When Something is Writing Through You, A Carnival of Snackery, Being Dogged by Twins
Something I enjoy about the process of writing — and let’s be honest, there are very few things to enjoy about it — is that moment when you achieve a sort of weightlessness, a sort of impersonality.
From speaking to other writers, I think it’s quite a common experience: and has come to be known in common psycho-literary jargon as “the flow state.” It’s the feeling that somehow your hand is not quite on the tiller of your imagination, that feeling that God is writing through you — or at least if you’re not religiously minded, that some power beyond your control has taken over, and is guiding your words in a way that is beyond your ability to fully understand.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this experience of writing since the emergence of AI, and our — creatives — collective, horrified reaction to it. And it’s made me wonder, heretical though this may seem, that perhaps part of our feeling of horror is that what is happening when we write may not be too different to what is going on under the bonnet of generative AI.
My (very limited, I admit) understanding of what’s happening in these Large Language Models (LLMs) that underpin generative AI, is that they are probabilistic. The models take a big pile of information (often completely ignoring who owns copyright over it) and infer from the pile what a likely next response might be to the previous input. Now that I’ve written this word — the model tells itself — let me run a test against everything that has ever been said, written and thought before, and what is the chance of another word coming next? Okay, let me write that word — now what word comes next? And so on and so on.
There is a setting in these models: temperature. We can think of this as a little dial running from, say, 1 to 15, where 1 forces the machine to choose the next most likely word, and 15 a significantly less likely word. The purpose of the temperature dial is that it allows you to determine how ‘creative’ the model can be. That is: how far it will stray from the most obvious thing it could possibly say next. Turn the dial too low, and the model runs through something that is so likely that it is useless and trite, turn it too high and it reels off into confusion and madness.
My proposition — or thought experiment at least — is that perhaps the human mind, the writer’s mind, is not too different from that model. We are taking everything that we have ever read and heard and said and seen and felt and, drawing on that pile of knowledge, we output the most likely next thought. That, in part, is why we have this feeling that the writing doesn’t feel like it is coming from ‘us’ — whatever ‘us’ might mean in this context. Instead, it is emerging, semi-independently, from the vast store of knowledge that sits prior to, and behind us.
If this were the case, then the originality of our writing and our voice is not a projection of ‘us’, but is dependent — upon this incredible data warehouse of knowledge that is sitting behind us, that is, the specific and individualistic collection of the totality of everything we have been. Perhaps that might be the reason why AI is a bit crap — at least at the moment. The database that sits behind it is a sort of lifeless dead thing, a totality without selection or interest or a history of its own.
Maybe with enough processing power, or enough fiddling with the models, they may be able to fix that, but my thought — my hope perhaps — is that the human mind, the writer’s mind, is the perfect ‘temperature’ for creativity. Maybe that’s a mystical belief, because I can’t think of a reason, mathematically or scientifically, why that should be the case.
But weirdly, it makes me more hopeful about writing, or at least the concept of writing itself, than I have been for a long time — a strange contradiction given the state we’re in.
Recently I was travelling to walk one of the stretches of the John Muir Way. I had to wait half an hour to catch the bus to get to the trailhead at Strathblane — and it was cold. While I was waiting, I decided to download David Sedaris’s latest diary collection, A Carnival of Snackery to listen to as I walked.
In these latest diaries, Sedaris is his usual sparkling self, dry and perfectly poised. His writing has a sort of reserved, wit and humour, often drawing upon his own life experiences for inspiration — even at their most painful. I’ve read a number of his books on paper, but I only really got into his work when I started to listen to them as audiobooks; they really come alive when they are spoken in his dry, laconic drawl.
I was a bit surprised, then, that the latest edition of his diaries was co-read by Tracey Ullman — obviously, the author himself is now far too famous and important to sit down in a studio to record the whole thing.
Ullman is a perfectly good voice actor, though her standard narrator voice reminds me a little of whoever read the Famous Five audiobooks I had as a child, which is particularly disconcerting during some of Sedaris’s more lurid entries (e.g., when he describes a competition he saw on reality TV in which a group of people were tasked with collecting stranger’s pubic hair). Ullman is not Sedaris — which is constantly and powerfully apparent throughout; I’m afraid some of the slyness of his writing is lost when his voice isn’t there to guarantee it.
Of course, like many public figures of his age, Sedaris has blind spots — particularly around race. He sometimes lapses into a terse, unsympathetic tone of someone who is used to being heralded as a liberal progressive and is greatly irked when someone points out, for example, that sometimes he tends to use people’s race as a shortcut for their character — especially when they’re Black. Sedaris is not ill-meaning, but sometimes clumsy, but it is strange for someone who, in so many other ways, is so knowing and self-aware.
I was at a party recently, and I fell into talking to a stranger: she once worked as a journalist and now was thinking of writing fantasy books, and when I told her what I did for a living, she was interested in picking my brains.
After talking about her novel for a while — a very straightforward, down-the-line YA romp — we moved onto the subject of our lives and, quite suddenly, she announced that all her life she had been “dogged by twins”. Her younger brother and sister were twins, she said, and her first-born children too.
“Do you ever wonder whether you had a twin who died in utero,” a woman who was sitting near us said, joining our conversation — coming in rather hot, I thought. But the journalist nodded as though this had never occurred to her before, and that this was a very likely explanation. “You know what, you could be right.”
The journalist then told a story of how, when she was at University, she had met another couple of twins — two Polish Catholic sisters — who went everywhere together and grew up to become a champion F3 driver and a very successful yogi, respectively. She has a distinct memory of them — they had never drunk alcohol in their lives — coming up to her in a conspiratorial way at a house party one night and asking for a hot toddy, before, completely inebriated, doing repeated forward rolls over a glass coffee table.
I asked her whether she thought there was a novel in any of that?