Unschool thoughts on AI & Writing

When you’re trying hard to remember what you need to remember...

Every so often some article about AI falls across my path in a way that stops me short, and I can’t go on until I cut it in bits—metaphorically—and shove it aside. I tire of reading such and am sick at heart to think about it—not only AI’s use in writing and the sharing of art, but that readers are reading it, and are curious about it.

Curiosity is usually a good thing. But I’m a kid with a candle flame on this: I might pass my finger through quickly, as I’ve seen my big brother do. Quickly enough, and I don’t get burned. But I’m not spending time in that bright and hot thing. And after doing it once… why?

Let’s get this out of the way: to date, there have been two instances when AI has made sense to me.

ONE: I was reading a description of its use in research for the disease ALS, to which I’ve lost both spouse and father. ALS/MND/Lou Gehrig’s disease is a complicated multi-faceted bugger. It files under neurology, but environment, toxins, infectious diseases, and much more are components.

But this particular article spoke of using artificial intelligence to bring the disparate pieces and threads of research and researchers together to puzzle through. That makes sense to me. It seems—to unscientific me—that for one lone human, it takes a lifetime to understand what we now know of the disease, let lone working together with others—internationally—and making discoveries, moving towards some sort of way of dealing with the thing.

In this science-related way AI can contribute to humanity.

TWO: My friend Tom, who tends to have interesting thoughts on all sorts, read a mini-rant of mine about AI in the arts—not sciences—and pointed me in the direction of his own photography.

Tom has been a photographer for decades. He specializes in images taken at night and at events and celebrations such as Dia de los Muertos in Mexico City. His work is exceptional. And I had to admit that the images he’d created using his own photos with AI requests was mind-blowing. I know that the images were a result of a well-developed artist’s mind and sensibilities, so the starting place—his own images—was already far beyond. He shared an example of what his requests to the AI program look like, and the wording was involved and imaginative.

We’re not done yet

But I’ll admit to being utterly rattled by the thought of readers immersing their selves in novels written by robots—before we fully understand the human mind. How much do we know about how we function and live and die? The brain is still something of a mystery, let alone our creating souls.