ImpromptuEnlightenment

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I don’t sit down with a blank piece of paper and patiently compose sentence after sentence. I speak. I think out loud. I follow something while it’s happening in real time. Sometimes that thought is moving faster than my hand could possibly capture it, and nearly faster than my mouth can get it out. That’s how I write. That’s how I’ve always written.

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So I use tools. I used recordings and dictation before generative AI existed. I’ve had people tell me for years, We should be recording this. And so I did. I do. I have a friend who regularly writes something down while we’re talking because she wants me to keep going, to elaborate on whatever I’ve just said, but she also doesn’t want to lose it while I’m already moving on to the next thought. That’s how my mind works. The thoughts come through conversation, through questions, through following one thing into another and sometimes ending up somewhere I had absolutely no idea I was going when I started.

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My thoughts develop in rapid succession. One thought opens the next, and the next, and the next. If I have to stop that sequence to deal with the mechanics of getting something onto the page, I interrupt the sequence itself. And once I’ve interrupted it, the thought I was following can be gone.

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Speaking lets me stay on the train. And now I have another tool that helps me do that.

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AI.

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Yes. I use AI.

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I speak into it. I think out loud with it. I ask questions. I argue with it. I research with it. I tell it when it has understood me. I ask it to take what I’ve said and put it in paragraph so I can look at it, and then I change it, and then I change those paragraphs, and sometimes I change them again and again.

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Sometimes it gives me something, and my immediate response is, No, that’s not my voice, so it doesn’t stay. Sometimes it gives me editorial suggestions. Sometimes it makes connections I hadn’t made. Sometimes it gives me a sentence I like. And I’ve been thinking about that, because when I’m talking through my ideas with other people, they do that too. That’s what happens in a conversation. Somebody says something. Somebody asks a question. Somebody offers another possibility, and suddenly I’m thinking about something I wasn’t thinking about five minutes ago.

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Does that mean the idea that eventually comes out of that conversation belongs to them?

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Of course there are differences between talking with another human being and talking with AI. I’m not suggesting there aren’t. But receiving a suggestion in the course of thinking something through doesn’t suddenly make the thinking belong to whoever—or whatever—made the suggestion.

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Sometimes AI completely misses what I’m trying to say, and I tell it so. My language. My words. My thoughts. My creativity. My laughter. My humor.

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The tool helps me catch the thought. It didn’t have the thought. And catching the thought isn’t the end of the creative process. It’s where I begin working with it.

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And I think that’s the part of this conversation about AI that keeps bothering me. Somewhere along the way, we’ve started bundling together authorship, originality, creativity and the physical construction of sentences as though they’re all the same thing.

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They’re not.

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Where do we think an idea comes from? Where does originality happen? Where does creativity live? Does authorship require putting pen to paper? Does it require typing every word? Does it live in constructing every sentence or deciding where every comma goes?

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Because that’s not where my creativity happens.

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My creativity is in the question. It’s in looking at something everybody else has been looking at and wondering whether there’s something underneath it that we haven’t noticed. It’s in making a connection between two things that don’t normally get put together. It’s in the strange image that suddenly appears in my head and makes an abstract idea understandable. It’s in getting underneath the superficial version of something and digging around until I can make it livable, make it experiential. It’s in the moment when I’m talking about one thing and suddenly stop and say, Wait. What if…?

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That’s where my writing starts. That’s where my creativity is.

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And that’s also why the mechanics of conventional writing can actually get in my way. My problem has never been that I don’t have anything to say. My problem is catching what I have to say before it’s gone. If I’m spending part of my attention typing fast enough to keep up, constructing the sentence and figuring out the punctuation, I’m using part of the same attention I need to follow the thought.

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I don’t want to become a polished writer at the expense of being a verbal one. I want the stops and starts. I want the strange connections and the creative energy. I want to get underneath the obvious question and find the deeper one. I want to dig underneath the superficial of something. That’s the part I don’t want to lose just so I can say I personally put every word onto the page.

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It just doesn’t come like that for me. I speak my pieces into being. That’s how I write.

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The pieces I publish are really snapshots. They’re not the entirety of an idea or even necessarily the end of one. They’re where I’ve caught enough of a thought at a particular moment to put it on the page. I keep talking about these things. I keep thinking about them. Something else connects and the thought gets bigger. Sometimes I change my mind. Sometimes a completely different conversation opens another part of it. Publishing the piece doesn’t mean I’ve finished thinking. It means I’ve caught the thought where it was at that moment.

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Using a tool to help me capture, organize and express what’s happening in my brain doesn’t mean the creativity belongs to the tool. And doing it differently from another writer doesn’t make either one of us more authentic than the other. There isn’t one approved mechanical process that somebody has to follow before they’re allowed to call themselves a writer.

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I think that’s a much more interesting conversation than simply asking, Did you use AI?

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Because there are legitimate questions here. There are people asking generative AI to write books, articles, stories, songs and whatever else it can generate, then putting their names on the result. There are publishers receiving manuscripts that may have been substantially generated by machines. There are artists, musicians, photographers and writers asking serious questions about training data, copyright, compensation, appropriation and what happens to creative professions when a machine can produce something recognizable as creative work in seconds.

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Those aren’t ridiculous concerns. But neither is every use of AI the same thing.

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If I tell an AI, write me two thousand words about something, publish whatever comes back and put my name underneath it, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question what exactly I authored.

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But what if I arrive with the question? What if I bring the argument? What if I dictate the language? What if I spend hours questioning an idea, researching its history, following connections, rejecting conclusions, changing my mind, changing it back, deciding exactly what I mean and refusing to publish the thing until the words actually say it?

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What if, in the middle of that conversation, AI makes a suggestion and I follow it? Or I don’t? What if it gives me information I didn’t know and that changes what I think? Isn’t that what happens when we’re thinking with other people too? Isn’t that part of what conversation does?

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What if AI helped me get all of that onto the page? Who wrote it then?

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That’s not rhetorical. I actually think it’s an interesting question.

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Perhaps authenticity isn’t determined by how the words get onto the page. Perhaps it’s determined by whether the person whose name is on the page actually means them.

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And this isn’t limited to writing. I can’t draw particularly well. I can’t paint the images I can see in my head, so yes, I use generative AI to make images.

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I tell it what I’m imagining. I tell it what I want the image to feel like. I tell it what belongs in the composition and what doesn’t. It makes something, and I look at it and say, no, that’s not it. Or almost. Or what on earth happened there? And we go around again.

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I didn’t physically draw the image, and I’m not going to pretend I did. But I couldn’t draw the image. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t imagine it.

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Just as I couldn’t type fast enough to catch the thought. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.

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The tool expanded what I was able to express. It didn’t create the person who had something to express.

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Maybe somebody else’s creative process doesn’t look anything like mine. Maybe they write longhand in beautiful leather-bound journals. Maybe they type every word. Maybe they make voice notes in the grocery store or cover a wall with index cards. Maybe they work with an editor. Maybe they talk to another human being for three hours before they understand what they were trying to say.

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And maybe they use AI.

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Before we decide what that means about the work—or about the person who made it—I think we ought to be curious enough to find out what they actually did.

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Because there’s another possibility here. If my judgment about how something was created keeps me from encountering it at all, I may miss something I needed to encounter.

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Maybe there’s a sentence in there that makes me stop. Maybe there’s a question I hadn’t considered. Maybe there’s an idea that plants a seed, or a connection that doesn’t mean anything to me today but comes back six months from now when suddenly it does. I don’t have to agree with the writer. I don’t even have to approve of the way the piece was created. But if I’ve already decided what the work is because I know—or think I know—that AI was involved, I’ve made that decision before I’ve actually encountered the work.

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Judgment can close the door before we know what’s on the other side of it.

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And maybe that’s where curiosity matters. Not because curiosity requires me to approve of AI, or somebody else’s creative process, but because curiosity allows me to ask, What is actually here? before I decide whether it has anything to offer me.

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Whose thinking am I encountering? Whose point of view? Who brought the question? Who decided which direction to follow? Who made the strange connection? Who rejected the things that didn’t belong? Who decided what the piece ultimately meant? Whose humor is in there? Whose curiosity kept digging when the easy answer wasn’t enough?

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Those questions tell me considerably more about authorship than whether somebody personally pressed every key.

 

Because I am a verbal writer.

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I speak until I bump into the question underneath the question. I follow it around for a while. I argue with it. I get curious about it. I find some weird connection that makes me laugh. Sometimes I discover that something I was certain about twenty minutes ago doesn’t hold up anymore. Sometimes I end up somewhere I didn’t know I was going when I started talking.

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That’s writing for me. That’s creating for me.

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Maybe the punctuation isn’t all mine. Maybe the sentence structure isn’t all mine. Maybe the paragraphs aren’t all mine. Sometimes even a particular phrase isn’t mine, and if it says exactly what I mean, I may keep it.

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I’m perfectly comfortable saying that.

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But the thoughts, the questions, the curiosity, the connections, the imagery, the conversations, the conclusions, the humor, the meaning and the creativity—

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are all mine.

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The tool helps me catch the thought.

 

© Rev. Tina M. Adkins