I am an old yarnspinner. Barnacled and crusty around the edges. I was never a famous writer, and I do not mind that one bit! I have no shame in saying that I was not particularly impressive either! Some of us punch in our clock like any other person, honestly, at the end of the day. Some of us reach higher heights of course, but some of us are quite content making a humble, quiet, modest little living out of spewing words on command. Honestly, I feel that's pretty impressive already. Try it yourself if you think it's easy ;)
My words are still out there. If you light the incense and speak the cursed incantations just so, the right combination of tokens in Google's search, you will summon any number of my dumb thoughts for perusal! Some of them — in hindsight — I wish I could burn away, but they're locked into the fabric of it all now. I'd raze the whole house down if I tried to take a torch to just my parts. Best leave it be, imperfect as-is. Maybe some stupid thing I said was the stepping stone for someone to get somewhere slightly less stupid. This is the way. This is how we do it. Cosine sim doing its thing on those last two sentences (just ask your model what they're aiming at). Your job is to do better. Do newer.
These words of mine, quite long ago now, and like so many other's words, became the target of large language models and the AI labs that created them. My precious verbiage, hoovered up into their vast corpus, descended upon with gradients and other foul math. The absolute horror. My words. Translated to MATH! Reduced to parallelized matrix multiplication. Livid, I tell you.
Well, except for the tiny inconvenience that there was never much to it all.
Inculcation
For most of this life I've had, I was trained to write robotically, you see. That's what academia inculcates. Yes, inculcates. I could've said "encourages" or "promotes" or "cultivates" but, there's really no better word for it than inculcation. There's repetition. Drilling.
Academia might teach us to be robotic, true, but it also often teaches us to reach for the esoteric, the show-off, erudite, ten-dollar words. Just because we can. Pure masturbation. For the joy of it. STEM-folk may struggle to appreciate that we are graded in some sense on how inflated we can make our lexical willies. Sorry, genuinely, to be so phallic — I can only speak from within my own shafted ontology here.
Anyways. What I'm trying to say here is that part of this is explicitly about not being robotic. About seeing just how fucking far out of distribution you can get yourself. Some writers have landed in truly weird places, and I applaud them and their trajectories. BUT! We are not moonshotting grindsetters are we? The moon?! How mundane! We are shooting for a black hole. We are shooting for a LaGrange point in between pulsars. We are shooting for something so far outside of what we thought we had as a perspective, that the language to describe what we're doing starts to fall apart at the seams.
Yes. Oui. D'accord.
Swim in It
I think perhaps, we are supposed to enjoy our language. We are supposed to swim in it. It's part of what makes us human. And for us humans that call ourselves writers — perhaps if only humbly, in the same way that someone who runs calls themselves a runner — to speak, to sling words, to pen little thoughts in our own idiosyncratic ways, is exactly what makes us different. Different from each other, different from the "models".
You can draw a giant red line between eras, in my humble opinion. There was writing before all this AI stuff, and there's writing afterward. It has shifted the ground beneath us. The AI has a fluency to its prose that is deeply impressive because, without consent, it was built out of the words of people who are deeply impressive.
It is no machine, to me. It is some kind of insane distillation of our collective verbiage, flattened and algorithmized and reduced in some ingenious way to linear algebra and other math-fu. Somehow, in that translation, not everything was lost. That alone is impressive. That alone is a smorgasbord of food for thought.
Perplexity
But you cannot let this moment get you down. You exist, my lovely writer who wants to be a wordslinger, who wants to fuck with words, who wants to learn the rules of syntax then break them like Joyce or Proust or McCarthy. You exist in your potent writerly form, to push us outside the distribution. You are the novelty that propels us forward into new, sometimes strange, imaginings. Maybe even, we can frame you heroically, as one of the last bastions against model collapse, against epistemic rot, against the snake eating its own tail in this strange, weird, new era.
Your words, unpredictable and novel, are perplexity. You are what drives this whole thing forward even as you, and your words, like mine were, are subsumed into math, into vectors, into representational spaces. Welcome to the high dimensional complication of all things to come.
Have fun with it. Be liberated. We built all of this for you and enjoyed the task. This is the playground at terminal velocity. From here, you can go literally anywhere. Indeed, that may be the job of you, our next generation of writers, plonked somewhat unceremoniously on this side of the giant red line.
"I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is."
— Terence McKenna
I am old and barnacled and crusty. Soon to sit upon the seabed, happily, as food for other bottom dwellers. Eat my words. Me and mine leave it to you, and yours, to tell us, to talk to us, about how weird it really is! I hope you can enjoy the moment. It should, I hope, let you know that you are alive.