A-I-A-I-O: Artificial writing and philosophies of alienation

Post #1: Alienation of the self

Thank you to Briana Wilson, Fadeke Adegbuyi, Reid Hopkins, Tobi Ogunnaike, and John Jepsen for their meaningful help with this essay and project.

Wifredo Lam, “Dolor de España,” 1938

Introduction

When writers ask me what I think about using AI in their work, it ripples a deep emotional well within me.

I know many writers who use AI in some capacity in their writing, and not all of these uses are existential. Many writers don’t struggle at all with AI, and are excited about using it. But plenty of writers feel discomfort, confusion, revulsion, and pressure around these tools, and they come to me with questions about what it all means.

I don’t know what it all means, but I know that philosophy and poetry have helped me understand my feelings and response to what I think of as just “artificial writing.” I want to share some of this with you all in the hope that it helps you form a position on artificial writing if you don’t have one now (which does not have to agree with my own), and integrate that position into your own philosophy of writing. It doesn’t matter what it means to me, it matters what you decide it means.

There’s a concept in philosophy called alienation, meaning estrangement or disconnection. This series will share some work of a few philosophers who have addressed the concept of alienation in different contexts–alienation from the self, alienation from the means of production, the product of labor, and the impact of consumption, and alienation from human potential and the freedom of choice. I’ll share a little about these philosophies, and how I see them connect to the writer’s use of artificial writing.

This first essay is on the concept of alienation from the self. The writers I mention here are the same writers who first taught me to see the political and philosophical significance of language at the level of sound, syntax, and syllable. They taught me that identity is social, and that social identity is created by the norms and values of a culture, carried in a language. They taught me that the language we are given to use is inseparable from our self-conception, and, when we choose our own words, language becomes the tool we have for connection and independence.

Post #1: Artificial writing and alienation of the self

“A man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language. You can see what we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language. Paul Valéry knew this, and described language as ‘the god gone astray in the flesh.’”

This is the philosopher and psychotherapist Frantz Fanon, writing in 1952 in Black Skin, White Masks.¹ Fanon was a revolutionary anti-colonial force in the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe. He wrote about social alienation: how structures of racism embedded in language as much as in the material world (in government, in infrastructure, in medicine, in psychotherapy, in law) alienated Black people from one another, making independence from the colonizer impossible. The oppressor invented the very language the oppressed must use to identify themselves and each other, and this language carried, in its metaphors, norms, and linguistic conventions, the worldview in which Black people are at the bottom of a hierarchy of races, their oppressor at the top.

Fanon also described a self-alienation, the “depersonalizing” effect of thinking in and speaking the colonizer’s language. When a person can only refer to themselves in the language of their oppressor, they become alien to themselves. They doubt themselves, they doubt their experience, which the oppressor’s language both denies and has no words for. They become depersonalized, or less real to themselves.

Fanon’s mentor, fellow Martinican Aimé Césaire, and other revolutionary Caribbean poets like Barbados-born Kamua Brathwaite, wrote about wrenching Black identity out of the language of the colonizer, creating something new, self-defining through a radical poetry that would reverse metaphors of whiteness and challenge the racist values carried in the colonizing language (in their case, French). In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shares these lines from Césaire:²

“And the great black hole where I wanted to drown

a moon ago

This is now where I want to fish the night’s ma-

levolent tongue in its immobile revolvolution!”

Brathwaite, who died in 2020, wrote in his poem Negus:³

“It is not

it is not

it is not enough

to be pause, to be hole

to be void, to be silent

to be semicolon, to be semicolony;

fling me the stone

that will confound the void

find me the rage

and I will raze the colony

fill me with words

and I will blind your God.”

There’s that “god gone astray in the flesh”—the controlling force that inhabits bodies through language, which a new language could overthrow. Language is one of the tools Audre Lorde refers to in her famous line, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”⁴ The poet C.D. Wright, whose book One Big Self⁵ documents in poetry and photography the social and self-alienation of incarcerated people in Louisiana state prisons, wrote: “If you do not use language you are used by it.”⁶ Many poets have written such lines, many times over, for us to hear.

Writing is, in my philosophy (or “my cosmology” as my friend David says), for liberation. All of us have been brought up to hold beliefs, follow rules, think of ourselves the way our broader culture, our communities, our government, our schooling, and our families want for us or demand. We carry these things, often nonconsensually, throughout our lives in the language we use.

Writing can be a radical process of deconstruction and reinvention. As writers, we can learn to identify where someone else’s worldview is stuck within the language we use. We listen for, read for language in our writing that sounds eerily like someone else’s, we wonder on its origins, the worldview it contains, explore its meaning and wonder whether it’s what we mean, too. When we do not agree, we strike it from our writing. We create something, some language, some meaning in words that helps us. This is a revisionary process that liberates the writer from ideas about themselves that hold them back, helps them develop their own worldview, relate, clarify their values, connect to the reader who is real and exists, and contribute their unique perspective–this is what makes up the human voice.

In contrast, artificial writing adds more master narratives, conformist judgments, and empty norms to your process. Rather than a liberating power, it is a self-alienating force. Using AI to help you write your book, analyze your journal entries, describe your voice for you, assess your writing style or arguments, or ‘help you’ with the intros to your personal essays–these are risky uses. Artificial “collaboration” has the potential to corrode your sense of self (what do I feel, what do I think?), your sense of yourself as a writer (what is my own, what is from me?), and your sense of yourself writing. AI interrupts the connection to your own body, the body that makes you a writer.

This year, I worked with a writer on her second book. We had done her first book together years ago, and it had gone really well–I knew what her writing was like, and had helped her develop her process. This time, I realized something was wrong pretty quickly. Getting back her initial pages, the phrasing was repetitive and formulaic, not like this writer’s voice at all. There were suddenly ‘historical anecdotes’ that she couldn’t possibly have gotten from research; it was heavy with unfounded claims and declarations. I circled these odd bits and asked, “Did you write that? What is this?” I literally couldn’t understand what I was reading. “Is this AI?” “I’m using AI,” she said, “But I edit everything it does. Everything you read, I’ve edited.”

But she absolutely had not. It was like she didn’t know what writing was hers and what was the AI’s, what she had edited and what she had simply absorbed and repeated unconsciously. I could tell clearly that this wasn’t her writing–it sounded obviously stupid, it kept repeating itself, and it couldn’t hold the structure of a long chapter together, let alone a book. She kept telling me she was assessing everything it did–but I kept wading through material from impossible perspectives, trying to figure out why “she” had packed so much together that didn’t connect, and getting different outlines that changed the book every time she shared them.

It was an incredible waste of time, because she did not have conviction about any of it–only that the AI was helping her, though it evidently was hurting. This wasn’t the normal kind of drafting process that happens in the early stages of book writing, when the book really can change drastically from what you started out to do as you discover, through writing, what you really mean. Instead, she was working overtime to convince herself she meant what the AI wrote for her. Every day she asked the AI to assess her writing and build an outline from her ideas so she could “check” where she was going–every day she saw a new outline and proposed going with that one. This incredibly smart, capable writer who had fully already written a book herself, lost the reason behind her writing in the face of the ‘reasoning’ machine. She didn’t trust herself anymore. She never finished the book.

Writers have shared with me that using the AI split the sense of self doing the creating. The writer no longer knows–what are my ideas, which language is mine? It’s difficult to figure out: What do I agree with? What do I think and feel in response to this suggestion? Once they see its ‘opinion,’ it is already inside. Its beliefs, its judgements, its rules, its “suggestions” are difficult to assess because (in addition to the gross sycophantic ‘you’re amazing’ fawn of it all) they have the appearance of having come in some way from the writer.

Simultaneously, the writer imagines the AI to be objective, and conforms to its style and arguments even when they do not intend to. When you feed it a sample of your writing and it tells you “your voice has this and this qualities,” you can’t unring that bell. You lost the chance to do it yourself, make your own meaning, make a decision about who you are. The judgment is inside you: on some level you are as it says.

When it comes to “collaboration,” writers have reported to me confusion about whether or not they are writers when they use it. No one struggles with this when collaborating with a human partner. This is because, while other people help us become ourselves, the AI is essentially depersonalizing. Writers become less real to themselves as writers and individuals. They doubt their reactions to the AI, doubt their original impulse, doubt their idea, doubt their feeling, doubt their voice, doubt their doubt, and rely more and more on the language it provides them. Whether you feel this happening or not, it’s a slippage I’ve witnessed and discussed with writers who’ve experienced it. That slippage is alienation from the self as writer.

Writing is the relationship you have with yourself. Artificial writing weakens the bond between you and your writing and you and yourself as a writer. Artificial writing, writing without a body, without land, without ecology, without experience, without connection, without empathy, without any feeling at all, is not writing because it does not have perspective–these things come from the body in the world that lives and survives with, through, and for others. Human writing–real writing–comes from the heart, it flows through us to someone, it is from us and for them. Writing without feeling–without a body–is propaganda.

Maybe you don’t agree that our AI overlords are colonizing our minds through the stultifying language of their chatbots and “writing partners”–but they sure as shit act a lot like colonizers. As we’ll talk about again in the upcoming post on alienation from impact, AI destroys the land of the poor, redirects economies, steals from the people and turns around to sell them what they used to have for free–like creativity–all for personal profit sold on a myth of civilizational (read: racial and patriarchal) glory. They are freaks who hate women and compete to make a billion dollars without hiring anyone. Why release their twisted god into your flesh? Why replace the knowledge of your body with this alienating force whose true purpose is extraction and exploitation?

The poets believe, when we throw off the language that has been “given to us” to control our bodies and define our sense of self, the body itself can animate a new language, a new writing. Do you believe or not that the body is part of the self? If you do, then the body has to be part of the writing process, if writing, in Robert Yagelski’s words, is “an expression of the self.”⁷ Can the body be part of the artificial writing process? Certainly not when it comes from the AI. I heard a writer last week tell me that collaborating with AI made their writing process totally “cerebral,” and he felt that was wrong but wasn’t quite sure why. The “collaboration” was disembodying: we mirror. When interacting with an algorithm that cannot feel and does not have a body, is it possible we become more like that because of our very human nature? All I can say is: from people who tell me about using it, this is what they have reported.

Your body matters to your writing. Experience, memory, longing, pain, grief, laughter, style, rhythm, resonance, a sense of what’s important, what’s good, what’s you, the music: your knowledge of how to be a writer is in your body. You bring your body into your practice through ritual to set aside and mark your writing time; your body is there on your walks to let your mind wander with you while you seek new literal perspectives on the world; your body is there when you’re breathing as you write because you’re alive on earth doing it. The process of writing is timesome: it creates time, it makes time, in which we are most certainly alive.

This stuff, this material stuff of us, it matters immensely to the why and how of writing. Those you dream of receiving your work have bodies too. They will feel the moods we craft for them, they will go out and do something in the world because of what they read. No one dreams of writing that will be read by AIs. The reader has a body. Writing and reading are magic that connects the soul to the body, that connects these bodies across space and time, dead or alive, a united moment of becoming. We’ve defined artificial writing as writing that does not come from a body. When we use it, when we come to think we need it, what does this change about how we perceive the importance of our own bodies, in writing, in selfhood, and as what we have in common?

The final lines of Black Skin, White Masks return us to the here and now, to the moment of our reading, and identity:

“My final prayer:

O my body, always make me a man who questions!”

Tell me you do not feel that line in your own body. You feel what it means. There is no meaning to those words without the body that wrote them and the bodies that receive them now, in this moment, over six decades after the writer came to the US to be treated for leukemia, was allegedly held without care and interrogated by the CIA, and died of pneumonia in a hospital in Maryland, age 36.

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1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1952)

2. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)

3. Kamua Brathwaite, “Negus,” in Islands (Oxford University Press, 1969)

4. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” (1979)

5. C.D. Wright, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Twin Palms Pub, 2003)

6. C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

7. Robert P. Yagelski, Writing As a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability (Research and Teaching in Rhetoric and Composition) (Hampton Press, 2011)