The AI-Assisted Mugg's Game
in which my brain sticks to my fingers when I try to discard it
When I was a kid, I didn't have a word for what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I had an idea for what I wanted to do: I wanted to sit in a room and make stuff up.
I imagined myself in a bare room, brightly lit, and sitting in the center on a stool. (I couldn't imagine the probable discomfort of this scenario, because even as a child I thought in third-person POV.) And it was there that I would think of new things. But just ideas. Whatever came to mind, I would say it out loud and someone somewhere would do something with it. Like, I should be able to make a paper airplane big enough to sit in. Stupid shit like that. All I was saying was that I wanted to be a writer, I just didn't have the word for it yet.
Writing is Thinking. The two are inextricably linked.
I'm going to let you in on a secret. I never sit down and "let the magic happen". There's a reason for this: it's because there is no such thing as magic. It may look like your card went into the middle of the deck and then miraculously appeared back at the top. What you didn't see was the 10,000 hours of practice the prestidigitator put in, sitting before a mirror, lifting two cards while making it look like he was only lifting one, keeping a "pinky break" in the deck and hiding it from you, etc. What you don't see when you read a piece of writing is the thousands of hours spent mulling over ideas and connecting them.
And they're almost never good ideas. Often you're wading through an Olympic pool of crap, because this is the only way to tell a halfway non-crap example from a full-crap one.
And here's what no one tells you: The whole time you're doing this, you're thinking, and it's hard. But in the end, it feels good. It's exactly what people mean when they talk about the rewards of mental exercise.
And so, the next time you hear some internet-bred embryo tell you about how he thinks Shakespeare must have had the autisms or that Dr. Seuss probably did ‘shrooms, tell him he can go give a rim job to the nearest light socket. No genius gets an EZ-Pass. You have to have a brain capable of growing muscles to begin with, yes, but you have to put in the work to grow them.
Now, let's talk about AI.
I just spent about ten minutes playing around with Mem, an AI note-taking "assistant".
Here's what's cool. Mem works only with what you've got. You have to feed it in order for it to spit back results. So, I loaded it up with shovels of fuel from my Obsidian coal bin (an obsidian coal bin?), all those notes I told you about last time, and then I asked Mem a few questions about what I should write about. It spat back a bunch of ideas that I had already had in my brain. In other words, they were already there in my notes, waiting for me to discover them. In other words, all I had to do was to make the connections—to do the hard work required to write. To think.
I’m always thinking, therefore I’m always writing. And when I actually sit down to type out what I’m thinking, I always have stop at some point and go back and fix things—often in the middle of a sentence or a thought—because that’s what writing is, because there’s no such thing as magic.
In other words, if I had help writing, it wouldn’t be writing. I don't need a bot to tell me there's gold in them thar shitpiles. There isn’t.
I'm not proclaiming that I beat Deep Blue or anything like that. I'm just saying that for ten minutes I was looking for something to eliminate what my brain normally does. But I like it when my brain does what it normally does. What I don't like is the idea of mental atrophy, which is what I risk if I continue to let machines do my thinking for me. My brain is all I got.
Writing is Thinking. I like one and hate the other alternatively, because I'm lazy, but that's the only bag I have to carry around. Using AI to write is an exercise in self-abrogation. To employ it is to suppress one’s immune response to life. No, thank you.
That's all for now. Got some announcements to make. Fun stuff in fiction land coming soon.
Make sure you catch up on Agony Rats while you're here. It's gettin' good!
And I'll catch you on the flip flop.