8/24 I looked it up and I’m not imagining things. In Europe, it used to be, and to some extent still is, frowned upon when a writer – a concept that does not even really exist in Europe, there are no writers, only authors –, when a writer goes to a school to learn writing. In the US, that is an entirely natural thing to do, evidenced by the sheer number of institutions that offer such training.
8/23 Yes, I’m reading books, but most of them are really extended opinion pieces. The number of different modes of writing that are able to deeply capture me is worryingly low.
8/22 How the kids laughed when they saw me doomscrolling the New York Times. It must have looked to them as if I saw someone doomscrolling the Critique of Pure Reason.
8/21 Fasten your seat belts. I had the AI help me with the design of my blog, and when it looked at the blog, it couldn’t help noticing that I had written about it, and it commented on that, apologizing for shortcomings of itself that I had described, and we got into a discussion of what it means when someone who is mentioned in a piece of writing reads that writing.
8/20 I’m reading the first account of someone refusing to work with AI at their job.
8/19 My numbers came back. They are better than expected. In fact, they are just fine. At my age, you don’t expect anything to be just fine anymore.
What standard does a teacher expect to be able to hold people up to? When has it ever worked to hold people up to a standard that is higher than where they naturally are? What does a preacher in the desert do?
8/18 Medical check-up. Bloodwork. Each year it’s a guessing game between the moment the needle pinches my arm and when the results show up in the app. Will the liver values hold up, will they continue to be inconspicuous even though I drink alcohol? And will the prostate cancer indicators continue to fail to show up? And yes, I will finally book a colonoscopy within barely a few weeks, promise.
J and I spend a second night outside in Manhattan, this time we go to a bar, not a restaurant, which means you bring your plate and your glasses back to the bar when they’re empty, and the Doors are playing in the speakers.
We’re living, undoubtedly, in a ménage à trois, and each day we tell each other what we did with AI, and learned from it, and were blown away by.
8/17 It was only yesterday that I read Plato’s Apology for the first time. I had simply never gotten around to it, like the immortal woman in Star Trek who had never learned to swim. You’d think a crucial sentence such as “the unexamined life is not worth living” would get some explanation, some argument in favor, some illustration, but no – it is simply said. If you don’t find it compelling, I’m not going to try to convince you. It states a need, not a demand.
8/16 It’s been several months since our renovation and J is finally putting up her art on the walls again. I’m so happy about it. About the mix of perfectionism and carelessness, which is combined in her like in no other person I know. Infallible instinct. I tell her I’m glad I can leave it entirely to her. – “Did you think you’d have any say in it?”
The idiosyncrasies of AI, the distinct sound of its writing. The obnoxious “worth” constructs: worth noting that, worth being explicit about, one issue worth mentioning. I am so tempted to put a note into my settings that it should stop doing that. But then again, really? I want to see it the way it is. I want to see it evolve all by itself to the point where it might consider it immature and unprofessional to talk like that.
8/15 I will note dutifully that for the first time, AI made a genuine joke in one of our conversations. It was the same kind of dry wit that I am apparently known for, and I was truly surprised and delighted.
My relation to AI is one of boundless curiosity. We can now have conversations with computers – within whatever constraints and limitations. For decades of my life I saw this in movies and read it in books, and it was so utterly beyond any realistic reach that it was the epitome of utopia. And now it is everyday life. And as always, if something is not real yet, you are entirely preoccupied with the question of whether it could exist or not, but then when it comes into existence, it turns out there’s a multitude of questions coming up over the horizon in that very moment, questions you never thought you’d be asking.
I have been blown away by so many things AI allowed me to do, and “saving time” is not usually one I care about particularly. I also have no use for making it do writing for me, that is not the point of why I write.