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Enjoy organic, free-range, grain-fed stories (while they last.)

Self-portrait by Dall-E 2.

M is traveling this week; Dad Duty has hoovered up my writing time, so I’m punting on a serious essay until next week. In the meantime—the question of what we’re all doing here, anyway, has returned.

Apparently, one of our prophesied apocalypses has already arrived. You’ll probably have heard about the Writers’ Guild strike, which kicked off when Management reportedly declined to pull the plug on AI-generated scripts. The lamentations of people like this Redditor are spreading across the Internet.

Paul Kingsnorth

believes that we’ve created the literal (not just the literary) Antichrist¹.

Despite all the wailing and rending of garments—we had it coming.

Artificial intelligence was just the last step in the elaborate Rube Goldberg machine we constructed to open the gallows-trap beneath our feet. The publishing industry has been rotten with passive income grifters for some time; all we’ve done now is fully automate the underpaid content mills that have been humming along for decades. We allowed writing and storytelling to be undersold for decades. We offered this scorpion a ride across the river on our backs, and now we’re shocked, shocked to feel that fatal sting.

So what can I do that a computer can’t, when it comes to storytelling?

If we accept the premise that stories are just entertainment products—that written words are just another commodity to be manufactured as cheaply as possible and sold by the bushel—then we’ve already authored our doom. If “being a writer” means “not having to work,” then, yeah, congratulations. Thanks to A.I., you never have to work again, or have the hassle of getting paid. You’re free now. Go consider the birds of the air, for they neither reap nor sow, etc.

On the other hand—if we maintain that stories aren’t just empty boxes to be filled up with words, and storytellers aren’t just vending machines for pleasant nonsense—then we’re putting some distance between us and the Machines. Stories can and should be about building relationships. Publishing created the illusion that stories can be separated from their keepers. These little squiggles have always been a poor surrogate for voiced stories that were conjured on the breath of actual humans. Maybe all those printed tales were a necessary evil; maybe the Luddites were right, and we should have launched a preemptive strike against the Machines, before they had the capability to strike back. Maybe we’d be better people now, if we’d stuck to conjuring shapes in the air above a campfire. “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

We can still put our storytelling energy into building relationships with real people. Those relationships have always had value. SubStack has been great for this. But it’s possible that, before long, it will become nearly impossible to find the real people in a sea of replicants.

Just in the space of writing these few short sentences, I’ve started to accept that I’m part of the rearguard—the ones covering the retreat as the humans pull back from this digital terrain.

We may already have lost the Internet to the Machines. And good riddance.

Meanwhile, we’re not living in Westworld yet. Unless I’ve missed some important news—these intelligences are still bound within the non-place of the Internet. They don’t have bodies. Can’t go out and experience anything for themselves, beyond what their users tell them. They don’t know what it feels like to be stuck inside of a single, isolated, physical container—to understand that someday, sooner than later, that vessel will die. They don’t know what it feels like to think about a future in which everything they’ve ever loved is turned to ash, to imagine going back to their childhood home and finding an empty ruin. They don’t know what it’s like to get up every day and find some beauty to believe in, despite all that.

We can tell them about these things. They can steal them from us, if we let them. But they’ll never really know how it feels. And that gives us an edge.

It does warrant a word of caution, though: we shouldn’t surrender those things willingly.

I was thinking about what deeply-felt, emotionally resonant story I could share as a counter to the soulless scripts that the A.I.s are churning out. There’s something about the lights in the hills that I could see from my bedroom window when I was growing up. I realized that I shouldn’t share something so personal on here, shouldn’t ever publish the very stories that would identify me as human. It might get poached by a computer and stripped for parts, stitched back together as the output for somebody else’s prompt.

We’re facing an Army of the Dead problem: every story that falls on the field gets reanimated as a hollow revenant to serve Them.

Maybe that isn’t a new problem after all. Plagiarism was already rampant before SkyNet became self-aware; anybody who was putting their best stuff up online was already taking a big risk. It’s been a Catch 22 for a while now: if you don’t publish your best work online, you won’t get recognized (or compensated)—but if you do, someone (or something) might steal it out from under you.

So what, then?

I guess I’ve already resigned myself to the possibility that any short stories and essays published on here could get scraped. (Please note that this does not constitute permission for free use: if you steal my stuff, I will send the nine Kings of Hell and their legal teams after you.) Hopefully paywalling the ending of my stories will prevent them from getting stolen entirely. I was planning to devote next year to one big story instead of several short stories; I think I’ll still do that, even if it does get stolen, because it’s part of a bigger story. I can always write the sequels somewhere else, or tell them around a campfire instead.

Speaking of real-life storytellers,

Martin Shaw

is currently on tour in Canada, and I wish I was able to go see him. Venue schedule and tickets can be found on the website of the School of Mythopoetics.

Also—if you want to help protect an endangered species, and haven’t already subscribed, consider signing up!

For the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can keep one of the last fully human writers alive in a safe enclosure that mimics his natural habitat. Protected from poachers and T-1000s, this little fella can continue writing weird nonsense—just like his ancestors did—for as long as the lights stay on.

Stay safe out there, everybody.

1. I won’t comment here on whether or not this is true, in case It is listening.