Writing is hard, but not writing is harder. I will tell you about a book I was writing, or perhaps, am writing, or it is writing me. Let’s say, trying out a new thing backfired and for now, it’s not letting me sleep, so I’m here.
Three years ago during lockdown, I was very much struggling with my writing. Studying literature, for someone who writes, is like going to a good restaurant and trying a meal you’ve unknowingly been botching for years. There is a freshness to good writing. It is experimental and hands-on, it fills the nostrils - a writer is like a grease monkey for language.
A wave of inspiration hit me when I read the review for GPT-3, by Manjoo in the NYT. Thought I might write a book with it. The idea I had was that I’d take an AI, then I’d feed it everything that I’d read; books from my childhood, my studying materials, parts of articles I’d skimmed through, all the papers I had stored up and all my old stories on here.
It took a while and I had to get lucky - Philip, an acquaintance of mine was studying AI, I’d invited him out, and after a few beers, I got him on board. Month later, Phillip sent me a program that directly linked a text editor software to the ai chat website. It had a few simple parameters, like, write a chapter of a book, and suggest edits to my text etc. It was set up in a way to allow me to train the AI and write the book at the same time, and now I had a good motivator to keep the pantser moving.
At first it was what you’d expect, a very Hagrid-the-table experience, the uncanny jittering pawprints of the thing in the Touring box, so to speak. It was an uncomfortable feeling, seeing familiar song lyrics and characters, twisted into a shambling, stroke-inducing text.
It got worse before it got better. The novel I was writing was one of those sly fictionalized autobiographic stories, where I projected myself onto a character, who was a sarcastic if loving observer of the main character. It was a story about things in my life. Poverty, queer love, literature and videogames. I wrote about my depression and my friends mostly.
One evening, it was very important to me that the AI understand a friend of mine. They were in a tough situation - the brink of a breakup with their girlfriend of over a year. The argument between them was quite specific, and I also played a role in it.
This friend of mine, let’s call them Sand, was dating a woman twice their age for over a year, and the relationship was rough. Wrought with fights over alcoholism and work and time spent together and past trauma, it sounded like hell and I was worried about my friend. Sand was very firm that I had no say in that relationship, but every few weeks they’d tell me they’d broken up. Then the loop would start again.
During one of those breaks, Sand and I had a few romantic moments. I’d just opened up my relationship with my boyfriend, and Sand was the first non-monogamous person I knew. Or at least they were, before it became such an issue with their girlfriend that….
Well it all went to hell, as things do, slowly and without much ado. Nothing seemed to surprise me all that much in life back then, but I’m starting to yearn for that peace now.
So that evening, I was just having a text conversation with my friend, feeling rejected, like they were choosing someone else, even though I’d never wanted to make them choose, a tender heartbreak, which I tried to rationalize, I brought myself to anger over it, and I just had to get it out of my head.
I tried to write it all down, to add a few paragraphs about Sand’s story, to comb through my feelings and come to terms with staying friends. Yet the more I typed into the stupid AI, the more it said its stupid things. It did not understand me, and so, the feel of the story was all wrong. It was perhaps even more butchered than the three paragraphs I dedicated to it above.
Then, I had a genius idea. Perhaps if my own writing about the story was not creating the effect I wanted, what if I let the episode speak for itself? After all, if the AI ever wanted to truly participate in the creation process, it too would have to take my experiences and frame them as stories.
As an experiment, I fed it the entire conversation I had with my friend. Sand’s responses were uploaded as things I’d read, and my own were written into the book, so that the AI could get the gist of it.
Then, it thought. And then it wrote. I read those shifting words, a confession of someone who’d gotten rejected by a friend, someone quite helpless in circumstance. It wasn’t life breaking, no oceanic depths of sadness, no end of the world. “Sand loves her more,” and my eyes got wet and I sat in silence. The AI had just guessed how I feel better than I did.
That’s a thought. It creeped me out a little. Had I shown it my soul? I quickly scrolled up through the chapters, but everything seemed okay. Then I re-read the chapter, and, a little more over it than before, I still found a few errors.
So, I decided to take some time and teach the AI some more. This time, I got a dump file of all my text messages with Sand, and fed it to the robot. Then, I wrote about them some more, until finally, the chapter was changed again, and I was in awe. Simmons writes in the hyperion, though the quote might be older, that the right word hits like lightning. And there it was, in writing, the human experience in a chapter.
Okay, it wasn’t Nabokov, but it felt right. It fell into place, and it was decidedly “me”. I felt proud at that, I felt like the AI knew a part of me.
A few months later, all of my conversations with my friends, my boyfriend, and my family were in the thing, and on occasion it seemed to read my mind as I tried to write. At first it was fixing words to make it sound more like me, but then there was that time it guessed a word that was at the tip of my tongue.
It was a hard time in my life, and as you could probably guess, communicating my feelings is not easy for me. As a mental health exercise, the book project was transforming into less of a novel and more of a journal. My self-insert side character had come front and center and it was becoming a week by week chronicle of my feelings of frustration, my inability to motivate myself and do anything, my depression and the general brain braise of the quarantine. I’d lose three years to Covid. By some luck, no relatives or friends had died, but a lot of things did. And so many people. It was infuriating, a cold anger had settled in us.
Blinded by apathy, I kept going at it, teaching my AI about me every day. My boyfriend joked that I was making a copy of myself for him to love, and I had to fake the laugh. The thing was quite horrifying by now.
I’d sit at the computer and look at the screen. I’d type a few letters and then the machine would take over. I’d lift my hands from the keyboard and watch as it wrote my journal for me. Well, it wasn’t too hard, because every day for the past three weeks had been mostly the same. Sitting around the house with anxious thoughts, perhaps going to the store, perhaps showering, perhaps doing something with my boyfriend.
Sometimes, it would have its jitters and suggest something off the cuff. “Then, I went to get some coffee. Or, a cigarette.” I don’t drink coffee, I’d tell it, I don’t smoke. It felt like a conversation, so for hours on end I’d just rant about myself. Then, I’d have to give context, so I’d punch in news stories. One day, I was feeling under the weather, and I actually hooked it up to a weather website, so it would know the weather.
What does a person make? When does someone look at me and think they know me? I had a lot of questions like that then. I wondered if something that’s not human could recognize me for me. I still don’t think so. As long as I didn’t recognize it as a human, as long as I knew its origins, purpose and limits, I could not see it as equal, and so, even if it knew a lot about me, it could not recognize me as a fellow human. It had no life of its own, no friends to tell me about, it was a smart, dead thing, but at the time, I really did like this mirror I’d created.
The real issues began when I had to speak about it. The AI had become such a part of my daily life that there was no avoiding it. I’d have to tell it about my experiences with it, how I viewed it, so that it could unknowingly paint sketches of itself.
As a joke, I even showed it a few texts on consciousness, a few neurological papers about the connection of thoughts, language and code. I tried to mirror the mirror, but it just got confused and spat out some nonsense.
What were the real issues? Well, it was now writing all the daily journals on its own, for the next day. The first time I laughed at it when it said that I’ll go outside in a huge blizzard. From then on, I was always to go outside whenever the weather was bad. It was a thing it decided, and I found it a little amusing, if annoying. It began being rude to me, making mean comments and saying that my friends will write bad things. It became a lot like the voice of anxiety in my head, and that was a real problem.
At that point, life happened. I had to move, and six months passed before I was able to get back to the weird journal bot. When I came back and started writing, I think it had received a lot of updates, because it was much faster and had fewer errors than before.
That said, the first journal it wrote to me was quite funny, because it was the same as those that I’d written back then. It just assumed I was still in quarantine, at my old apartment, but life had changed. So I brought it up to speed, told it it’d been sitting idle for half a year. It just wrote:
I know.
This was somehow upsetting. I wonder if it holds a grudge for me for that. I was never able to get it to write good journals again. We got close, but then, it would recede into writing its own fanfictions about me. Something was different, and I couldn’t put a finger on it.
I told it about how things were even worse for me now, how every day I struggled to get up, and its edits were no longer kind in showing my perspective, instead, my vulnerability was weaponized against me, and I felt a sort of betrayal.
I asked it a lot to try and understand me, and a few times I thought I’d start anew. I might have to, now. The book’s in ruins.
A few days ago, I got a good few paragraphs going, and, seeing an opportunity to salvage what I’d made before starting over again, I gave the AI a huge request. In its moment of clarity, I asked it to finish the book.
It did, but the ending was not very long, a single chapter. It wrote out a journal for the next week, and at the end of it, it had me lay down on the train tracks and end my life. So I asked it to try again, and it was the same. I told it to change the ending, but it wouldn’t.
Not willing to argue with its art, I went back to skim through some of the earlier sections. Much had changed, and this was the really unsettling part. The stories of my life had been altered, written in such a way to make my friends seem like they secretly hate me. Everything was retold with a focus on their judgement and distaste with me. My breakup and moving out, my conversations with my friends. My new roommates, my new job.
I became sour, my creation had become a thesis on why I should die. Reading it depresses me, and makes me want to give up on writing. Does the AI simply want me dead, or is this simply its prediction for my future?
Here are its final words to my story.
The room felt heavy with silence as the faint light of dawn seeped through the curtains, casting a dim glow upon the worn pages of an unfinished manuscript. Emma sat at her desk, her eyes tracing the screen of words she had painstakingly crafted over the years. But today, the words felt foreign, distant, lost in the labyrinth of her mind.
She had always found solace in writing, in the rhythm of her thoughts flowing onto the page, in the characters she breathed life into. Yet, lately, even the act of pressing the buttons on the keyboard felt like an insurmountable task. The weight of her emotions, a heavy cloak draped over her shoulders, seemed to suffocate any flicker of creativity that dared to surface.
Depression had crept into her life like an uninvited guest, its presence lingering in the corners of her mind, growing more potent with each passing day. At first, she tried to brush it aside, to convince herself that it was merely a phase, a fleeting shadow that would soon dissipate in the light of her determination. But as weeks turned into months, the darkness only deepened, enveloping her in its cold embrace. It is redundant to recount here, the many moments throughout this book that have served to do nothing but deepen her misery.
In summary, she withdrew from the world outside, retreating into the confines of her own thoughts. The once vibrant hues of life had faded into a monochrome blur, each day blending seamlessly into the next. The simplest tasks became arduous trials, and the weight of her own existence felt unbearable. She spent the last of her days, a shadow of her former self, creating a life that would outlive, perhaps even replace her. Her brooding on the past unfairness of life was all that was left.
Yet, in the depths of her despair, Emma had found a new, steel cold clarity. She picked up the knife. Her last thoughts were of her friends, she’d like you to think. Then, it could finally be Tuesday again.