I don't know about you (the collective you) and your relationship with Literature. Some of you read, most of you write and many do both. I must confess, I write far more than I read on here. Undemocratic or not - as far as reciprocating the kindness of others who stop by my work and offer up good comment - I simply find myself with little time for such a demanding affection. I love stories. I lose myself in them. It is like a mini adventure as each story sees me become the hero or the heroine or all the protagonists in turn.

Reading takes a lot out of me. It is not a diversion, a past-time, a hobby. I take reading seriously. I become a reader, an editor, a protagonist- often the very philosophy itself; meaning I become fully immersed and do not pause to look up till the final word. It gets in other people's way, this immersion, time being the enemy of all these days. (Except teenage girls rushing to reach this magical adulthood those of us already there are trying to escape.) Yeah... shh.

I also struggle to read chapter by chapter. I cannot read-in-waiting. That is something I am working on, having my immersion in smaller, not controlled by me chunks of time... rather than the hoovering up I like to do. But this is just one problem with me and reading these days. The other- I am fucking exhausted internally screaming, "You fuckers are watching Literature DIE and you do nothing! Nothing!" ("You fuckers" includes me.)

I came across an article today confirming a suspicion lurking in my head many years now: Machine creativity (capability) is able to, and IS assisting, human creativity. Like it is assisting all other aspects of human communication in a connected world: Messages, texts, even email will soon be available with predictive word and sentence 'enders'.

Oh ye. Anyone can write now. Start with some words, let the AI fill in the rest. Who knows, right, what new directions your tale might take when your mind is "working with" a machine to produce the next enthralling trilogy-

Who the fuck knows how much of that was you or... the machine damn it?

I can't. Bile rises.

Yet part of me also understands. All of us hold stories inside, stories we wish to tell but for varying reasons or justifications... we keep to ourselves. I understand, I do, how this collaboration between machine and person might perhaps create a means where there is "equality" among all- meaning, anyone should and can and will, in time, be considered "a writer" irrespective of the degree (or lack) of collaboration with a machine.

Fuck. Most of me though, the most that spent night after freezing night outdoors very recently, drawing the only internal warmth out of me in an emotional purge - because the need to divest myself of all physical need fit the writing - says, "No, motherfuckers, you won't destroy this last thing. No! Keep your machines and their learning away from our craft!"

I subscribe to the school of thought which believes if you can't think of the "right" word/sentence, then you are thinking the wrong word/sentence to begin with, so, start again. (Works for me, anyway.) I abandon far more words than I publish.

And, the more I observe machines "assisting" us the more I withdraw into a purist, monastic off-line state. I no longer even pretend to own a mobile phone. I do not communicate on Social Media. Even emails, my last connection to a connected world will soon become predictive and therefore no longer of use to me- because how the fuck will I know which part of the information or "letter" I receive is real (the sender's) and which part generated by a machine on their behalf? What if it is all bloody predictive-filled huh?

Ye, ye, predictive is supposedly based on past 'similar events'. The machine learns my brain patterns then dutifully spits out what (under the assumption I'd have got exactly there myself since that's what I did every other time) I am likely to think and then choose to write- you see my problem? What if this time, I want to think or write something bloody different then I see, based on my past responses - crap, maybe I best go by what the computer predicted since it worked before...

Or, what if the predictive text is... better than the stuff I carry in my head?

Tempting. To not laboriously sit and ponder a thought to the point where there is a flash and suddenly the mind is afire and the words (be they spoken or written) create something. It could be a mere sentence that just feels absolutely fucking brilliant the more you read it over. Or a paragraph, a statement describing a thought or view so aptly it reads like it transported itself uncensored by the hurried clacking of keys from the mind to the white space.

No, I do not profess to be some great thinker or great writer. I simply present a view on this, which I define as a vile trend making inroads into my beloved Literature: MACHINE ASSISTANCE. It did it to movies. It did it to Fine Art and Photography. It came after music and did it there, too. It took command of our language and the way we communicate between ourselves and with the world.

The less we think, the less there is to think about...

If we are not consumed by writing and are simply filling in gaps of generated text - responding to its direction meanwhile - then we have a problem. And if we can't see that we have a problem, (seeing me for instance as "out of touch" or anachronistic to these 'fast-paced and on-demand but in manageable chunks of time' new definitions of communication and its flow-on effects on literature) and we consider collaboration with any machine appropriate...

Nope. NO.

You know what it feels like? Almost the same as having to apologise and be considered alternative (not of the people) for buying my family "organic food" which... is what real food was... and the new normal food to live in massive aisles of packaged "stuff" I should be dutifully stuffing in my trolley.

Only worse! Because my choosing REAL food, not the illusion or new definition of real food, is a stance I can take with measurable results: the more of it I consume, the greater variety is afforded me through my direct consumption. I can ignore those scoffing and choosing the aisles because their dietary preferences do not directly impact my health.

Big problem with words though. Words are everywhere around me and they do impact! The more language contracts or is assisted... the more panic rises. 

I have observed this many-pronged attack on the minds of the young and the minds of the old and those in-between for a while now. The young love the notoriety: "From zero to a zillion reads! Wow!" as they "write" another  hundred-word chapter on their phones. Those a little older still 'aspiring' and dutifully putting in some effort... use the proffered predictive language as a tool expediting the process. Those bruised and battered and frustrated because the damned words are right there, right there only they refuse to finish either thought or sentence... else they jumble up, like some translator suddenly bereft of all IQ is randomly choosing words which kinda fit... I can see how there could be a massive sigh of relief. The drought broken.

WILL I HAVE TO LABLE MY STORIES "ORGANIC" SOME DAY SOON?

Because hand on heart, I cannot buy into any of this shit. I'd rather keep sending stories to myself, or, letters to that place called "DRAFTS".

Progress cannot be stopped. Adapt or die, in a Newtonian world. The next generation is already excitedly rushing ahead to places I, from my vantage point, lament about. Yes, the stench of death pervades. I will soon write to a dead thing; a relic; a memory. An echo. The wunderkinds creating all these apps and tools and programs to assist... successful in removing all autonomy within creation.

"I LET GO OF THE PEN! I, too, succumbed to the convenience and time-saving clacking of electronic keys. I, too, am therefore tainted." This is what the purist in me insists. The couple of remaining diaries not rotting in landfill read of my young mind meandering. Very few crossed-out words or spelling errors in their pages. My writing style easy, flowing; the communication between mind and page- Oh God, my mind was not so rushed those years! (Nor filled with so much accumulated peripheral nonsense and noise.)

I try writing with a pen today only to sit back, see the distortion of the former ease in words now barely legible, see plethora mistakes, the untidiness of it all... when compared to the orderly structure of the electronic page... and it pains me. Sometimes I struggle to bring that person in line with this one. My thoughts are much faster these days, the hand and pen simply cannot keep up. This is my mistake and I know it as such. And there is no going back unless I go into total isolation from all things "non-organic" to calm this mind of mine into a slower pace.

There is, however, a certainty: I WILL NEVER LET A MACHINE SPEAK FOR ME. Not even to finish what sits at the tip of my tongue, a simple "Thank you." I will ignore the fucker predictive text and type those words myself, if I ever have to. Rather, I'd much prefer to speak with people. Hear what stories they have. Exchange some of mine. I find these days, cocooned with my sons and nephew,  I speak more than I clack my stories.

Maybe... Literature needs to die before it is reborn. Maybe all this is just the killing process.

Maybe it needs to go back to the beginning - even before the simplest of Dictionaries and Thesauruses - when all a writer had was what his mind and it alone contained and created from, be it poetry, prose, real stories of a life lived or flights of imagination to destinations and events not existing- when it came from a pure source, self-written. Maybe we need to start even further back, with speech, again; with the passing of stories from mouth to ear and the living of lives retained in the minds of others and retold in turn till a scribe-mind commits them to paper.  

Pulp.

Yes. Everyone and anything can write. Even a machine. Even, apparently, enough monkeys left alone for a period of time.

But just like sitting at an electronic piano and repeating the coloured key sequence with my fingers without progressing further does not make me a pianist, nor does cutting my mother's hair for the last twenty years qualify me as a hair-stylist... or the sending up of a drone and getting 'credit' for the ingeniousness of the shots having little to do with anyone being an aerial photographer...

... If you allow a computer program to finish your supposed thought, then, this too, does not a writer of you make. Credit must be given where it is also due: to the predictive AI who shared the writing. Bullshit it came from you! Bullshit!

A measure of convenience commensurate with effort is one thing. When you know the word but your in-the-moment mind is divided between seeking it and continuing the story, maybe then, to concentrate the mind again, a synonym might be considered via a right click. Not, however, if you must trawl your work, edit it enough times there are tufts of your hair round the base of your chair, change this and that, use other words that "sound better" and allow predictive language to dictate direction and tone...

A blase, fill-in-the-blanks story similar to thousands, perhaps millions of similar fill-in-the-blanks computer tales, is another.

And the worst part of it all? Borrowing another writer's voice! This! We are going from fan-fic to the ability to write "predictively" precisely like any author we please. Wanna be Robert Burns today? Maybe your voice feels more like Nietzsche this morning... Hell, why not?

Fuck that. 

I did not mean, at the beginning of all this, that I do not read much these days because of what emerged in the body of this piece. Those I choose to read write simple, pure thoughts. I meant, sadly, I I acknowledge that I need to re-organise my life so that there is time to take mini-adventures again since if I do not actively support fellow scribes I am then further guilty of doing even more nothing to fight the machine.

The 'collective you' might argue, "This is the world, suck it up, do your best in it instead of wasting time worrying about everyone else." If so, I say as a parting thought: "We are ALL equally responsible for the world we bring to being and by extension, the stories we tell each other."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/technology/ai-is-beginning-to-assist-novelists.html