Where will the writer go?

Photography did not end painting, but helped starting a completely new way of approaching it.

While I would not say that, as a writer, I feel immediatly threatened by the rise of language models like ChatGPT, I am noticing the almost inevitable desire to compare my own work with whatever these technologies are capable of producing. And like many people by now, I have tested these digital text-factories, and I have witnessed the extent to which they can imitate the human spirit, which still feels unreal at times. Will machines be able to write in seconds what I write in days, sometimes weeks or even months? Will I be obsolete?

(Not too long ago I realized we will need a philosophy of obsoletion, especially in the context of the capitalist logic of earning a living. What if we are all obsolete, but still all need to earn a living?)

Will writers be obsolete? And I am specifically thinking about essayists here. Well, did painters become obsolete after photography? That remark does not seem completely fair however: while the painters could change their styles to differentiate themselves from photography, today’s AI seems to be able to create anything. Where could the writer possibly go?

One possible scenario that might come to mind is a wide emergence of a very outlandish and extraordinary way of writing. Something that would remind us of the avant-gardists, the modernists, but perhaps more extreme. Such a future seems unlikely to me however, since AI would be able to appropriate such a style in no time, insofar this is not already the case.

(I quickly asked ChatGPT ‘Can you write me a two sentence poem about breakdance in a James Joyce type way?’

Here it is:

Limbs whirl in babel-spasm, cobblestone thuds to the heartbeat’s brawling song —Joyjolt sinew-spin, madcap soul unspools in curbside epiphany long.)

I am optimistic however, as I believe that the current artificial intelligence revolution we are living through will move writers, and perhaps all artists, back to … themselves. There is one thing that the machine cannot appropriate, and that is life itself, the personal (if it could, I wonder whether we will and should still be calling them machines). I am not thinking here of the personal as something opposed to the communal (such a distinction is never absolute), not as the ‘inner experience’ so to say’. Rather, I mean the personal as the factical reality of one’s existence. The random encounters that make up the particularity of one’s everyday life as the main source of inspiration for creation and contemplation. The world, exactly as it is and has just happened, will learn to write even more directly because the advance of technology forces it to.

This idea, which I will describe more concretely in a second, first came to me a couple of years ago when I just started writing for myself regularly, before the launch of ChatGPT. I remember vividly trying to explain it to my back-then girlfriend while we were sitting in a bar at fondamente nove and having tramezzini for lunch. The idea (in fact, it was more of a sense of direction) felt concrete and at the same time vague and slippery. I just knew that, in a day or a week, many different things appeared to me, from frustrations with pans breaking to certain people I noticed in the supermarket, and from dreams I had to the specific books that I had just happened to choose to read, and that the coming together of these things in the tiny picture of the world that is my experience is something that only I had and have access to. All things can appear to everyone, but nothing does at the same moment, in the same light, from the same angle, in combination with the specific thoughts that you are having, in the same order with other experiences that proceeded it and will come after it. We are all living in the same world, and yet, we all only get to experience a very specific, completely unique, ridiculously tiny and yet all-encompassing piece of it: the only thing one can truly call mine. 

As I am writing this, I am also in the middle of writing a text on sun mythology. A week ago, I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, my first time, and it was a wonderful experience. While there is no direct connection between what I was writing on and Van Gogh, I felt a strong desire to talk about his work, and to connect it to what I was writing on. At first, the puzzle never fits, things seem too unrelated. Yet, as I keep on reading and looking at paintings, something small comes up, something that fits, and a beginning has come about. As such, I try to harvest the particularity of my life.

In the creation of these texts, in the victory of glueing together in words that which only came together randomly in front of my eyes, I feel an excitement and energy that evaporates the fear of the new machines. Simply living a life as the greatest resistance against automatization. I have a feeling – which is not much but something – that many more writers will and are already moving more towards their lived particularity, in different ways. Before, all writing was written by someone that lives, but this is no longer the case. Living, therefore, has become the direction towards which the writer, the artist, might needs to go. And yes, all writing before was also already situated within a particular life, but I believe we can be more open to it, more sensitive to it. Like trying to bring together those unrelated elements you find in your path and keep on pushing to construct something with those things, with that which is given. In fact, I even feel that perhaps this is what a philosophy of obsoletion might need to emphasize. In a way, the rise of AI and the automatization of everything might finally necessitate us to no longer seek for happiness in work, in something that still needs to be done, but rather in that which is given.