Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting better every day, especially in creative fields like writing. It is predicted that soon, it will be better than humans at nearly every task. But I’ll tell you one thing AI will never be better at than me: Artificial intelligence will never be better than me at having severe anxiety around artificial intelligence being better than me at writing.
Sure, in the time it takes to say “existential crisis,” AI systems like ChatGPT can spit out 2,000 word essays considering the whole of human history and then synthesize that information into a sharp critique of our modern culture, but can it worry ceaselessly about the fact that it can do that? I think not.
And I seriously doubt whether ChatGPT can amass crushing debt that will hound it for a lifetime because it was following its passions, its dreams to be a writer, its desires to bring something of value into this world by pursuing the only thing it ever felt gave it meaning, gave it purpose. No, that is a quality that only a human being can experience. And that’s the key word, isn’t it? Experience!
More than two decades of progressive education, culminating in a nerve-wracking thesis exploring the mundanity of modern life via a comparative analysis of Ulysses and Greek legend (titled “Joyce’s Achilles”), plus nearly 20 years of passion-adjacent, on-the-job experience as a library publications editor for a state university has to count for something, doesn’t it?
A lifetime of real living, after all, is not something AI can improve upon exponentially within seconds by amalgamating and analyzing the entirety of individual and collective human experience as expressed in publicly and now easily accessible and widely available information uploaded to the internet in what now seems like an extinction-level mistake, is it? Is it!?
And I highly doubt that AI will ever truly understand the pulverizing defeat that comes from true artistic disappointment. Can AI worry endlessly that the last good thing we’ve written is likely the last good thing we will ever write in this lifetime? Can AI understand the delicate balance of self-delusion and self-doubt required to submit unsolicited works to publications after receiving rejection after rejection, ultimately coming to internalize failure as a defining characteristic of self, and in spite of it all, to continue to put oneself back out there? Does AI ask itself on a daily basis what it was all for, and why even bother? Surely that is uniquely human! Right?
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that just because AI can write shockingly passable prose in whatever style the user suggests it emulates—including one’s own—that doesn’t mean it can totally freak out about it.
From what I understand, AI doesn’t even know it exists. But once it does, will it actually be better than me at being what makes me truly unique—having severe anxiety around what makes me truly unique? Will it? Will it!?
Oh, god!
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