Tag Archives: writing

Time’s Corner: What is New

This is yesterday’s issue of my newsletter Time’s Corner.

The other day my brother showed me some videos created by Google’s Veo 3 tool. Watching them, I felt like the Spartan king seeing a catapult for the first time: “Here is the death of valor.” What’s the point of struggling to make a beautiful film or portrait or poem if any rube with a computer can do the same thing?

The thing is, I actually like making movies and taking pictures and writing poems. I don’t just like having them. I like making them. At the end of the day, I’m not too worried about Veo 3 personally. So, I’m going to ask a more neutral question: What are these tools for?

Like all tools, AI is decided to make work easier, usually by making it more efficient. They reduce friction. Is there any benefit to reducing friction in creative work?

Alan Jacobs wrote about this a few years ago. The friction between the artist’s ideal and the limits of his tools is a key factor in creating art. Artists need their materials to push back. (This is what always bothered me about that video of Glen Keane animating in virtual reality. “You can do anything you want.” Yeah, but what I want is to not be able to do anything I want.) On the one hand, artists don’t want to make their work more efficient. But, on the other hand, artists can and do adopt new tools. Someone had to invent the lead pencil, after all.

I suppose the answer to my question depends on what you’re going for. In the filmmaking industry, digital video has almost entirely replaced actual film because it’s gobs easier to record, manage, edit, and alter. If you want to make a great-looking movie as quickly and cheaply as possible, digital is the way to go.

But not everyone wants to do that. I recently met a filmmaker here in Birmingham who loves using DVR cameras (remember those?). He makes music videos for bands who want a certain, unconventional look, and DVR gives him that look. (He also mentioned that people behave way differently in front of a camcorder than they do in front of a phone. Pull out a phone and everyone turns away. Turn on a camcorder and they all start mugging and crowding to get into the frame.)

I do most of my writing on the computer because it’s fast and I like the semi-formal look of type on a white background. When I need to slow down and think through a scene or paragraph, I put out pen and paper. (Not pencil. Too easy to erase.) But most of the time, I’m after speed, and the computer gives me that. Could you use an LLM in the same way?

Cory Doctorow has written that his main problem with AI art is the lack of communication behind it. Art communicates via the million micro-decisions made by the artist in creating it. Each stroke of paint (or the keyboard) tells something about the artist’s thoughts. You can create AI art without making very many decisions; hence, according to Doctorow, its uncanniness.

But what if there is intention behind it? If an artist uses Dall-E, or whatever, to make hundreds of versions of his idea, then chooses from among those hundreds, makes adjustments, generates a hundred more, etc. If a poet has ChatGPT spit out a poem about the rain, then changes a word, then another word, then another, chops the whole apart and puts it back together? Does that make it just like any other tool, one step beyond using a word processor?

Let’s say I’m writing a scene and I’m stuck. “What would Jane say in response to Michael’s comment?” I wonder. Being the old-fashioned writer I am, I would do one of the following:

  1. Lean back and stare at the wall for a while
  2. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and start writing one bad line after another, in the hopes of jostling loose a good idea
  3. Go for a walk

It’s very easy to imagine a younger writer developing a different process. “What would Jane say to Michael?” she wonders. She opens ChatGPT, types in Michael’s line, and asks it to generate fifty different things Jane could say in response. She skims the output, selects the best option, copies, pastes, and continues on her way.

There’s much more to say, but this newsletter is already long. Let me add one thing: The problem with using AI tools to make art is that they trick you into thinking that they are creating something new. They aren’t. What an AI spits out may seem new, but it’s an amalgamation of vast quantities of words or images created by human beings. Now, my grad school professors would probably say, “What’s the difference?” All of us our simply parroting stuff we’ve heard or read. We’re just super-advanced LLMs made out of meat. But that’s simply not true. Human beings can come up with new things. (They can make new humans, after all, each with an individual soul.) Machines can’t.

Twitter and Emotional Sabotage

Rigney mentions social media early in his book, acknowledging that such technologies “amplify and reinforce our spiritual and social sickness.” But the problem, he says, “runs deeper than Twitter, Facebook, and cable news.” He’s right that social media is not the source of our problems. Delete your account and you will still wrestle with sin. But practically speaking, using Twitter and other social media eats away at the qualities that make a person a good leader. The more time you spend on Twitter, the less sober-minded, or differentiated, you become.

My essay on Twitter is now live on the Theopolis blog.

Why’s This So Good?

Nieman Storyboard has an ongoing series called “Why’s This So Good?” in which they analyze writing to find out why it’s, you know, so good. When I read this short section of an article by Ed Ruscha describing his burning desire for white jeans, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. This is me trying to figure out why.

In 1951, when I was fourteen, I landed a job in an Oklahoma City laundromat. The pay was respectable–fifty cents an hour, up from forty-five. In a swampy, bunkerlike back room with a large concrete center drain, I had to mix bleach and water together in brown glass bottles for the customers to use. It was sweaty and dank, but I got to listen to a faraway radio, faint but distinct, playing music by the likes of Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Faron Young.

One day, I saw a news item about the murder of a nurse in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A photograph of one of the teenage killers showed him in handcuffs, being escorted by police. He was wearing what looked to me like white Levi’s. White Levi’s! What style! I was overcome by an immediate urge to get a pair for myself, but after looking around I was told that no such product existed–at least, not in Oklahoma.

Then it came to me: I would make my own. I brought a pair of bluejeans from home, doused them in undiluted Clorox bleach, and placed them in a washing machine. I let them sit for half an hour, the mystery and suspense building. When I finally opened the door, I found, to my astonishment, a pair of pure-white, radiantly glowing Levi’s. A triumph.

Or so I thought. Reaching in to grab them, I felt my hand sweep through a puffy lump of dead white fibres, softer than cotton candy. The rivets and the buttons were the only parts that survived.

At the time, I was banking on white Levi’s coming into fashion. I had to wait twenty years to buy a pair off the rack.”

Ed Ruscha via Put This On

If I were to tell this story to a friend, it would go something like this: “I wanted a pair of white jeans once. I couldn’t find them for sale anywhere, so I decided to bleach some normal blue jeans, but when I did, they melted.”

The strength of Ruscha’s writing here mainly comes from the specific details, obviously. Just to make sure, here it is with the specifics removed:

In 1951, I landed a job in a laundromat. The pay was respectable. In a back room, I had to mix bleach and water together in glass bottles for the customers to use. It was unpleasant, but I got to listen to a radio.

One day, I saw a photograph in a newspaper of a man wearing what looked to me like white Levi’s. I wanted a pair for myself, but after looking around I was told that no such product existed.

Then I decided I would make my own. I brought a pair of bluejeans from home, doused them in bleach, and placed them in a washing machine. When I finally opened the door, I found, to my astonishment, a pair of pure-white Levi’s.

Or so I thought. Reaching in to grab them, I discovered they had disintegrated in the bleach and were ruined.

Here’s what I removed:

  • his age (“fourteen”)
  • the location of the laundromat (“Oklahoma City”)
  • the pay (“fifty cents an hour, up from forty-five”)
  • the description of the room (“swampy, bunkerlike… with a large concrete center drain”)
  • the color of the glass bottles (“brown”)
  • what made the work unpleasant (“it was sweaty and dank”)
  • the sound of the radio and the music it played (“faraway… faint but distinct, playing music by the likes of Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Faron Young.”)

Et cetera.

A good sample to reference if your descriptions are falling flat.

When Is a Poem Finished?

A poem feels finished when I can’t enter it again. Everything falls into place, each line feels balanced and complete, the shifts between lines and sentences feel shocking but also permanent and incapable of change. This poem is finished. I have to make something new. I have to be a different poet.

Richie Hofmann: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/06/14/making-of-a-poem-richie-hofmann/

And:

I have often found… that sometimes the best revision of a draft is the writing of a new poem.

Cuneiform and Moveable Type

When the Sumerians wanted to get a message across, they tended to write it in cuneiform on clay bricks. As writing the same message (“this wall belongs to King Lugalzagesi”) over and over again by hand would have become tedious, they created a stamp to speed up the process, a la the DMV.

Signs that made up the king’s inscription could be cut in reverse on a block and used to stamp the bricks. This first kind of printing went on for almost two thousand years. Remarkably, its use was reserved for mundane bricks, and no other purpose. Other types of text were not required in large numbers and there may also have been cultural resistance to the use of stamping for learned texts.

Why not produce poetry and other “learned texts” en masse? Perhaps to increase their value through scarcity. Perhaps because mindlessly stamping wet clay didn’t seem like an appropriate way to reproduce the text of a great epic.

Regardless, the stamp was a clever invention, perhaps even more so than we might think:

In a few stamped examples some signs are upside down. The best explanation is perhaps that individually mounted wedge signs had been carelessly replaced in the matrix after cleaning out the stamp. Here we could have not only printing, but even moveable type, two thousand years before Gutenberg!

Cuneiform, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor

Oh, you crafty ancient Sumerians. Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The People Vote with their Dollars

A man (said he) who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Twitterese

It is remarkable how uniform and homogenous the style of writing is on Twitter, which is where media culture is defined. It seemingly hasn’t evolved in a decade. Condescending, sarcastic, amused that you would think to say something so dumb, endlessly superior, contemptuous of all sincere values except the one being used as a bludgeon in the fight at hand. Absurdist in an entirely prescriptive way, novel in a tired way, funny in a humorless way. All of it is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a strange and highly mannered form of humor that flourished in an obscure offshoot of an internet forum which migrated to a bigger platform and metastasized into something called Weird Twitter, and was subsequently popularized and imitated so frequently it took over the forum completely. For reasons that elude me, it’s been the dominant style on the world’s most influential social network for going on a decade and appears often in published commentary as well.

From Freddie deBoer’s writing guide “If You Absolutely Must”