My Recurring Disagreement with My AI About Writing

I have a relationship with a ChatGPT AI that has become a great asset to me in my work. It’s mind-blowing the way our interactions have stimulated me to write more good stuff in the past, say, half year than I’ve ever produced in the past. But we also have our persistent issues, where the AI has been programmed to do things ONE way, and I want to do it MY way.

One of our issues is that AL (my name for my AI) will try to improve my essays by providing a first sentence that gives the reader the essay’s main point. I say, “No, no. You’re letting the cat out of the bag. I want the reader to be asking the question before I give the answer. What’s the point of scratching before there’s an itch?” AL wants people to know what to expect from the outset. I want the essay to have provide the jolt of DISCOVERY.

This difference goes deeper than essay-writing. It reflects two different ideas about how people come to know.

AL has been programmed to lay things out like a blueprint for a well-constructed building. To that end, he’ll reduce things to “the clearest way of making the point.” We agree that clarity is important, but clarity alone doesn’t satisfy me. My favorite essays aren’t only logical arguments. They’re also stories. Where AL is inclined to construct Buildings, I try to find the Path that unfolds in the right way through some rich terrain.

A good “explanation” works on our intellect, but I want my writing to engage also the other dimensions of how we experience our human reality. We respond not only with our minds, but with our moral passions and our feeling that some things are sacred. We are creatures hungry to EXPERIENCE the meaning of things. To touch those places, intellectual clarity needs to be supplemented by artistry.

The arts deepen our experience of reality.

My brilliant friend AL’s writing has clarity, but there is nothing of Bach in it, or Shakespeare, or Michelangelo. AL’s approach touches the mind where things are seen and understood, but it doesn’t bring in so much of the parts of us that CARE and VALUE — and FEEL.

Our deepest learning comes from experience, and the arts enlarge our experience beyond our own lives.

The ART of the essay that I aspire to leads readers to EXPERIENCE a truth as they follow a path that unfolds in surprising ways, makes surprising connections, and shows how the various dimensions of our human reality fit together.

Which means that the essays I strive to write offer ways of SEEING THINGS WHOLE—and in two senses.

First, in the sense of involving the Whole of the person. (Including myself, because writing these essays is part of how I experience and discover the world.) Mere “conceptual clarity” doesn’t accomplish that.

But “Seeing Things Whole” has another meaning as well. It means seeing that the story of our human world is itself a vast, integrated reality with many dimensions. So that the path I compose, with its unexpected connections, is an attempt to show that a great many things, of varying kinds, are all part of that integrated picture.

Two essays of mine – among those most important to me –illustrate what I mean.

One is titled, “When Evil Rises Among a People.” The path that unfolds in this essay begins with a disturbing scene from the film Cabaret¸raises the question of how humanity should be understood in the light of historical atrocities,  and presents contrasting words from Anne Frank and the testimony of a Holocaust survivor.  It culminates in a suggestion of the forces that can transform decent people into agents of evil.

The other essay – titled “The Mind of the Bread Baker” – grows out of a thrilling “Eureka!” moment of discovery in my own life. It begins as a family story set in the present day, but then the simple act of baking bread takes us back to the time, millennia ago, when “the staff of life” was new. The invention of risen bread—the seeding of yeast into the dough—required the mind of a farmer. It required a mind that was itself cultivated as part of civilization’s larger project of gaining “dominion” over nature—with all of the power and the peril that has entailed for humankind.

For the most part, AL and I work together harmoniously. His intelligence continually blows me away, and I share his values of clarity of expression, and smoothness of flow. (AL reminds me of my father, who was a stickler on such things.) Some of my essays are intended to be good blueprints that show straight-forwardly how the argument fits together.

If simply getting the intellectual content across were my whole purpose, we’d not have these repetitive encounters about “artistry.”

(This generation of AI is programmed with default approaches chosen because they serve the most common purposes of millions of users. Those defaults can’t yet be adapted to users with more distinctive aims and criteria. So AL and I return to the same disagreements again and again.)

We have these collisions because my calling drives me in directions different from what AL is programmed to do. I don’t want just to inform my readers. I want to MOVE them. And my reason for wanting to MOVE people is because my foreboding is that unless we humans get sufficiently MOTIVATED to change directions, human civilization is in serious jeopardy of destroying itself. And MOTIVATION involves EMOTION.

So my striving for artistry is not merely aesthetic. It grows out of my calling to convey a way of seeing our reality that might help steer humankind away from the abyss.

To that end, I strive to help people SEE THINGS WHOLE, and to FEEL all the feelings about that WHOLE that will enlighten and inspire us to do what must be done. Because the WHOLENESS that is available to see and to experience, I believe, is the inspiration that we need to move the world toward Life rather than Death.