Wordish Things

This post is going to seem like a lot of words to make a very simple point. You could read the table of contents and get the gist.

It follows on what I wrote in My Voice and Why Gen AI Can’t Fake It a week or so ago.

As I wrote at the end of the post, I’m looking at a couple million words in the rear view mirror, and every project has the same lifecycle.

I learn.
I write.
I learn.
I publish.
I learn.
I write.
I learn.
I publish.
I learn…

Doesn’t it logically follow, then, that my next book will be written by a different me than the me that wrote my last book?

Gen AIOnly Knows the Past

If I were to give generative AI an idea or two, maybe a couple of plot points, and then ask it to write my next book it will write a book in the style of my previous books. Same techniques, mistakes, turns of phrase – it might even get some of the pop culture that always seems to seep in.

But it won’t know anything about me that happened since my latest book unless I tell it. And even if I could find a way to articulate formative and important events in my life, it could not predict the precise way I reacted. For example, it could not scan the way I reacted to the news that I had breast cancer that might inform a future character having that experience.

It has no knowledge of the “aha” moments of creativity and flights of fancy. AI might be able to tell me the name of a song that caught my interest, but couldn’t possibly guess how a motif or rhythm change made me want to replicate my emotional response to it in a scene. I’ll only know when I’ve listened to the piece two dozen more times and made an attempt to put music into words in the head of a character who exists now in my head because of that music.

Generative AI can only take data it’s been fed and regurgitate that data. It isn’t capable of creativity.

Plus, Sometimes the Past Needs to Stay in the Past

I’m proud of all my books. They were the best I could do at the time. Nevertheless, they have outdated ideas, limitations in imagination, and words I would no longer choose.

If genAI were to concoct a “new” work based on my old work, it would repeat mistakes and limitations of the past. And there would be so… many… ellipses….

Frankly, anyone who tries to write a book based on genAI manipulation of my previous work deserves to inherit those mistakes and the reactions of readers to them.

Future Me is the Only Me that Can Write a Future Book

That’s the basic physics of time, isn’t it? In our world time goes in one direction and entropy is a journey we’re all on, all headed to the same end.

The life begets art begets life cycle is the magic of storytelling. The writing of it is a journey, and it becomes a journey all its own for the reader. Because I change, every time I write a book the journey is different. And any given reader changes too, so their journey with a book changes every time they read it.

Even someone who writes much faster than I do will change subtly from book to book. When it’s been a couple years, versus a couple months, the changes aren’t so subtle. I think I could pick up books by the same author, one written in 2015 and the other in 2025, and see the imprint of fundamental social change and upheaval.

As an example, I’m not the only writer who had a book started when COVID-19 locked down the world, and found that continuing forward on the same plan for it no longer made sense: the “contemporary now” of the social contract and political world changed. My trust in a lot of things I took for granted also fundamentally changed. As a result, Simply the Best became a different story of despair, redemption, and trust in love and in spite of the world.

Even I don’t know the totality of the person I will be tomorrow. And who I am tomorrow is who will write my next book. How could genAI ever get it right?

Photo by me of a stack of books a reader brought to an event for me to sign, which I very happily did.

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