Austin Kleon

AI can’t kill anything worth preserving

The title of this post was stolen from John Warner, whose book Why They Can’t Write was recommended to me by a friend. He tweeted a really excellent thread about how AI’s “correct-seeming” prose is an opportunity to rethink and improve how we teach students writing. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the highlight for me:

(James Brown summarized this as “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” It has become the default setting in American life.)

Warner wrote a followup post, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving” that is also worth your time. Warner’s big idea is that students aren’t actually being asked to “express express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose)” but are rather being asked to produce “writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format)” which do fine on standardized tests, but don’t prepare them for writing at the college level, or writing anything that, you know, an actual human being would want to read.

“We made a mistake thinking it was a good thing to train students to write like an algorithm,” he writes. “Now we know we have to undo that mistake.”

Some of his suggestions are to “make the work worth doing,” to “value the process, rather than the product,” and to “move away from what an algorithm can do and towards how humans learn and develop.”

This strikes me as excellent advice not just for teachers, but for writers and artists of all kinds.

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.

How you think it is to be a human.

As Warner puts it, writing “is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.”

Emphasis on embodied. Head, heart, and hands.

“As human[s], we are wired to communicate,” Warner writes. “We are also wired for ‘play.’ Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.”

Whether you’re into AI or not, it’s worth spending some time honoring what is not machine-like in you.

And if you’re going to spend time with machines, be sure to spend time with machines that make you feel more human.

Letting books talk to each other

A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite ways [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.”

Someone recently asked me what it looks like in practice. I am loathe to muddy it any further with explanation, but here goes.

A mundane and far-from-perfect example: I was reading Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes and she mentioned the brain’s “default mode network,” something I don’t know anything about. I may or may not have paid much attention to it, but I had just finished John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World and remembered that he wrote about it, too.

Now, if I’d just read about default network mode in either of those books, solo, I might’ve just ignored it and moved on with my life, but the fact that two books in succession mentioned it made me think I needed to investigate it further.

Lo and behold, Steven Johnson wrote about it for the NYTimes several years ago and also in his book Farsighted. Now I have another book to dip into, and three books on different subjects talking about the same thing. That’s enough for a blog post, at the very least.

In this case, it was chance and happenstance, but you can sort of tweak your reading life in such a way that these sort of things happen more often. If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worth going into, but I realize it might not be so obvious to others.

Reading this way is a form of “input as collage,” and of course, you can take a multi-media approach to it: I remember last year I watched Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing while I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and I can’t identify exactly how, but they spoke to each other in some way that glued them together in my mind. (Later, I found out that Murdoch was a big Shakespeare freak.)

Another example: Yesterday’s blog post on Simic and Steinberg exists simply because Charles Simic died and I was going around the house trying to find all the books in the house of his I could find.

On the back cover of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks I noticed that Simic’s portrait was drawn by Saul Steinberg. A quick google of “Charles Simic” and “Saul Steinberg” made me remember that I have a catalog of Steinberg’s with an intro by Simic. So I pull that book out and read the intro and find out they were friends. A few more googles and I have everything Simic wrote about his friend (I think) at my fingertips.

As I read those pieces, they started talking to each other, and suddenly I had something to write about.

Iggy Pop on his mother’s love

I was touched by these bits from an interview with Iggy Pop. As @jhiggy suggested, they lend new depth to the lyrics of “No Fun”:

Maybe go out
Maybe stay home
Maybe call mom
on the telephone

Iggy has spoken elsewhere about the love of his parents:

My parents had been shocked and impoverished by the Depression. It made them careful and frugal. At first, as a teacher, my father made no money. So he got the idea of living in a trailer park. The rent was a dollar a day for the plot. I slept over the dinette, on a shelf. We were definitely the only college-educated family in the camp.

Once I hit junior high in Ann Arbor, I began going to school with the son of the president of Ford Motor Company, with kids of wealth and distinction. But I had a wealth that beat them all. I had the tremendous investment my parents made in me. I got a lot of care. They helped me explore anything I was interested in. This culminated in their evacuation from the master bedroom in the trailer, because that was the only room big enough for my drum kit. They gave me their bedroom.

“I had a wealth that beat them all.”

(He speaks more about his upbringing in Jim Jarmusch’s documentary, Gimme Danger.)

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.