What Are We Doing Here, Anyway?

I promise not to write about AI again for at least six more months.

Hi friends.

I am sorry to write to you today about AI. I try to do it sparingly because that’s not what this letter is about and also it makes me a little cranky, but here we are yet again.

Before I do, I’m just going to direct you toward something I published a while ago that is really in the spirit of what I am trying to do when I send these letters to you, which is encourage you to revel in your ideas and creative self and figure out ways to be productive in a healthy way. In it I wrote:

The words do so many different things for people. If your writing is for comfort, let it comfort you. If your writing is for process, let it be for process. If your writing is to change your life or even the world, let that change roll. If your words are a war cry, for the love of God, please howl.

Writing is so important to me! I am grateful that it exists, that I am allowed to do it. It has saved my life a thousand times. I encourage people to write so that it can save their lives too. So let’s be really clear: I am interested in a positive vibe.

When I speak of being opposed to using AI, I am talking about using it to generate ideas for your work, and/or to generate your writing for your creative projects. Here is an example of how this kind of strategy can go awry.

An important thing we need to understand about generative AI is that it is based on the stolen work of authors. Eight of my books were used to develop Anthropic AI. That’s two decades worth of work for which I have not been compensated, and even with the lawsuit I have linked to, I will still barely be compensated. When you use AI to generate your work you’re stealing the work of others. You may not care about that. I do.

Additionally, I am extremely concerned that the more people use AI, the more they are going to let their brains go to shit.

Oh yeah, and also generative AI is an absolute nightmare for our environment.

Again, you may not care about any of that. You may care about convenience, your immediate needs. You may care about saving time being more important than creating something unique, valuable, or interesting. You may not feel like ever pushing yourself again—just let the little computer do all the thinking!—because the world is such an exhausting place. (It is!)

You may feel like: I just want to publish some AI slop and make some money, and that’s what it’s all about. Money.

I know some people will argue with me about the value of AI in terms of creative experimentation. Perhaps I’m missing out in my life (I am not) but I feel pretty solid about how much work I’m doing and how I’m getting it done. Good god, there are so many stories to write out there!

As Colson Whitehead wrote in this wonderful piece in the NYT:

Some people say, “I just use it to brainstorm ideas.” If you don’t know what to paint or compose or write, you’re in the wrong job. Art is the business of making up stuff — go make up some stuff.

And look, I don’t know you, person who might be using AI to generate ideas and text. I don’t walk in your shoes. All I can tell you is this is not the world we are living in on this letter, in this community, in this bigger project called 1000 Words.

We are living in the “waking up in the morning and urgently thinking about our ideas and feelings and how best to process them on the page” world. We are living in the “fighting for our stolen moments to write” world. We are agonizing over our sentences until hopefully, finally, deliriously we can feel delight in them. We are here because we believe in making wholly original art for ourselves and possibly to share with others.

Creativity is not a competition. It’s you showing up for yourself every day so you can make some cool stuff. Sometimes I hear the whispers of people saying “Don’t get left behind” when it comes to AI but guess what, I’m not in a fucking race here—none of us are.

This is why I don’t really address AI very often. Because I am mostly just concerned with the people who are here for the reasons I stated above. Because those are my people.

So now I will remind you that 1000 Words of Summer starts in less than a month, on May 30, and runs through June 12. We will all be there together and it will be challenging and it will be fulfilling and we will be supportive of each other and we will be focused on using our brains to make something original and special and ours.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.