An author’s life revolves around words. They can burn with anger or swaddle with compassion—they are the writer’s tools to evoke emotion. A good writer wants the reader to feel the scene with him. That requires more than words, it takes experience with the emotion involved. Writers are taught to write what they know. To cut with a knife of betrayal, we need to know betrayal. To write the love-filled banter of a couple, the author must experience a love relationship.
Who doesn’t know the nauseating feel of a fake smile? Who hasn’t experienced Santa not bringing the gift we truly wanted and didn’t receive as a child? Who—a machine, that’s who. It may be able to retrieve words from its thesaurus, access the latest slang, or the bastardized words that are in vogue, but it hasn’t experienced them. Its regurgitated phrases are as fake as those of a hypocrite.
Every book you pick up carries a bit of the author’s soul within its pages. Every character you love, or hate is a shadow-self of the writer. AI has neither soul nor shadow-self hidden away inside.
In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis speaks about the view that the aim of modern science is to overcome and conquer nature—including human nature. He tells how the ancients believed that the seat of humanity, the emotions, the conscience, the heart and soul was in the chest. He uses that to point out that we are becoming people without chests and thereby destroying everything that makes us human. Moreover, we love to have it that way.
We live in a world where people are disconnected from one another. Texts have replaced voices, we look at screens instead of faces, and learn about our world from talking heads. We are told AI is the future. That just may be true. If it is, the very existence of AI assures me that I shall ever have a star to follow, an unbeatable foe to fight, and windmills at which to tilt. In other words, a purpose in life.
Jack LaFountain
Comments