​The Ball in the Woods

            When I look east in the morning, I can almost feel the earth spinning into the future at 1000 miles per hour.  It’s also flying around the sun at over 60,000 miles per hour.  The future is upon us that quickly.  

            Some find the inevitability of the future terrifying.  Change, fate, and karma loom, all beyond our control.  What will it bring?  Another ache, increasing disability, crazed terrorists of the elected and unelected kind?  Among writers, the threat of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence often enters our thoughts.  The millions of A.I. generated books threaten to wash away the carefully crafted writings of humans, drowning them in a flood of mediocrity.  Worse, as the LLMs push writing toward the mean, at what point do the voluminous writings of LLMs establish the mean?  Will computers soon write for other computers?  

            So, why bother to write?  Why dig deep into your soul to find compelling stories, emotional tragedies, terrifying histories, or even simply beautiful words?  

            In an essay I read this morning,  

https://janefriedman.com/be-so-good-the-robots-are-irrelevant/ 
I found this lovely tidbit:

      “David Perell asked the author Yann Martel if he’d experimented with AI in his writing process.
     'No. Why would I? It’d be like hiring someone to have sex for you.'
      It’s easy to get nihilistic and pessimistic when thinking about the arts and AI. What snaps me back to my natural, optimistic disposition is the simple idea of play. Writing has been a business for me for ten years. But the only reason I can make a living today is that writing has been a hobby since childhood.
     The people who are inclined to write will continue writing. Because writing is fun.”

     A neighbor recently teased me gently, asking why he so often saw me through the window at my computer typing away.  “An A.I. can do that now; you’d best take up golf.”  

      I’m sure golf can be fun.  (maybe?)  But now that I’m writing fiction, creating stories, letting my characters guide me along a historically correct path, writing is a wonderful journey.  Sometimes it’s hard; you hit the ball into the woods or a deep sand trap.  Sometimes you can’t even find the ball, meaning you must start over.  But so often your characters call to you, “Over here,” and there’s the ball in a place you never imagined.