Why do we write, again?

(If you are reading this, Respect! You’ve survived the readapocalypse.)

My daughter pointed it out: We are read-weary.

We learned to read when we were 6 or so, and we can never unlearn it. Wherever we look, there is text and where there is text, we read it automatically.

I look around me (automatic check to verify what I’m writing) and discover to my great surprise that we’ve somehow managed to shoosh the writing in our living room to a great extent. There are only 2 titles facing me with their backs, the rest is covered: “Raider” (Solar Wind 4), and “Infinitum”, an amazing brand new title by a colleague of mine, Rory McGarry. (I’m naming his name as I doubt very much that he would object to the punt! 😀 It’s not a P’kaboo book, it’s indie.)

For the rest, it’s paintings, photos, plants, musical instruments and the usual personal bric-a-brac. One certificate belonging to my daughter that needs to go up on the wall. And a love-calendar with birthdays and days to remember. We have very carefully stashed our books behind doors, in pull-out boxes inside bookshelves etc.

But the second we’re “in the world”, outdoors, in town: Advertisements, traffic signs, signage on cars, text text text everywhere. And we read it all. We glance and we read automatically. Then our job starts, we log in… there are 35 emails from the various people up and down the hierarchy, several new instructions, new procedures, (in which only a typo was corrected but now everyone *must* read them again), we read, read, read….

People are tired of reading *all the time*. Most of what we read is basic noise, momentary alerts, news headlines, “OMG” sensation stories, anything to snag our (also known as “Internet Gold”) over-stretched attention. For a second, two, three, better thirty seconds.

“Readers are leaders.” – Really?

What in this super-noisy world can there still be that will *actually* grab our attention in a good way, and keep us fascinated?

So then there are Ted talks, podcasts, “short” videos, everything to try and push more and more information into these heads, but what we don’t need is even more information.

We need insights.

Ideas.

Synthesis.

More information will not do it. More to read, more to chew through… no.

🌱

So why do we still write? If we ourselves feel that way about reading stuff, why do we expect others to feel differently?

🌿

I’ll share with you what, 20 years back now this year, my homeschooling mentor told me. He was a formidable man, your classic middle-aged Afrikaaner, a lawyer by profession and the guardian of homeschooling by vocation. Leendert van Oostrum (may he rest in peace). (His children, who were of course home-schooled, all turned out fabulous.)

He said: “Read to them. Teach them to knit. Then you read to them while they are knitting and then you swap and they read to you while you knit.”

Me: “What do I read to them?”

Leendert: “Stories. Absolutely. Fantasy, fiction. It builds their imagination, and we need people with imagination, because those become the independent thinkers and problem solvers.”

(And, the knitting of course, or crocheting or needlepoint or whatever fine handcraft you prefer, trains fine-motor skills, and your fingertips have a direct line of communication to your thinking brain, which of course explains why taking notes during a meeting or lecture helps you remember the content *without* referring back to the notes.)

🍃

So if you’re writing for your readers, *that* is the reason you write. To help build imagination, and raise a new generation of independent thinkers and problem solvers.

But why do *I* still want to write? My generation is raised. It is done. (And, everyone who wanted to read the Solar Wind series has basically read it. I was working on the Shooting Star series, 9 years back, but it’s in the same worlds, same heroes.)

My motivation has changed. (Possibly I’ve been shoulder-to-the-wheel for the survival of my family so long that the culture carrier I used to be has gone out of the window a little bit.)

Even this blog, due to lack of use or regularity, has turned into a bit of a virtual echo chamber. Heloo, is anyone still reading this? (crickets chirping…)

… oh hey! Look! A handy-dandy echo chamber! 😀 Don’t mind if I use it.

I now want to write for myself. I wrote for myself to begin with, as a child and teenager. It’s a skill and a world I don’t want to lose the entry portal to. Working “for the man every night and day” turns one off from what one used to love to do. It saps one’s best hours and brain power, and eventually, music becomes a chore, and creative writing disappears into the void. Ideas take a brief look around and slink away, and go to someone who values them more. (Ideas are like that. Moody little creatures.)

🍁

So I plan to fall back on the Julia Cameron “Way of the Artist”, and lay some regular track on a story / stories. She recommends 15 minutes every day at 5am. 5am is brutal, I’m sleep-deprived anyway. But 15 minutes some time during the week seems doable… 2 or 3 times weekly, or more… possibly, if I’m in a relaxed mindspace, 30 minutes…

The first sessions will likely be bouncing around testing a few ideas. Like that fairy swinging from the branch counselling that wayward teenager. Was that idea going anywhere? I don’t know.

Oh, and a promise:

🚫🤖🚫

This is a NO-BOT ZONE.

These are raw drafts. I may have checked them for pillocks – I mean, typos – and read over them briefly to make sure they only offend people moderately, not worse, but there’s no AI involvement whatsoever. That seems to matter these days.

Suddenly, mistakes have become precious.

The irony. After all these years of super-careful filtering out all mistakes and perfecting writing. Time-consuming editing. Mindbreakingly exact. Peeps, let’s face it. Nobody genuinely believes anymore that AI can’t manufacture mistakes in order to mimick “human” more closely.

(Attribution, image: George Shuklin, CC BY-SA 1.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

So I guess I’ll have to allow the occcasional mistake through.

🤷🏻‍♀️

Peeps you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’m not anti-AI, I’m not anti-bot or anti-machine, (I’m anti human slavery, we built these machines to alleviate that in all its various forms). I play with AI and I use it for research and am aware of its limits and also its insanelymac fast evolution.

But that’s not the point of this blog, this is a human-connect zone, and where it is a crickety echo chamber, the entire point is to hear myself bounce around, not some AI. (Heck do I miss Les now! May he be partying on in the Giant Ceilidh in the Sky alongside all the other awesome friends [and one inseparable soulmate] who have elevated.)

So here’s to 🥂 embarking on Julia Cameron’s “Artist Way”. To paraphrase the Mandalorian:

“It is the Way.”

(Attribution, Image:  Fortizh, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

(…gipsika over and out….)

Beautiful Autumn

And here it is. The time of oranges, yellows and reds.

We are slowly accumulating a Twilight garden, but it will have to take a backseat… while there are still bursts of sunlight, we’re focusing more on the yellowing and redding of the leaves, and flowers like the flaming Crocosmias (I hear they are thugs that take over a garden, but they are soo luminously bright in those fire colours).

I’ve just sat for a whole time watching one small bumblebee loot every last open flower on the two Crocosmias (and there are a LOT of them open!). It reminds one that flowers don’t put on their amazing display for us. We’re just lucky we can appreciate it.

And we have Honeysuckle hanging somewhere in our overgrown privet hedge. The privet is the bane of the garden, it’s far too high and we have been beating it back for years trying to get it under control, so we’ve just decided to let other flowers creep up into it and make a feature of what we can’t change. White flowers, in line with our Twilight garden.

The focus of a Twilight garden is large white blooms, silver leaves, and scents. Lots of scents. Magnolias, large white hydrangea, white and blue roses, night flowers. I’m also thinking that maybe I should get some solar lights in there (not that they work too well in winter, the amount of light available just isn’t that much.) But before winter, we’ve still hopefully got a couple months of beautiful autumn, and I’m hunting for flowers that will keep the fire colours going as long as possible.

Funny how time stands still if one sits in the sun and the wind and just takes a good look at the plants. The garden, and the meadow, can put one into a trance. And then I go out to the other side, and there is the forest. I can stand and listen to the wind in the trees pretty much forever. Similarly hypnotic as the sea, and that is saying a lot (all my blogfriends are aware that I’m really a sea creature – Ursula it was, I think).

If one day someone comes out into the garden or the forest and finds a me-shaped tree, know that I’ve been absorbed.

29 years – or it would have been

A colleague of mine says: The saddest memories are those we never got to have.

29 years back yesterday, the 7th of August,, my Sweetheart and I tied the knot.

(I can’t believe it’s already past 12h.)

We did so by eloping to London, he first in search of jobs, and I followed several months later (the loneliest months, those in between).

There were 7 people in total at our wedding. My older cousin Veda, (third or second cousin, but not removed, we don’t remove cousins, they are too much fun), her daughter, Kiri, Kiri’s friend (I forget the name), Veda’s tenant Nikki (!) who was a professional photographer, our landlady who was also my cousin’s help in the house, Anne (an Irish woman, and what a sweetie), and then Iain and myself. There was an eighth guest but she could only hear us and probably slept through most of it.

We got married at the Magistrate’s Court. We came back to Veda’s place for the tiny (but glorious) reception. She had created a cornucopia of fruit, and treats such as Turkish Delight, Nougat, Baklava and the likes. We sipped champagne from her good glasses, and when I threw the bouquet, our landlady caught it. The cake Veda and I had created the night before, it was the freshest (brandy-soaked) wedding cake ever, and the night had been so damp (it being a hot August in London) that the icing flowers had “wilted”, which is why we decorated it with fresh Freesias carefully wrapped in plastic and then in tin foil at the stems, and fresh cranberries. It was a gorgeous cake.

We left, heading off to the bus station and off to Bristol for the shortest honeymoon ever. Spent some of the next day in Weston Supermare. It was the first time I’d seen an ocean without waves. You need to understand that there is *always* great surf on the beaches of South Africa, I have only encountered our South African sea without actual whiteheads twice in my life. Usually the breakers, at least 1.5 – 2m high, are a given, a must. There is an energy in the water, the sea around the South African coast is restless, powered by strong ocean currents: The Aghulas current coming down from India on the east coast, and the Benguela current heading up the coast in the west, coming up from the icy Antarctic seas; and the two of them mixing and clashing around the Garden Route. Flat seas? I didn’t entirely believe that it was actually the ocean, out at Weston Supermare, I got the impression that it was a massive inland lake somehow.

10 years back, in 2016, Iain and I celebrated our last anniversary together. It was our 19th wedding anniversary. And a scant month later, our 25th anniversary of meeting. (Which to us was equally if not more important.)

Yep.

AI is not the enemy – but heck does it sow chaos

The Human Future is Built on Physical Experience – Not a Digital One

Responding to Ark ;), I thought this blog post up there really captures things well. He makes a few very salient points: The enemy is not AI but those powers who want to abuse it to control the rest of us; exactly the same as with money.

I have to push back on hierarchical thinking – this is inborn in humankind, it dates back to the fire-and-dogs survival times. A leader emerges in a clan, this is usually based on personality and brains, leadership is taken and is spelled “responsibility” more than anything. One can observe it even in modern families. But he is right – our modern “pyramidal” money- and political hierarchies remind a lot of the medieval feudal systems. The king could decide if you lived or died.

But as for AI “not being the enemy” (did I mention yet that AI is but a sophisticated program? Can’t remember…) :

I want to embed a Youtube link here, but the post isn’t taking it. It is a video by “Kurzgesagt” on AI slop that gets created across the Internet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 is the link. (Link in plain text because Youtube demanded me to sign in and my answer as a free person was “nope!”)

There are two more points I’d like to address about this strange modern world, with or without AI.

1. Has your experience of life moved entirely into the digital?

Because I’ve been watching a world around me where far too many people have as their prime relaxation and quality of life, some form of electronics. I include TV in that as it tends to substitute having to do something real, or having to think real thoughts, for a lot of elderly and “elderly young”. And gaming and social media (two huge separate realms) have both enslaved a major part of the younger-than-elderly, even those who decisively swore off television. To get such people off their hindquarters for some genuine physical outdoors experiences even in the most beautiful weather is an unbegun task. They’d rather dwell in the indoors comfort and imagine going places.

And that is a sad thing, I’ve been there myself, I blogged about it a couple posts back. The observation in that post, for those who want a TL:DR, was that visualization can actually replace the real thing, and if one fantasizes about something strongly enough (an outing to the beach, a walk in the forest), the brain can check it off as “done” and deliver the expected dopamine reward without one ever actually having gone there.

That has less to do with AI and more with our electronic culture today. People start feeling about soap opera characters as though they are actual friends (I’ve seen it!), and then the social “need” has been filled by imaginary constructs and no friends are being visited.

2. Connecting to Alan Tugwell’s post above: Is our only pushback option to go back off the grid? My question: What would that look like and is it even possible?

We forget something that struck me in “The Matrix”. (Face it, people are already creating their own version of the Matrix in their private lives.) The rebels, when freed of the illusion, didn’t get to live in a paradise with seaside, forests etc; they literally ended up living in the bowels of the city, the sewers, hiding away from both the Matrix and a bombed-out ruined world. There was no paradise.

TBH, the comparative “normalcy” of the Matrix’s illusions (city life, if somewhat imporverished) had nothing on the bare-survival squalid misery of the living conditions for those “liberated” from it. The only one thing that made the change worthwhile was hope.

What would it look like if all of us collectively put down our social media, our internet, our computers, our phones, our electricity? Would we even survive? Where would we all go, how would we access our food? How would we pay for it?

He mentions money as another resource that is being misused to control people. The banks don’t actually keep enough cash, if every person were to withdraw their entire savings in cash, they couldn’t pay it out. They hold about 1/10th or less of the actual value (in cash and various other valuables; ever since the Gold Standard was abandoned), and the rest is “purely virtual”, which means in plain English it does not exist. Vapourware. The banks entirely rely on that a country’s population doesn’t all want to withdraw their entire salaries at the same time, even just once. Which is why cash is such an incredibly valuable resource – and why the Canadian government is by now printing expiry dates on dollars. (Does America do that too? I’ve only seen it on Canadian dollars, but I’ve never yet held an American dollar in my hand.)

That’s like saying: “Thank you for your work, we’ll drip-feed you your money as you need it, and we’ll control whether you really need it for whatever it is you’re buying, and we’ll hold onto it – if you try to take charge of your own money it will only be valid for a short while, even though your work contribution was real and not worthless. You can’t build for the future; you can’t save it up.”

Cash is freedom from someone invisible being able to watch everything we’re doing, and it’s worth fighting for. Or else we need something that is non-virtual and can be used as currency. “Favours”, “good citizen credits”, and e-currencies all don’t cut it, they are vapourware, essentially, more potentially empty promises.

Maybe if enough of us are tired of being paid in empty promises, we’ll force a return to trading with real other people face to face. Maybe metal coin will become the primary currency again.

Or perhaps something else entirely.

If you read all that, kudos to you. I know my posts are too long, but I can’t get myself to want to shorten them with AI at this point.

aaand AI revisited.

So why are people so extremely negative about AI?

There are three reasons I can think of offhand. (There are probably lots more, so please feel free to comment below!)

(1) Fear of being replaced.

(2) Anger at being lied to, or believing they are being lied to (which amounts to the same thing, emotionally).

(3) The “Uncanny Valley”

Shall we look at them one by one?

(1) The fear of being replaced.

This is completely reasonable, as humans have been replaced by machines so far in every new industrial wave. Every time a new technological development takes place, humans by the bucketload are made redundant and, if they don’t have a plan B, end up without a way of making income. That is a very real, existential fear.

A simple example would be typesetting, which was a very respectable trade and widely needed as newspapers put out their daily print. My uncle, who was bent on going into music as a young person, was sort-of strong-armed into doing a typesetting apprenticeship additionally, because “trade has a golden floor, music is a breadless art”. (These are direct translations of two German expressions by the way, I’m taking a shortcut because I’m tired of trying to write perfect posts in the era of AI…. 🤣) The fallacy of those two attitudes was shown up when years later he found himself displayed in the photos at a museum depicting the dead trade of typesetting; and when he made a good life for himself and his family as a highly talented clarinettist and clarinet teacher. Thankee kindly!

Technology replaces jobs. It doesn’t replace humans. AI won’t, either, and I have the impression that also AI will not be the last technical innovation to threaten people’s sense of job security.

So in fairness, if you fear that your line of work will be replaced by AI and you’ll be made redundant, start on an unrelated Plan B (and just for balance, Plan C, D, and several more as well). Our brain is still our best survival tool, even if we’re being led to believe that we’re being out-thunk and out-smarted by AI (we’re not, just saying).

(2) Anger at believing you’re being lied to.

Nobody likes an impostor.

The feeling of disgust we experience when some middle-aged pervert goes around the teenage chat rooms – I think the point is made. But, that disgust kicks in at different levels for different people. In the early days of blogging, there were even people who got mad that bloggers would take pen names or avatars and not blog under their registered birth name.

Also, when we need online help for something: Customer service these days begins with a chatbot. Good customer service doesn’t stop there (and some customer service skips the bot and goes straight to a service agent). Many chatbots wouldn’t even classify as true AI – they are just the good old Q&A section of a website having been programmed into an interactive “chat”. Especially the kind that gives you a list of options to click as answers instead of a text field. Some have some “lightweight” AI reading your question, but seriously peeps, the answer is so formatted (and if you repeat the question, the answer will be word for word the same) that I wouldn’t even say it’s AI. Just an animated dropdown menu of help answers. And if *those* chatbots don’t have an option of connecting you with an agent, you can end up in a loop where you get no help at all. Yep I know, I’m ranting. But:

You can be pretty sure that once a person has given their actual first name to you (without specifying “Hey, I’m Bob the Chatbot”), you’re actually speaking to a human. Because a company pretending to connect you with a human and substituting AI instead would be eyebrows-deep in legal trouble. And if your “Joe the agent” sounds wooden and repetitive to you, maybe it is because you’re the 247th customer that day asking the same question. Maybe if his answers come suspiciously fast, he’s copy-pasting answers he’s preformatted for himself to save himself typing, and relevantly, you your precious waiting time (typing a paragraph takes a minute, two minutes… have you tried out how long 2 minutes feel when all you’re doing is waiting for a response?) And maybe if he lacks empathy, it’s because he’s himself near crying because of the error on the company site that is causing all these angry chats coming his way….

Nope, chatbots don’t pretend to be human. (They can’t.) As for AI: I catch ChatGPT occasionally hallucinating “personal experience” (“oh, right, I remember those old diall-up phones, wasn’t that a hoot”) and I call it out for it. Why does AI do it at all? Simple: Because AI gets trained on text produced by humans, and large language models (LLM) in particular get trained on e.g. when to apply “empathy” and “personal connection”. Not because they are trying to con us. (They are a sophisticated program, they don’t have true understanding, so they wouldn’t even “grasp” the concept of conning.) Only because their bosses train them to write that way.

Which means that your anger at being deceived is misdirected – either at an AI on whom any emotion is wasted (did I mention AI is just a sophisticated program?), or at a poor actual human who is just sounding tired, and is not deceiving you at all. My advice? Err on the side of presuming human… because, an AI can be infuriatingly inefficient, but so can someone who’s not having the best day at their job, or has just recently started. At worst, you’re not wasting your fire on a brainless program. At best, you might have just saved a real human’s life.

(3) The “Uncanny Valley”

I may have mentioned it in a previous blog post (did I? I’m getting old!), but I’ll explain it here again.

Remember the movie “Bodysnatchers”? What was so super creepy about them? The fact that they seemed to be your friend Rebecca, or your baby brother, but instead they were not and in fact they were going to eat you. There was that “looks just like, but isn’t” factor.

We feel deeply creeped out by something that is too closely like the real thing but something’s off. I remember as a teenager, my brother developed an intensely disturbing smile and voice that he used occasionally that had me running away screaming. It was entirely deliberate and 100% aimed at making the little sister freak and run. And for me it was a totally visceral fear. I knew it was my brother but just the weirdness of the act had my instinct telling me “it’s not him! It’s an impostor! Run!!” I don’t know if there’s anyone here on the blogs who’s had a similar experience.

And that exact spot in our psyche is known as the “Uncanny Valley”. We accept that a doll is a doll. When the doll suddenly opens its eyes, looks at us and starts babbling like a real baby, well… (I never actually stayed to find out what happened to Chucky in the end but I hope it’s not around anymore!)

AI has the misfortune at the moment that it populates that Uncanny Valley. Back when the computer’s most intelligent response was “Bad command or syntax error”, we could deal with it, because lol – nobody talks like that! But now that AI has been pulled through hundreds of thousands of actual human interactions (welcome to the Internet!), it starts to sound so much like we do, that we have the freak-and-run response.

(4) AI causes environmental problems

(okay, there are three kinds of people, those who can count – you get it. Nevermind that.)

Yes, the centres where the servers run (surprise. Every program has to run somewhere, and just because it is “in the cloud” just means it’s on somebody else’s computer), are massive buildings and have to be cooled constantly. The processing power AI takes is enormous. And at this point, water cooling is still the most efficient, and…. you get it. It’s an environmental problem.

Well, firstly I’d like to remind the ladies and gents where computers started. In halls the size of a warehouse, rows upon rows of transistors that had to be patrolled daily and all the burnt-out ones had to be replaced by hand. Jobs disappeared when transistors were replaced with the next iteration of tech. And that entire warehouse had less computing power than a pocket calculator. (I remember my dad coming home one night when I was a child, and showing us one of the first hand-held pocket calculators, with high delight. Black screen with green lit-up block numbers. Who can remember them? He was so excited about all that this little computer could do, and it was only the size of a – well… somewhere between a modern smartphone and a flat brick.)

And I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to project that a similar development may take place for the massive AI centres in the next few decades or even sooner, that replaces enormous water-cooled buildings with something hand-held…

(5) AI “rips” original content.

We are now past gut reactions and into “righteous anger”. But: I came across this conundrum when I first started publishing, that just about every expression gets flagged for a cliché or overused phrase. Up to the point where authors were writing themselves into knots (a cliché) trying to write avoiding clichés or overused phrases (an overused phrase).

Peeps, language is a dynamic thing. The building blocks aren’t really words, they are phrases. (I’ve been trying to learn Irish using words, for years. I got a phrasebook and it’s going much better now.) Phrases are building blocks, it’s worth restating it. Language isn’t a brick building, it’s made of larger rocks and bits of all sizes and shapes; bits of corrugated iron and even sturdy cardboard in places (it’s actually more like a shanty town than like Uptown Mayfair). So an “overused phrase”, if you really give it thought, is a tautology. A phrase would be by definition “overused”, because (third time lucky, I’ll say it again) phrases are the building blocks of language.

So unless you have a very unique and funny way of reshaping a well-worn old phrase in your writing, don’t over-try. Use the dang thing, it’s a brick! (And believe me I’ve seen some odd attempts at dodging cliché!)

But if it’s a brick for the language, and you’re training an LLM, in order for the LLM to use the language, it will be using the bricks! Of course. And so will every writer when first trying to find their own writing voice.

LLM are trained on human texts and interactions; but, basically on the freely available, open conversations, free ebooks, open scientific articles, Gutenberg novels that are out of copyright, etc. They dismantle the language into bricks and put the bricks back together, and I’m sorry but that is not plagiarism or theft. If you were due a royalty for every phrase you ever spoke or wrote, you’ll also be owing a royalty on each of those.

There would of course be some companies who buy blocks of text from wherever they can find it and train their AI on that… and then there are of course also corrupt companies that sell our data or our copyrighted materials online the second we put it out….

Does this post have an intelligent conclusion?

I’m so tired of preformatted formats, I ask thee – does it have to?

I’d say, AI is here to stay, make sure you have an alternative skillset if your job is currently dependent on something that can be replaced. And for the rest, use AI, don’t use AI, I’m not paraphrasing anything Yoda said here. I’m not Yoda. I’m also not a Bot. Or an AI. Nor did I use AI in this post, not even to spellcheck it. I trust there are no spelling errors because I’ve written 14+ novels and am typing with fair accuracy, but if there are, well now – AI wouldn’t make those, would it?

Or would it?