Reading and writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with the written word recently. I think about this on-and-off every so often, but lately it’s been gnawing at me and I don’t know quite how to express an idea and a feeling I have about writing.

Lots of what I read is technical. Part of my job involves digesting technical written work: specs, feature descriptions, documentation, academic papers, stream of consciousness chat messages about technical topics… This is true now and has been true for a long time – my PhD killed my love of reading for fun. It’s not that I don’t like reading, but it’s hard to make time/energy for more reading at the end of the day after spending most of the working hours of a day reading/writing quite carefully.

A sad consequence of the type of reading I do for work is that the words written are devoid of emotion or human experience. Something that I think is part of this gnawing absence from my life is the human experience part. I work from home, so my interaction day-to-day with people can be quite low. Professional interaction is fine, and even the informal moments of chat for non-work topics happens but is strictly time-limited by getting on with whatever scheduled meeting is actually the pressing concern. I go into town most days to grab a coffee and a loaf of bread. This interaction is valuable, although it is still mundane. It doesn’t teach me much about the other people I share the world with: predictable small talk, polite comments about the weather, sometimes something about a holiday.

Life can be very solitary, even in a town, even when interacting with dozens of different people during the week.

I read some of Monty and Sarah Don’s The Jewel Garden over the winter, and that spoke to me in a way I quite liked. It was very English, very thoughtful, very relatable. They wrote about gardens, of course; but also about depression, life-struggles, and a bit of their philosophical outlook on their place in the world. I have found garden writing in general to have some quality of self reflection and honesty that is refreshing. I’m seeking more writing like that.

Another thing which is making me yearn for a bit more human expression is the inhuman expression I see day-to-day now. AI writing is commonplace almost everywhere now, and the writing style of AI pervasive. It’s not X, it’s actually Y. It really truly is Z. Little flourishes of ‘style’ which are trying to call upon common persuasive writing techniques, but that often draw false tension in a way that’s distinctly inhuman. The accusation of human writers being too alike with AI generated text also stifles expression. En dashes–one of my favourite parentheticals–are AI-smelling. As for em dashes — well they’re so patently AI that you should avoid them altogether. Beyond that the language used is inherently sanitary. Low-risk, no dangerous ideas, no dangerous turns (or simply unusual) of phrase, no anger, no grief, nothing raw, no fucking swearing. And that’s sort of fine? For lots of types of writing those urges don’t belong, technical writing especially. But for lots of types of writing I want feeling, I want very localised idioms, I want to learn something about the human holding the pen.

The existence of AI generated text that’s reasonably convincing and reasonably well put together fills us with cynicism when we encounter well written content, especially online. There’s now a bevvy of books, blogs, and news articles written by prompt-only, the human interaction itself offloaded to a text extruder which robs us of human interaction and human expression for one sanitised inhuman.

I’m not a Luddite. I don’t wish for the collapse of AI, nor do I think that automation of tasks that AI can do is inherently evil, just as I don’t think washing machines or welding robots are evil. AI for writing programs, writing (but ideally just editing…) technical documentation, or searching through vast databases of information… is something that can allow humans to be more productive and solve greater challenges faster. What does frustrate me though is where human-to-human interaction is displaced by AI. It denies us our humanity. I don’t want to read the output of the prompt “describe this project to an engineer at NVIDIA, include examples”. I don’t want to read the output of the prompt “answer Simon’s question, find examples in documentation and link to them, include a sentence of small-talk about his garden”.

If you have an idea or a feeling that you want another human to understand: write it with your own words. Write it in your own style. Write it with your own emotion. Include your typos, clumsy wording, misspellings, and human infidelities. Don’t deny yourself and your reader the humanity.

Finally, it is my belief that the harm of social media doesn’t come from unscrupulous use of AI to shape opinion or drive outrage, it comes from content chosen algorithmically to drive outrage. We blame AI for being a tool of mass propaganda, when really it’s secondary to feeds of content picked by opaque software to drive engagement over health. I wrote about the evils of Facebook taking over large parts of civic and community life last year, and that’s the direct impact of Facebook being the du jour platform for local communities online in the UK. What I didn’t write about (much) is the harm I see being caused by outrage-fuelled engagement. Facebook, reportedly, has a bit of a slop problem and that slop is being pushed by Facebook’s software because for those who can’t tell its slop it looks real enough. The slop is often there to radicalise, force people deeper into their bubbles, stay on Facebook for longer, talk about what they’ve seen on Facebook when they’re speaking to people in real life. This was of course happening before. Facebook’s role in the Brexit referendum and various other nudge projects around the world show that AI generated content is not necessary to achieve these aims, but AI generated content does make it easier and cheaper. In any case, the problem isn’t really the content itself, but how the content is chosen.

I am going to read more. I am going to find writing which talks about emotion and experiences that I can relate to. I will seek out humanity on paper, where AI is not in the loop.