Eschewing LLM convenience

Reading books has become an esoteric practice. In case you haven't been paying attention, reading is in decline. The Atlantic recently published an article titled "The end of reading is here", citing all kinds of dispiriting evidence to support this. Elsewhere, James Marriott has published a book along the the same lines titled The New Dark Ages. For the dwindling number of us who still enjoy reading books for pleasure, our reasons for reading include to learn, to be entertained, to dream, to aspire, to escape, to access a different experience or to see one's own reflected back. All of these and more, are reasons why I read.

In this age of LLMs, does it matter that what I read has not been written by a human? It matters plenty. I seek writing that connects me to other human beings. When I read, I'm looking to witness the writer's experience through their eyes. Take grief for instance. An LLM might put some very compelling words together, but they lack the fecundity of human experience. An LLM will never be able to know the utter devastation of losing a loved one. That's not to say an LLM cannot help in processing grief, but let Joan Didion or C. S. Lewis tell me in their own words, what it's like to be lose a spouse.

Zadie Smith highlights similar sentiment in a lecture titled, "Art for Our Sakes" in which she explains why we should go on making things: "It's definitely the case that a machine might easily take a bushel of novels concerning slavery—take The Known World and Toni Morrison's Beloved and Alex Wheatle's Cane Warriors and even my own The Fraud—and use those data points to write a comprehensive, informative, and perhaps even aesthetically pleasing novel about the 'peculiar institution,' and all in a matter of moments. It might even convince most people that the book was written by a human being. But the thing is: it wasn't. And when I read, I want to be in relation with a human being. That's why I read. Likewise, a machine instructed to make love to me might technically be excellent at making love to me, but that won't do, either. I want to be wanted by a human. I want to be in relation with other humans."

Human connection is one of my reasons for reading, writing and keeping this blog. I read to see articulated, the ideas and thoughts I have felt or seen but perhaps been unable to put into words. George Orwell described this well in part I of his essay "The Whale":

"Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives."

I enjoy reading and writing partly because I know that it can be difficult to tame the mind's slippery nature and it takes courage and effort to do so. An LLM, no matter how convincing, will never know the leap of faith required to get past a blinking cursor. While writing can be agonising, there are also joys and pleasures to be found in making the next associative leap from disparate words and ideas. Remarkable things happen, should the writer succeed in overcoming their own fears and hesitancy. As writing takes longer than speech, it forces the writer to slow down and reflect. Having somewhere to put one's thoughts makes space for new ideas and discoveries. For this reason, one is able to alight on surprising ideas that might never have occurred had the writer not been engaged in their enterprise. An LLM is fast and convenient and it can probably do a good enough job, but convenience preempts these possibilities.

For the reader, there is much to be gained from observing another bridle the wild horse that is their galloping mind to harness its potential. In an essay titled "A new kind of creative poverty" for Noema, Afra Wang, explains what she enjoyed about Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion processes her husband's death. In Didion, Wang saw her own stalled life reflected back at her and was able to observe, "the record of a mind at work on its own chaos, a way of processing thought, of handling the formless weather in the head." Wang continues, "I love watching her spill it all out, like discovering the neighbors' house is total chaos, and feeling assured that no one's life is truly put-together." This, Wang says is what she went to Didion for and what many people seek in Didion's work. This is what it looks like when another human's expression makes you feel less alone.

The pleasure of encountering another human's innermost thoughts, and having the ability to roam around their mind for a while has a transformative effect. Which is partly how books save us and why they matter. Here's Orwell again describing what it was like reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer:

"You feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,'' you feel; 'he wrote this specially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings."

If by reading, your goal is to find human connection, where it is not declared up front that an LLM was used to produce a piece of work, it can feel like you've been duped. In her essay, Wang explores the use of LLMs for writing. Wang observes, "AI slop feels like betrayal. There is this haunting feeling when you lean toward a face and then find only a mask, with no person behind it."

Furthermore, it's bad art, as Cory Doctorow the activist and science fiction novelist sees it:

"It's bad art in the sense of being "eerie," the word Mark Fisher uses to describe 'when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.'

AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it's missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it's undetectable."

As Orwell put it, "it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind." LLMs do not need courage to bloviate. They cannot take risks. Having no skin in the game renders their words empty of meaning and makes their output boring, as the writer Oliver Burkeman observes in his newsletter The Imperfectionist, "I don't think it's a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I'm reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies."

As a writer, it's easy for me to respond to LLMs by refraining from using them or if I do, being up front about it. As a reader, it's more challenging. To avoid LLM content, are we doomed to read only books published pre-November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT? Developing heightened awareness about spotting AI written verbiage is becoming an essential skill. Some have become hyper vigilant, like my friend who now puts some of the text messages she receives though Pangram, an AI checking tool, because she does not trust virtual communication any more. Enjoyable as a new work might be, it feels like forever more, we will read it with one eye looking to rumble the word guesser. It has become increasingly difficult to trust that your favourite short story has not been written by an LLM. What's worse, is the atmosphere of mistrust this suspicion creates.

In such an environment, why bother writing when LLMs are becoming increasingly capable of writing fast and well? It was Albert Camus in his 1957 lecture, "Create Dangerously," who observed that, "The doubt felt by the artists who preceded us concerned their own talent. The doubt felt by artists of today concerns the necessity of their art, hence their very existence." This is even more true in the age of LLMs.

I would argue that because AI slop proliferates, creating any kind of art has never been more urgent. The reasons to do it are age-old and numerous, such as self-expression, to communicate complex ideas, making sense of things, keep a record of the time we are living in or escape the present moment all together and so on. In a sense, the reason doesn't matter. What is important is that one follows the need to create, does so in good faith and with courage. Should you choose to use an LLM for whatever reason, be honest about it.

There is never an ideal time to create art. In other words, the ideal conditions where everything is settled, politically, economically and so on does not exist. It never has. Instead, we cleave space to create from the rabble of our existence and make the best of it that we can. History is littered with writers who did their best work during turbulent times, and some times at risk of death or persecution. Yet, they had the courage to continue, because this is the artist's job and imperative.

Camus in his 1957 lecture said, "To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. It is not enough to say in this regard that art is threatened by the powers of the State. If that were true, the problem would be simple: the artist fights or capitulates. The problem is more complex, more serious too, as soon as it becomes apparent that the battle is waged within the artist himself. The hatred for art, of which our society provides such fine examples, is so effective today only because it is kept alive by artists themselves."

LLMs have their place, like any tool. But Do not let them impinge on your artistic process. Creating is a fundamental part of being human and what is at risk when we surrender it, is our very own humanity. Resist convenience. As Zadie Smith says "That convenience should be the highest aspiration of human existence happens to be one of the many uninterrogated assumptions of capitalist ideology. When we convince ourselves that art, too, must take the shortest route to its effects, then we've submitted to that ideology. Yet art can be enormously inconvenient! Art can luxuriate. Wander. It may embellish and decorate, or refuse to be convenient, dogmatic, obliging. Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies." Take the rambling artistic path. Think for yourself.

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