism has a similar effect on readers, graduates and professors alike, or few likes, more like. Many of those relatively complex ideas remain intramural as they are considered challenging, chaotic, unstable, idiotic, contentious, incorrectly comedic or even dangerous to often rhetorically inert methodologies. Ideas burdened as they are with a succinct ability to infect commercial safe space and introduce concepts of an uncanny other.
New Ideas often (just like these parentheses will) slow down our mind. A contemporary student of writing, any I, if she strives to emulate the motive forces of those essays of the two writing greats, in my view as stated above, has become certainly some kind of augmented, i.e. made larger, in one manner or another, intertextual, paratextual, technotextual, metatextual, within broader societal contexts. No modern-day writer can be that proverbial island, no ‘normal’ head contains only one thought, Maslow’s hammer has become a scholarly swiss army knife app, running a mobile pc in your pocket. Where your pocket, certainly in Ireland, is not a quarterback’s protective zone but has become an Orwellian political pocket of permissible opinion and (un)acceptable practise.
Digital pivots litter our learning landscape and yet zero actual pedagogical evolution appears to have essentially occurred. Certainly, in Ireland when it comes to learning literature; digital is a very deliberate omission. As one example, in the year 2020 and within 96 celebratory PDF pages of the Irish Literature review, not a single mention of digital can be found anywhere from the main literature Ireland agency.
Thus how could any beginning writer investigate or somehow allow for digital or electronic in terms of understanding or critiquing these evolving and non-evolving concepts, when entirely unacknowledged and omitted? Allow me here to place that activity of personal creative writing in the contemporary contexts of Artificial Intelligence, Alternative Ireland, Augmented Idiot…or just me in full view for some kind of discussion or engagement.
What today really can influence existentially, intrude, underlie, inform, interfere with a contemporary personal version of those two foundational essays?
“Teddy said, “You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what real really means. Let’s go indoors.”
A whispered starting point ala Spielberg in Skudent writing workshops or masterclasses, before haiku, structure or inspirational or intuitive dives into silence or source material, stories of mannequins, Pinocchios, protagonists, plot points, some suggested standard Socratic introductory question gets asked: “Why are you here?”
God, a wave not so much in the mind more an avalanche of anadiplosis that infamous insomniac dyslexic agnostic lying awake at night contemplating a, dog. Space at last, cerebral, social, spiritual, scientific, for something funny yet superficially meaningless, just to kickstart our corny koan corner.
Whatever about seeing the forests for trees some people Ursula they just want to see these transmedia storyworlds burn. Recently deceased anthropologist and writer David Graeber, also a self-described anarchist, identified one of his difficulties working in his Yale department, as being the relationship to the hierarchical structures of power therein. As a pejorative practitioner fond of exploring and embracing occasional chaos, a devoutly working class writer firing the odd stone at the patrician glasshouse, knowing many sincere successful dedicated academics I am aware it is my own home made challenge to fit that modern academic mould here in Ireland, my own ‘authority or ‘authorial’ issues maybe, frustrations with glacial pace and institutional intransigence. What I am writing, speaking, to here in some part is the proffered beliefs that formal or paid for education in these instances makes you a better writer, formal structured third level creative education, can both coral and expand your thinking, focus you, allows you aforementioned spaces and times to find that thing, your own unique voice, yes I agree with the life of Brian we really are all individuals in unison… so surely… we can also get some support from similarly minded individuals threading a similarly common individual path?
TEDx talks are the new academic sonnet.. and stop calling me surely. These indispositions are not inspired by some ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ variety of crude isolated autodidacticism many of us older writers certainly in then workshopless Ireland were forced to adopt. Nope, at heart is an uncritically engendered collective assumption that formal rigid class based promoted processes will most certainly help you hone any modicum of talent you might potentially have, so go sign up for a semester or a Hilary term.
Please forget for a minute that two of my many heroes David Bowie and James Connolly left formal education at 15 and 11 years old respectively. Please allow me to acknowledge it is often the teacher and the classmates rather than the subject, curriculum, institution, or its much vaunted resources and facilities that inspires. I have taken Creative Writing Classes only in recent decades, taught, and later written about these phenomena for others in various places.
Mark McGurl’s interpretive ‘the program era’ offered me my first definitive narrative about the emergence of creative writing programs in America. In my last ten years of writing, commercial writing, metawriting about writing, about creative writing programs, developing and teaching such programs themselves, the study and teaching of creative writing itself has drawn me in and further interested me.
Writing traditionally Eric Bennett’s ‘Workshops of Empire’ situates the ideology of the nascent workshop teaching format firmly within a comprehensive effort to counter communism. The design of the workshop is specifically ideologically informed. Beginning as a writer of comedy, when I read various entreaties to consider writing as merely an encounter with simple craft, a craft that can be so easily taught and learned within such an ideologically cultivated and cultured workshop, I inevitably remembered the observation of the first comedy store M.C. Liverpudlian comedian, writer and cultural critic Alexi Sayle when he asserted:
‘Anyone who uses the word workshop and isn’t involved in light engineering is a dickhead.”
Despite Alexi’s opinion I recently purchased and read incumbent educator Mathew Salesses “Craft in the real world (rethinking fiction writing and workshopping) [Captapult, NY 2021] The book itself says it is built on two primary questions: why do we limit our ideas about craft and workshop? And how do we start changing things? My answers to those questions are shorter: I don’t limit and I began changing things for me more than twenty years ago, all change begins with ‘I’ not we. That print entertainment version of a twenty first century ‘real world’ doesn’t appear to contain any computers nor technology and doesn’t strike me, to borrow some Debordian sense from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as in anyway actually ‘antifragile’.
Whatever about print’s specific real world the life of a working class writer will be rejection strewn yet entirely otherwise unpredictable. One of Ireland’s respected originators of the institutional creative writing workshop, Gerald Dawe observed back in 2013: “It would be a pity if idiosyncrasy and unpredictability — often hallmarks of the creative mind — were ruled out of the classroom in the interests of bland routine. Genuine creativity can be wayward, a point that can pass the cultural legislators by.”
To paraphrase one essence of current education’s modern managerial clash: “ I fought the law and the law developed new success criteria.”
My writerly relationship, with A.I. is not now nor has it ever been as tumultuous as my relationship with authority, education, language, writing itself, nor technological evangelism. In the 90’s I previously conceived and designed the first nationally funded highly technical computer game research projects in the then unknown area of graphical syntax management.
Operating within a commercial research partnership with a third level institution and a government agency. In early International encounters with complex entertainment technologies my lack of A.I. Knowledge became fully apparent to me. Having written my first of many computer games in 1983, in a pre-internet world it was not until I was designing NPCs in 1996–1998, post a short theatre career, did I really discover how little I actually understood about A.I. I met Steve Woodcock….
Steve at that time was perhaps one of the few computer game developers so sharply focused on A.I. and like all good listening developers I came away from Steve understanding that A.I. was ‘the future’ and it was necessary to understand it in greater depth, and the glaring fact that my knowledge was entirely inadequate if I genuinely wanted to move forward with my own soon to be Officially Licensed SONY playstation Developer, business.
As that restless head of my own Sony licensed game studio, I already thought about and experientially understood the travelling salesman problem as merely the tip of the A.I. iceberg. However talking about thinking within a tech company context may well support Orwell’s argument that thought corrupts language and language corrupts thought, while endorsing the concept of promoted retroactive planning explanations as tantamount to anti-totalitarian sloganeering.
“Stories have very simple shapes, ones that computers can understand ” Kurt Vonnegut.
A.I. could someday become a kind of God of all understanding according to some views (ihuman documentary for instance) Isn’t it already consolidating our knowledge bases in areas such as materials science, software, and daily driving ? Protein folding is the latest amazing instance, I however doubt it really is on a soon to be all knowing entity, God like path. (I spoke about that in 2016 and wrote about that here on medium some years ago)
Most people (willingly) appear to absorb or accept some type of ‘know-all’ thinking A.I. It is in areas like A.I. art or machine generated art these beliefs can muddy matters since such already sometime contentious concepts have become increasingly complex, often as a result of that domain specific subjectivity and again while also being prone to further prejudiced insider discussions.
Many academic A.I. stakeholders drive ‘agendified’ Dracula debates. While some dissenting voices from business reduce or ridicule current assessments of its efficacy. Increasingly for some, life outside the invested walls of the academy, may appear less vital, even as the traditional role of the university as site of public discourse is shut down like its tuck shops, student bars and history departments. A once fully functioning rota of university based public intellectuals offering expert academic insight being reduced and replaced by PR savvy Professors come administrators and special correspondents who leave their own TV newsrooms and canteens only to pontificate on an adjacent street. Creating an impression of notional distances from their foreshadowing colleagues and the shared prescribed commercial commentary of these often post event undead agendas.
Ireland today a silicon republic caught as it is between Boston and Berlin has long wrestled its own dualities yet embraced the duality of writing cultures. Joyce to Triest, Becket to Paris, Böll back to Achill, Wilde’s infamous tour of America, Frank McCourt, JFK, and a long list of Irish American Writers, J. P. Donleavy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O Neill, still permeate our literary air and graces in our modern western EU economy. Twenty years ago US President Bill Clinton gave a speech in my own home Town Square where he spoke about my granny Annie in Dundalk’s old Castletown graveyard and reminded me of my time as a barman in McManus Bar in Seatown. The American Vice President Joe Biden tramped our culturally sodden area too and as President Biden he recently stated he loves Irish Poets because they are ‘the best’.
As a young would be Irish writer, I read, Kavanagh, Behan, Synge, Sheridan, O Casey, Flann O Brien, Roddy Doyle, so very many others and the works of the aforementioned Joyce with the resonant cannons of the four noble horsemen of my own literary apocalypse, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, Heaney, our country has always been awash with writers, for decades you couldn’t order a pint of Guinness without spilling some on one. I haven’t even mentioned the Irish Language writers or those like C.S. Lewis resettled in the UK or other Internationally renowned writers like Bruno Bettelheim quoting Irish Poets like Louis MacNeice.
Up until recently mediocre simply didn’t cut it with any of our older writing gatekeepers, if you wanted to be a writer you were immediately informed you sat far and away behind all the aforementioned genii while paradoxically most lilliputian like microscopically standing on the shoulders of Swift, in the Shadows of Goldsmith, the Bronte sisters of Banbridge, Maire Edgeworth, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O Brien, Iris Murdoch and a shufflingly stuffed scriptorium of other accomplished scribes. How could I ever be the same in any adult classroom when despite being student representative of every class I ever graced, those classrooms of my youth had been veritable mental and physical straight jackets.
That difference between knowing and understanding an escape into writing, without resorting to referential philosophical epistemological distinction better framed elsewhere, may simply be the differences between a kind of common semi-self-aware writing intelligence and a ‘factual where with all’. When we consider the development of A.I. it is ironic that perhaps its greatest goal is the development of a general intelligence model, not models of A.I. that deal with specific subjects where large data sets in that area can be used to train it.
In this article I deliberately omit discussion and much of the information about the specifics of its anatomy and various application of specific A.I. as others I know are currently writing books on that aspect of the subject. All writers are readers and in my own view writers must read outside their targeted genre if they are to create ‘work of value’ for themselves and a broad society, we ourselves are perhaps training our word power on diverse sets.
Reading widely improves the ability to write specifically, although that fact, like the work itself, may be difficult to believe in, as it obviously seems counter intuitive. Some writers refer to the difficulty in sustaining belief that what I write has obvious intrinsic value, relative to recognized worth of such other splendid scribblers impacting the literary world like some massive meteor shower of merit.
In an alternative Ireland whence the activity of writing is no longer being framed as an exclusive preserve of the uber-talented, uber-connected, or the driving an uber overeducated but it has become a craft for all that can be learned, with some ease, to be, taught as to embrace whatever general or miscellaneous experience you have and, not to be, discouraged to see its various vagaries translated into ‘your voice’ on page or screen?
It is only when Sky Net becomes self-aware does the real A.I. trouble start.
Notes from above, below..
For example: https://anatomyof.ai/img/ai-anatomy-map.pdf
Also: Roschelle, J., Lester, J. & Fusco, J. (Eds.) (2020). AI and the future of learning: Expert panel report [Report]. Digital Promise. https://circls.org/reports/ai-report.
SKUDENT: I amalgamate ‘student’ with the business acronym ‘SKU’ or ‘Stock Keeping Unit’ to reflect their commercialism.
BUSH: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
LITERATURE IRELAND See full document: http://www.literatureireland.com/latest/new-writing-from-ireland-2020/
STEIN https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1934/10/13/tender-buttons
The Spielberg Film A.I. is said to be inspired by and based on the Brian Aldis short (link below), Spielberg famously claimed that intuition whispers and so is difficult to hear and heed.
http://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/story-collections/collections-r-z/supertoys-last-all-summer-long/
Discussed in an interview: https://charlierose.com/videos/10730
‘Proper Bants’ appeared as text in a controversial ‘Dettol advert’ at the London underground Camden town station, only half of the advert was posted to twitter as an image. However that still resulted in a twitter storm about the British government’s drive to get workers back to the office, and suggested mimicking of the opening voiceover of the film trainspotting. The Scottish Novelist himself Irvine Welsh who had originally written the ‘choose life’ opening monologue tweeted in response ‘choose death’.
Nature July 3 2020 the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, see also https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neagpb/ai-trained-on-old-scientific-papers-makes-discoveries-humans-missed
See https://www.researchandmarkets.com/issues/self-driving-cars
For a contemporary gallery’s perspective on A.I. art see: https://cuevagallery.com/pages/what-is-ai-art
You can view the trailer for ihuman on youtube at https://youtu.be/u07rtt7E1-E
Machine Learning and Neural networks are elements of the A.I. art generation paradigm, a paradigm like others that continues to evolve, see MIT article: https://news.mit.edu/2020/rewriting-rules-machine-generated-art-0818
Peace out.
