‘Poetry is the only one of the arts which comes literally from inside the body, a thing secreted as well as made. It is not so much written as it is breathed onto the page. It is possible because, in our mortal oddness, we have a jointed jaw which waggles the sounds of love and rage and gloom in the daily air.’ Paul Engle, 1957, New York Times Book Review
Artificial intelligence does not scare me, nor am I having nightmares of a post-’Skynet’ landscape of decapitated journalists, skeletal former writers and poets in chains. For all its promise and content-generating similarities, machines will never surpass a human’s take on one area of personal expertise: Ourselves.
‘Purpose’ is the first and most fundamental flaw of ai. As a writer in training, and deployed, machines respond to how they are designed and what they learn through structured observations. For me — a journalist and writer — the choices I make to combine words and observations do not originate in ones and zeroes, carefully positioned to formularise creative outcomes. They come from the blood running through my heart, sometimes fast and emotional, occasionally docile and bored — all less predictable and somehow influenced by a wholly incalculable assortment of experience, emotion, character, and abilities that are deposits from the divine God Himself.
I don’t write poetry, for example, or craft articles because I’ve been coded to do so. Neither am I spending 24 hours a day learning the linguistic choices and characteristics of great writers long since dead. Patterns are one thing, blood is another.
Imperfection and failure are the other reasons why machines will never surpass human creativity. Inside me is the crude but predictable weakness of flesh, bones and blood. In fact, I am — by any standard medical measure — more imperfect than most. Not only am I a middle-aged man with questionable lack of fitness and form, but this body is a victim of the neurological equivalent of collateral damage in the form of multiple sclerosis. My flesh, quite literally, has an appetite for itself — specifically the tasty fatty, protective coating around my body’s countless nerve fibres. My emotional, psychological and physical response to pain and hardship intravenously impact every word I find, or that find me.
Sometimes I write rough and short, ugly; not because it is articulate but because I am in pain. And that makes it better fundamentally because it communicates imperfection as triumph rather than a lesson to add to the code for future improvement. My failures are not rungs on a ladder, but missed steps that I fall though, then write about while staring at my snapped walking stick or upturned wheelchair.
Sometimes I write rough and short, ugly; not because it is articulate but because I am in pain.
Cute terms of ‘partner’ and ‘support’ are being ascribed to ‘ai’. I agree, and regularly use versions of machine language models to find and analyse past writings or resurface old articles from 1957. But the choices are mine, bad and good as they are.
I choose a sheet of sandpaper in my hand to edit these words, not a motorised, electric tool to take the effort out of the procedure.
Machines will seek perfection or at least continual improvement.
Humans recognise their frailty more the closer they get to being adept.
Much like an athlete benefits from time on the bench, so a writer improves from the lack of limelight as much as they do the best seller lists. Artificial intelligence is designed to learn from the best, emulate the finest and assist the flawed humans in their quest for improvement. True writers, however, fall in a heap, grieve the losses, feel the boots of circumstance, then find a way to grant hope to others lying down there with them.
I’m a published author, writer, journalist, editor, speaker and pastor. I write about words, writing, language, life, politics, faith, and Multiple Sclerosis (the latter defiantly). If you like what I write, sign up for more words. (This story was first published on Medium.)