Second Brain

AI expands our thinking and writers take us inward.

Hi Cringers,

I just finished Writers & Lovers by Lily King, which I recommend if you don’t mind a book about writing a book.

There’s a scene where the main character, Casey, is interviewing to be a high school English teacher and references a book called Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. The interviewer asks her if she’s always been an enthusiastic reader, and Casey responds:

"I liked reading, but I was picky about books. I think the enthusiasm came when I started writing. Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That's what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it's contagious because while you're reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school."

The narrator goes on to describe reading as “experiencing story” and writing as creating an “immersive adventure.”

Reading takes us out of our heads and opens us up to new ways of being. It’s the cheapest vacation.

Writing, on the other hand, can feel more like therapy. It’s about going into yourself and sharing the sensation of being alive (see How to Be EXTRA Human).

Because besides having a body, an opinion, and a life, us flesh writers can also channel that individual subconscious that computers can’t access. We can relive memories, describe moods, tap into dreams, and attempt to translate the various mysteries of our souls into words. You know, easy things like that.

Writing involves a lot of grasping, grasping for words to fit feelings or shades of feelings. It’s trying to describe sensations that seem important, familiar, mundane, or connected to a specific memory.

It’s an attempt at connecting our inner world with our outer one, and the sad part is we can’t. There’s no way to invite others completely in, but it’s a way to open the door a little.

Writing can and should be emotional, sensuous, and spiritual.

I truly believe there’s a mystical and very human layer to writing that can’t be replicated by AI.

I’m not trying to trash-talk AI, believe it or not. I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s here to stay, is a tool like anything else, and is as helpful or hurtful as we make it.

My issue is when people say things like, “AI can replace writers,” because I deeply disagree with this. AI can assist writers and serve as a second brain, but it can’t replace them.

AI writing is based on common experience and individual writing is based on personal experience.

The personal experience pulls us in because it’s intimate and relatable. It’s the details and idiosyncracies that make writing stand out. It’s the way your childhood friend’s house smelled like hot dogs, or how lilacs remind you of your grandma, or that you get a metallic taste in your mouth whenever you get nervous. Weird human shit like that. 

Then again, AI is tapped into the consciousness of humanity. It’s attempting to bring order to the chaos of collective human thought.

AI-generated content is really regurgitated human content, and in that sense not that disconnected from human experience. The difference is that AI pulls from the hive mind, whereas writers pull from their lived experiences, intuition, and observations.

It’s the difference between group and individual thinking, and binary and non-binary information processing. 

AI organizes and selects information based on machine learning and algorithms. Humans organize and retrieve information in less predictable, more complex, and nuanced ways. 

Brains are banks of personal information, stored in uniquely wired shells, and soaked in a cocktail of hormones. LLMs are blenders of human thought poured into little cups labeled with 0s and 1s

I’m trying not to be threatened by AI-generated content anymore, to stay open to it. I’ve even started using it to create these Cringe Letter watercolor promotional images. Not bad, eh?

I may even try experimenting with it as a way to explore our relationship with technology. If you want a good article on this, check out this Wired article by Vauhini Vara, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.”

In it, Vara shares his experience using ChatGPT-3 to recount his experience of losing his sister to cancer in college:

“At one point in the essay, I wrote about going with my sister to Clarke Beach near our home in the Seattle suburbs, where she wanted her ashes spread after she died. GPT-3 came up with this:

‘We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.’

My essay was about the impossibility of reconciling the version of myself that had coexisted alongside my sister with the one left behind after she died. In that last line, GPT-3 made physical the fact of that impossibility, by referring to the hand—my hand—that existed both then and now. I’d often heard the argument that AI could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life.”

There are instances like this that give me hope for what AI can do for writers, the ways it can expand our mental reach, and provide the binary machine-brain thinking we may need to get us out of our human muck and trauma loops.

We are seeing the evolution of a new brain, so literal it can sometimes be profound. It’s a top-down vision of humanity, a data-driven summation of human experience.

It could be that we humans overcomplicate everything (this post is a good example), that machines can help us untangle our inner worlds, process our experiences, and connect us with a more global consciousness, and maybe that’s a good thing. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

At the same time, we will continue to need individuals who are willing to dive into their psyches, retrieve the symbols from their dreams, and invite others into their streams of consciousness through more personal writing.

AI can help us expand our thinking with collective thoughts, while writers can continue to take us inward.