Independent author

Last week I started reading The Alignment Problem, a scholarly exploration of the history of neural networks (the ancestors of what we now call artificial intelligence). I have only just begun the book, having read the prologue, the introduction, and the first chapter, but it’s already giving me a lot about which to think.

I started thinking about different forms of electronic assistance in various activities and wondering when certain amounts are too much.

Racers and car fanatics might say that the only real form of driving is with a car that has a manual transmission. But the vast majority of drivers have cars with automatic transmissions. That’s driving, too, isn’t it? What about if you use cruise control on long stretches of highway driving? Is that driving, or is the driver merely managing the driving that the car has now been programmed to do? What if you have a car that can do parallel parking for you? And what if you drive a Tesla and give over your control completely? When does driving a car end and something else begin? And what is that something else?

Let’s think about reading. Many of us still imagine reading as something that’s being done when you’re curled up with a physical book. But many readers use their Kindles and Nooks to read e-books. Others drive (cf. “driving,” above) or work out while listening to audiobooks. Aren’t those books as well? Similarly, music has gone from a live experience to a vinyl record to a tape cassette, a compact disc, and a downloadable digital file. It’s all music, isn’t it?

Two years ago I participated in an online songwriting group. I don’t play any musical instrument well enough to accompany myself while singing, so I opened the Garage Band program on my iPad and used the tools it provided to me. I laid down a percussion track and used a virtual session guitarist that (who?) was provided in the software. I recorded my singing of my lyrics to the beat of a digital metronome, then edited and saved the file and uploaded the link to my file to a shared Google Sheet. I wrote a few songs via this process, but does this make me a musician? A singer/songwriter? Or something else?

Art is another obvious continuum. If I apply pencil or pen to paper, brush and paint to canvas, hands to clay, or chisel to stone or wood, I’m rather obviously creating art. But what if my process is digital, and I can Undo the virtual brushstroke I just made and give it another try? What if I have an infinite number of do-overs in Procreate and can create several layers in my file before I save it to my hard drive? Am I still an artist?

And now let’s look at writing. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the only real writing is done using a dip pen in gall ink on parchment. We accept that writers can write (as I am writing now) their words on a computer and published to the Internet. No paper was impressed upon in the composition of this blog post. But is a blog post “real” writing as opposed to a newspaper column? A short story in an electronic magazine? A printed novel? What makes the writing real?

Must I come up with my own words in that written piece utterly on my own? Am I not permitted to use a dictionary or thesaurus? Can I allude to another work or create a parody of it? Can I use spellcheck or the grammar tools within Microsoft Word, or need I turn those functions off within my Preferences menu? May I tap the center button on my iPhone and use predictive text if I’m in a hurry? Or can I enter a prompt in ChatGPT and still call myself a writer?

Where does it change and where does it end? Who drives and who writes? Who is an artist or a musician? You’ve seen the AI-generated art that isn’t informed by the rules of real life. This is something we’ll have to think about as a society, and something we’ll have to decide — preferably before the artists and the writers lose their hope and creativity.

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Knitwise, I did all of my knitting on the Habit-Forming Scarf during the sessions of the Grand Prix of China this weekend. The scarf is now 18 inches long, so there is still quite a ways to go in the yarn of the first skein.

This weekend I organized my collection of compact discs, which are stored in a cabinet that was also being used to store yarn. Until I emptied out the bottom two drawers, that is, and found evidence that mice had gotten into the yarn stash. That yarn has since been moved to sealed plastic storage (and I’ll probably set a trap in the bottom drawer). I’d better pick up the pace of using my stash or start giving more of it away before it turns into rodentine bedding.