Process or product? What We Lose When We Let AI Write Our Stories for Us

Today, after a few hours at my desk, writing, cutting and rearranging, I suddenly saw the light at the end of the tunnel and knew that I was close to completing a first draft of the manuscript I’ve been working on this past year. It’s a good feeling, completing a long journey like this. Satisfying.

Although I’ve sensed it along the way, it’s only now that I get to see the bigger picture and the parallels between the creative journey I’ve taken and the book which has emerged from it. I begin to see how each of the threads are woven together, and to sense that I’ve learned something, not always quantifiable, but nevertheless it is there. Always there. That learning. This coming to new knowledge through the arduous process of writing. There’s a reality to it that feels important.

I love and hate writing and it will always be like that. Sometimes I find myself immersed in the creative flow; words, ideas, fuse together like magic and I feel such a sense of joy. Other times I walk away from my desk, cursing the fate that drew me to this form of expression, wishing I could just press a button and the book or the article would be written. The difference is that in the time it has taken me to write this particular book, AI has found its way into our lives and provided us with that button.

The Power of Process

The pace of life is increasing by the day, making us ever more impatient, and greedy for quick outcomes that prioritise product over process. An AI program that writes our books or our articles for us in seconds is so much easier than working on something over many months or years, so it’s not surprising that some of us are tempted to feed in a premise or an outline, press a button and run with the outcome. But we lose a great deal when we succumb to the tantalising lure of product over process.

Writing is about so much more than getting published. It’s an initiation of sorts. A life-time apprenticeship, a way of perceiving the world, interpreting it, sharing our experiences and crucially making sense of them. It’s about using our imaginations, our empathy, to slip into the skin of others, celebrating the differences and the commonalities between us. When we write we work with the thematic threads that permeate our lives and in so doing we begin to break free from our conditioned selves. It’s in the process of writing, and reading too, that we learn more about ourselves, about the human condition and about our own experience of life.

Writing is hard work. But it’s also essential work. When we start a story, we take the first step on a journey, and like all journeys it will be full of surprises, delights, difficulties and sometimes even despair. There will be times when we want to give up and times when we throw ourselves into it whole-heartedly. There will be pauses and sprints and everything in-between. Sometimes too, our story will draw us deep into the shadows of our psyche to unearth and let go of trauma. And as with many journeys we might also start by heading in one direction, only to discover we’re making unexpected turns and weaving in themes that run deeply and sometimes unconsciously through our lives, themes that guide us to where we need to be not to where we wanted to go.

What We Lose If We Press the AI Button?

‘There is no greater pain than a story untold,’ wrote Maya Angelou. The stories we tell help us to see the limitations in our own lives and to overcome them. But in a sense, it is the commitment we make to telling our stories that is most important because although many of us might at times describe writing as torture, it is really a form of self-nurture.

Feeding a quick summary into an AI program and publishing that article, that short story, that poem or script or novel means the story is still untold, it’s still there within us. We haven’t experienced the magic of the creative process working on and through us. We haven’t reaped the rewards of turning up to our desk each day whether we want to or not, of tuning into our muse, of stepping into the flow of creativity, of finding our way through the blockages instead of walking away from them. Nothing has changed. We haven’t made sense of anything. And we haven’t grown.

Our Intention Imbues our Creations

The industrial age saw the introduction of mass production but despite this, we didn’t lose our fascination with the crafted object. More recently the emergence of the ebook was met with warnings of the end of the printed book but instead what emerged to balance it were beautifully crafted books that are a delight to hold, to savour and to return to again and again. Now we have AI programs writing books, essays, articles and even poetry. It’s too early yet to see what we will do to counterbalance this new development, but I have little doubt that we will find a way because we humans are resilient, fundamentally creative and naturally seek real connection.

What is it about a bowl cast by real hands, a story that’s been labored over? The pot of tea carefully made and steeped in compassion, the meal cooked with a nurturing love, the cloak woven with prayers of protection, even the ring forged to bind its wearer? They’re all imbued with the attention and the intention of the creator. Never mind that once written, a book is mass produced, because the words and the story still carry the intention and the energetic imprint of the creator, their devotion, the love and the care they bring to their work. But what is it that AI imbues a story with? What energy imprint does it carry?

AI in itself is a tool, and like many tools it can be used in both positive and negative ways. Much depends on who is using it and their intention. We humans are in the strange position of being both the servants of AI and its master. Human knowledge is being fed into AI in order to teach it what it needs to know and already it has surpassed us in many ways, proving itself incredibly useful to humanity and enabling us to become ever more efficient. Whether we like it or not, all our creations too, our books, our art, our music, are feeding AI’s inexhaustible appetite. My books have been offered up to AI without my permission, as have the books of most people I know.

I could ask AI to write a novel in the style of Rosie Dub and it would, but that novel would be empty. A hollow thing. Written without hardship or joy, no gradual understandings, no epiphanies. It would be a product created without process. A product resulting from a tremendously fast and efficient gathering together of information. Maybe today the AI produced novel would be heavily or slightly flawed, but in the near future it will iron out those flaws and when that happens it will be almost impossible to distinguish between a book that has been written with the love and care a story deserves and one that has been produced by the press of a button.

Learning How to Discern

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate what is real and what is not. Where does reality begin and end? How can we find something true in this hall of distorting mirrors we’re trapped within? The ever more troubling news being broadcast day and night, the outright lies, the omissions, the overt manipulation of truth . . . it’s so dispiriting, disheartening, frightening even. The information age has morphed somehow into an age of deception. Nothing is as it seems. Certainties are undermined from one moment to the next, the ground we’re standing on doesn’t feel solid anymore and the morals we were taught to live by are no longer reflected in the behaviour of our leaders.

If we can no longer trust our eyes and ears, or even our intellect, to find something true amongst all the deceptive information, then it seems to me the only way forward is to practice real discernment. The path to this lies in learning to trust and incorporate another one of our senses. Intuition. This doesn’t mean abandoning intellect but rather encouraging a conscious interplay between the two, along with a nod to noting our bodily responses so we can ‘feel’ our way to truth. What is solid and true feels different to what is slippery and false. It’s a subtle difference but if we tune in, we can feel that difference because we have the tools to do so.

Idries Shah once wrote, ‘he who tastes not, knows not.’ Writing is experiential, but AI is informational, and wisdom cannot be found through information alone. Experience is a fundamental element of learning. It’s experience that transforms information into knowledge, experience that transforms knowledge into understanding and experience that transforms understanding into wisdom. AI might be a useful information source, a problem solver and an organiser but unlike us it doesn’t have experience, it doesn’t taste or feel, it has no senses, no pain, no grief, no love, no compassion. And it is not intuitive

As W.B. Yeats said, ‘The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’ The constructed world is desensitizing us in many ways, and yet ironically perhaps it is also forcing us to find a new path because if there is no one left to trust, we have to learn to trust ourselves and learn how to use our deepest senses. It seems to me vital, that as writers we resist the temptation of letting AI do our work for us, and as readers, we learn how to distinguish between the crafted story and the AI story, by using discernment to search for and sense the energy of a story.

Signing Off

It’s taken me a few days to write this piece, to discover what it is I’m trying to say, to mull over the ideas, join them up, and shape and structure the writing. During this time, this article has haunted me, drawing me back to it again and again, following me on walks, intruding on conversations, waking me at night with glimmers of inspiration, a sentence ready formed, a new direction to take. And now here it is. Complete. It could be better. It could be worse. But I did it. It’s now a product but it was also an experiential process and the imprint of that process is woven through every thread in this article and within me too, leaving me all the more certain that within the creative process, within all the difficulties and the joys of the journey, lies the magic, the art that can never be replicated by the press of a button.

Rosie

I’m Dr Rosie Dub, a novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as a creative writing teacher, mentor and developmental editor. My PhD research explored the purpose and function of story as an evolutionary tool for individuals and societies. I’m also the creator of the Alchemy of Story workshop series.

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