The incident happened in August of 2024. I stopped going to the office in September of 2024 because of difficulty using computer screens. I did vision therapy and recovered some but not enough to use traditional computer screens for a long time. The incident was walking into a hive of wasps or hornets. I had 8 or 9 welts where each welt could have been multiple stings. It caused a likely anaphylactic shock and apparently, neurological damage that affected my balance and my vision.
I ordered two typewriters so I could at least write some, though I’m doing this writing on a different setup, using a laptop and an e-ink display. One was a “Royal Classic” and the other a “Hermes Baby”. The “Royal Classic” came first. I wish I had read reviews for it, because it skips letters and adds spaces and is generally difficult to use. But the rhythm, the little bell as the line comes to an end, the pushing the level to get a carriage return, all give the experience of a previous time. It summons the ghosts of Hemmingway, Plath and even Tupac Shakur. The desire to take the minds thoughts and the place each word and each letter in its perfect place, the desire to be a craftsperson, that is part of the soul of the writer.
I started typing and something like the below came out. I’ve edited it to remove the typewriter mechanically induced errors.
“Let’s try again. Press each key carefully. Try to keep the cadence going. See if the words can come together. Maybe in time the typewriter will unlock the secrets. Maybe the keys need oil. May be the gears need to be clean. Maybe the gears need to be cleaned and polished with a wire brush. The thoughts need to be changed into words. The minds potential must be unl The minds potential must be unlocked”
I will admit that it may be a little bit cliché, stream-of-consciousness, spur of the moment writing, but those were my thoughts in the moment, so I will own it.
Our modern day, AI enabled tools were able to read the essay and rewrite it in the tone of some of the writers mentioned above. AI did not produce new thoughts, it was statistically enabled sentence building.
A language is in some way, the manipulation of tokens, usually words, to create ideas. A Large Language Model, as per my understanding, takes a corpus of data, which can be “the whole Internet” plus some other data, and finds statistical relationships between the tokens. A Large Language Model gives not an answer, but given that data it has, finds a statistically likely combination of tokens that is close to what a user could expect from the prompt. It is a rule based system of creating language, and can be expected to be formulaic and “robot voiced”.
Cahill (1995) tells us that the Roman poet Ausonius produced writing that was empty, formulaic and based on late Roman era “best practice” while St. Augustine had a fiery personal struggle that set the stage for his relationship with faith and inspired his writing. In a similar fashion, the algorithm based, corporatized, sanitized language of a AI ChatBot could be contrasted with personal writing that has feeling and incorporates the friction and struggle of human existence.
There are many writing tasks that AI can not do. Amongst them are the human needs to feel useful, to feel creative, to feel connected and to be inspired by our feelings, failings and beliefs.
Cahill, T. (1995). How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.