This week I had the joyful and inspiring experience of going in person to hear an interview with Andrea Hairston, who was finishing up a tour in support of her new book, Archangels of Funk.
At one point, she mentioned that she had started working on that book about 20 years back, but realized that she had to know more about her character – and specifically about her character’s ancestors – before she could write it.
So she wrote two other books, Redwood and Wildfire, and Will Do Magic for Small Change, so that she could write Archangels of Funk. I should point out that both of those books are incredible works in and of themselves. Which is to say that she created art while building the framework for more art.
But what also hit me was how antithetical her process was to what the so-called “AI” chatbots (that is, the large language models or LLMs) promise: frictionless writing. I mean, she did a lot of research plus wrote two complete novels to figure out what she needed to know to write the latest book.
Talk about friction!
But that’s the point. Writing is so much more than putting words on a page in some semblance of the right order. The LLMs can’t do anything more than that, and that’s not even taking into consideration the incredible inaccuracy of what they do.
They can’t react to the words they’ve written and figure out that they need to research more or even write another book or two before the one in progress. All that involves thinking and they can’t think.