They Can't Automate Your Humanity
The robots are taking over, though as long as you stay in touch with your humanity, you've nothing to fear.
Welcome to my newsletter. Essays and stories about travel, the outdoors and stuff that’s good for your general well-being. If you haven’t already, then sign up now to stay in touch.
You Have Nothing to Fear
There’s been a lot of talk doing the rounds lately about GPT-3 and what its existence might mean for writers. GPT-3 is the name of a computer programme; specifically, it’s a machine learning AI (and presumably the long-awaited sequel to GPT-2). Its job (for aren’t all robots built for jobs? It’s one thing that distinguishes us from them) is to imitate and generate human-like text. It’s a writing robot essentially. When given a few instructions and samples to work off, it can write entire works that are eerily intelligent and human-like, like this one. People have always assumed the art of writing, like other arts, would be a field untouchable by automation. But this development has shown that writers may not be as safe as we’d thought.
Or are we?
If you have any creative value as a writer, then you have nothing to fear. A robot will not steal your work, they will not steal your audience, they will not steal your soul. The only ones who have to fear the robot are those who have no creative value to begin with. The ones who write, or create, or live purely to sell, or to appeal to those who don’t think for themselves. The mass markets. The supermarkets. The disposable things.
The only people who have to fear their writing being co-opted, overtaken, replaced, or usurped by a computer or a robot or an algorithm are those who write like robots anyway. ‘Content’ has become king on the internet in recent years, which is basically quote-unquote ‘wanker-talk’ for marketers and those who deal in bottom-of-the-barrel art purely as means to grab your attention and money.
It is possible that we come across things are written that come from the pen of a robot-in-disguise, or a robot-at-heart. And we’ve all read them. It is not so much that a robot can adequately mimic the writing of the greatest heights of humanity, it’s that many robots-at-heart lurk among us and produce and manufacture written words in a form that is widely consumed and gobbled up by hungry hordes as if they were guzzling down on cans of Coke, and cartons of coffee and cream. Indistinguishable from food, not for thought but content for fodder. And we’ve thus our senses have become dulled over time as we’ve been bombarded with bullshit masquerading as the compassion and aspiration of our fellow man. The robots are already amongst us, consuming us as we consume burritos and pink gin.
They can’t measure your humanity
Your creative value isn’t measured by the views and reviews of critics, or employers and other self- or institutionally-appointed gatekeepers. Nor is your creative value measured by, say, another computer, for as sure as there will be a robot designed to create something artistic, there will be robots appointed to measure and quantify things, for that is what robots do.
No, your creative value is measured by yourself. Your creative value is your authenticity as a person. And the more you live according to your instincts, the more authentic you become. It’s reflected through your creative outlets. And it isn’t something that can be put into numbers or even words. There is simply a feeling, or a sense, that’s left lingering in the air.
The feeling of words spoken from one to another, given with meaning and received equally so. You could analyse this relationship to within an inch of its life with behavioural models and experiments and such: a cause and effect dance reading into every little word, tone, turn of phrase and micro-expression, all elements of language and body language and non-verbal communication – isolate and analyse everything that makes a conversation a conversation – and you would get some interesting answers and explanations as to how meaning is conveyed, given by one and received by another, until you have the perfect algorithm for humanity, to be replicated and programmed into a willing robot employee.
And these things may all be right, in their own little domain, to an extent. But they do not and would never give the entire truth of a truly human exchange, these models and micro-explanations for every last little thing.
That “I Don’t Know What”
But there is that beautiful phrase coined by the French and puffed out as a vapour from the mouth in a small, delicate gasp of purity, understood by everyone, no matter their native tongue or education and even if – fittingly enough – they don’t quite understand what it means: that je ne sais quoi of human expression and communication.
These are the things a robot cannot measure. A robot won’t know the difference between a Mayo accent and a Cavan accent, for example, though the difference would split the ears of even the most casual of listeners to a conversation. Writers can tell these things, and readers do as much, for they’re not limited to speech. Accents carry more than words. A person’s life story and their family’s history permeate the air in the rhythm and music of their voice; on paper the words may appear to run in a straight neat horizontal line across the page, but within those collections of letters those same hills and valleys of the native’s geography exist too, they are absorbed through the senses and retake their original form in our minds as we read.
Can computers make jokes? They might be able to make you laugh, but there’s more to a joke than just eliciting a giggle. A joke is piece of humanity communicated between two or more people. There is a knowing between the parties that can’t be explained or proven with formulas. You mightn’t always recognise them but you’ll know these things when you read a piece of writing that’s written from the heart of another person.
Writing Is More Than Just Words
Some say that language is more related to music than to the passing of information. What’s the point of music? We all know it even if we can’t quite put our finger on what it does. And so too, the point of language. Writing it down doesn’t diminish this, or our ability to detect it, it’s more just like bottling a little bit of humanity.
When you write, write as if you are speaking to a person, a real person, or many people. The tone of this piece can change from nothing other than speaking in a different voice as I read aloud what I’ve written in a different tone, to a different imagined audience, or with a different intention. Intention matters. To write as if you are singing is to imbue your work with a human quality that can’t be replicated.
Grammar and style matter in how a piece of writing is interpreted. Vocabulary matters, as does the rhythm of the words and the sentences. We interpret all of these things. Perhaps a computer could be able to mimic them. Or, it would at least contain them in some form, to be interpreted positively by someone, somewhere. But they only go so far.
Because in any case, writing is a telepathic act. I mean that literally. When you read something, the author’s energy and will is transmitted to the reader. Some dread or lament or curse the text message as a means of communication, that it loses so much of the purpose and intent of language for being mere text on a screen. That words might be misinterpreted, intentions misunderstood, grudges will arise. I don’t think this is how it works at all. Intent is carried through text. Heart and meaning and everything else. And it’s carried in ways and across media that we can’t even begin to understand, never mind programme into an algorithm.
If you’re living your life with appropriate authenticity, you will just know when something’s been written by a human.
How will you know if you’ve passed the Turing Test as a writer? Maybe you’ll lose not just your job to a robot, but the rest of your life too. Could that happen? Hemingway had some good advice, long before a robot might have threatened to steal his art, his work, his humanity from him, though I’m sure he would have made light work of them if they had:
“Just write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
If you can manage that, you’ve nothing to fear. You’ll know you’re human, and therefore so will everyone else. It is the original Captcha question, and once passed, not only will you be safe as a writer, you will be free as a person can be.
If you enjoyed this, then why not sign up now to stay in touch. Essays and stories about travel, the outdoors, and stuff that's good for your general well-being.
Or feel free to leave a comment, or share it with someone you know who might like it