Reading Notes 3

Creative integrity, AI's rise, and the purpose of life in a doomed world

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the third entry in Reading Notes, my occasional post series in which I track what I’m presently reading, researching, studying, and textually imbibing and enjoying—books, articles, essays, stories—by paraphrasing and labeling core points, quoting especially striking passages, and noting down my brief thoughts, reactions, and reflections. As before, and as always, I will repeat my original preamble to the first entry:

I have always taken notes on my reading. One of the most productively useful aspects of such an activity is the recording of fleeting notions and impressions that might otherwise be lost to the daily flux of mental activity. Another is the self-imposed challenge of processing texts by rearticulating them to myself. But the irreducibly performative nature of writing such notes in public for other people to read serves the added helpful function of keeping me motivated and accountable, especially since in a public post I feel the need to give an effective label or title to each note in order to indicate its content or import.

I hope you find something enjoyable or otherwise worthwhile in these notes, where all italicized emphases have been added by me unless otherwise noted. If you feel like commenting on any of them, whether publicly or by emailing me at matt-at-livingdark-dot-net, please don’t hesitate. I will always be interested to hear your thoughts and impressions.

BUT FIRST, before we transition to the notes, something new: I am now an affiliate of Bookshop.org, the American company launched in 2020 and operating in both the U.S. and the U.K.. Its purpose is “to connect readers with independent booksellers all over the world.” Every purchase on the site financially supports the company’s network of more than two thousand bookstores. I learned about the company recently, felt surprised that I hadn’t heard of them before, read up on them, and was fascinated. Then I applied to become an affiliate and soon received approval. In the words of the online culture-wellness-leisure lifestyle magazine InsideHook, “Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore.” Clicking on that link will take you to a 2020 article that details the company’s founding and describes their business model. It also points out that Bookshop.org’s founder and CEO is Eric Hunter, who is the publisher of Literary Hub and the creator of Electric Media, so he’s somebody with serious credibility in the online literary world.

The upshot for TLD can be stated in the form of a necessary disclosure: As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, I will earn a commission if you click through my affiliate links and make a purchase. Moving forward, some of the linked book titles that you’ll see in TLD posts, such as the ones below, will be such links. I will also be adding such links to some previous posts. And you can visit my complete Matt Cardin bookshop, which contains curated lists of some of my best-loved books, ones that have played a part in forming and informing my world, and that will therefore likely resonate with you, too, since our interests clearly intersect.

Warm regards,

NOTE 1: Guarding your creative core, or the dangers of feedback

In his recent newsletter post “What Is Good Feedback?” (Enfant Terrible, July 9, 2024), the filmmaker Remy Bazerque reflected on “the complexity of feedback in the artistic process,” arguing that “artists should be eminently careful in what they choose to listen to in order to protect their originality and integrity.” I heartily agree with him. Here are two strong passages from the post:

In the artistic world, feedback can be a double-edged sword—or more accurately, a big club to bludgeon one’s work. It can refine and elevate an artist’s work, but it can also dilute originality, stifle creativity, and smash confidence to pieces....

I have seen it said on this platform [i.e., Substack] that one should always listen to their editor, or trust their beta readers. I think going in with such an outlook can lead to confusion and a loss of confidence. You cannot indiscriminately listen to everyone; if putting as many talented people in a room as possible produced glorious outcomes, then there would be nicer shows on TV these days.

I think anything that questions the vision or goes against it should be ruthlessly dismissed. Anyone trying to trigger a reaction from you is playing power games and should be ignored with no emotion at all, and most importantly, anything that isn’t concrete and actionable should also be dismissed.

I basically feel that in 90% of cases, we are right about what we create. It’s only in the remaining 10% where we need to identify and solve issues in order to produce successful work.

Reading this, I can’t help flashing on Ray Bradbury’s famous account of deciding at age nine to tear up all the Buck Rogers daily comic strips that he had been collecting from the newspaper, because his schoolmates had been teasing him about them. As he told The Guardian in 1990 and has also recounted elsewhere many times,

One morning about two weeks later he woke up crying. “I asked myself: ‘Why am I crying, who died?’ The answer was me. I asked: ‘Why am I dying, what am I dying of?’ The answer that came was that I was dying because I had destroyed the future because I had listened to those fools.”

Realizing his error, he immediately resumed collecting Buck Rogers and decided never to listen to negative people again. Or, as he more colorfully stated the matter himself,

And then I made up my mind that I would never listen to another damn fool ever in my life. That was the day I learned that I was right and everybody else was wrong.

I think of that often, turning it around into advice phrased in the second person: “Never listen to another damned fool ever in your life. You’re right and everybody else is wrong.” We writers and artists have to adopt something of that attitude in order to establish an inviolable core of soulfulness and originality in our work. Yes, there’s always that early place and stage of working with your influences, of aping the work of other people that you love. But that’s all to figure out who you are yourself as an artist. As Bazerque put it in his recent post, in words that could likewise be rephrased as advice in the second person,

When starting a new project, I create a ball of confidence around the core idea, ensuring it’s well-defined and reinforced. Later in the process, as feedback floods in, this core will be challenged. I build this emotional confidence over time and guard it fiercely against any attacks.

NOTE 2: To get better ideas, start talking (and listening)

A couple of months ago in his essay “On Having More Interesting Ideas” (Escaping Flatland, May 15, 2024), Henrik Karlsson described one of the ways that he had spontaneously discovered to get more and better ideas for his writing:

I get ideas in communion with others—by reading and by talking, and by thinking about what I read and talk about....

In 2021, six months before I started Escaping Flatland I began taking detailed notes from my conversations. In particular, I did this with my friend Torbjörn, whom I would call every week to discuss ideas as I walked through the nature reserve next to our house. We have known each other since we were 13, but it was remarkable how much untapped potential we had in our conversation—and how much better our ideas got when I wrote them down. Instead of drifting off to random topics each time, we could return to the most interesting idea from the last call and go deeper.

I notice that this is pretty much the same phenomenon that gave birth to the popular Weird Studies podcast (where I have twice been honored to appear as a guest). Writer/filmmaker JF Martel and musicologist Phil Ford had a series of private conversations that proved so inexhaustibly compelling that they decided to dive more deeply into them and create a public forum for sharing them with other people. This kind of spontaneous synergy between fertile minds that are closely attuned to each other’s wavelengths is pure gold whenever it manifests. And as Karlsson points out, and as his blog/newsletter and the existence of Weird Studies demonstrate, it provides actionable grist for writing and other creative projects that will enrich everyone.

NOTE 3: On writing as a conversation with your daemon

A hat tip to my friend

Jay Rothermel

for pointing me to Patrick O’Brian’s 1995 interview in The Paris Review 135 for their “Art of Fiction” series. O’Brian was the English novelist famed for his Aubrey-Maturin series of historical naval novels. The first in the series, Master and Commander, was adapted as the popular movie starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. These books required significant research and planning to write, and the Paris Review interviewer pointed out to O’Brian that the way many events in them to fit together perfectly over the course of such a long and epic series is sometimes amazing: “No event in your series seems arbitrary and unmotivated, and even your most labyrinthine plotting seems not merely reasonable but inevitable: you have a Shakespearean talent for establishing and foreshadowing. . . . There are many, many such instances—perhaps a doctoral candidate will one day have fun with them.” The interviewer then asks, “In general, how far ahead have you been able to plot these volumes?”

O’Brian’s reply is one to warm the heart and spark a rush of affirmation among those of us who have found our own creative compass, path, and process in a mutual embrace of our daemonic muse as we forge ahead into the unknown by writing into the dark:

I rarely work out any of those detailed sequences that constitute a plot. My usual way is to fix upon one central idea—a given voyage or campaign or whatever, a vehicle—and then to envisage a mass of potentialities, often loosely related; and among them I roam about in an often opportunistic fashion....

Sometimes I look into an earlier novel or tale and I am astonished, favorably or unfavorably, that I should have written it: I do not even know what happens next. A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences; but just how that minds picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding. Yet there is a certain analogy with conversation. When one is with friends, talking hard, maintaining a point against severe and well-informed opposition, one draws on resources scarcely to be imagined at ordinary times; and when they are exhausted—all hope gone—fresh reserves come to cheer one’s heart, apt quotations forgotten these forty years and more, fine strokes of scurrility. And after all a book can be represented as a conversation with one’s daemon.

NOTE 4: The sublime in science writing (excerpt from a masterclass on prose style)

The following is both an astute commentary on a brilliant passage from a book and a wonderful opportunity to read that passage. The commentary/analysis is by the American poet, nature writer, and English professor Christopher Cokinos, in his “masterclass on prose style” for Auraist. The passage he’s quoting and talking about is, as he states, by the American author and science writer Chet Raymo, from his book The Soul of the Night.

Before sharing Cokinos’s commentary, I’ll pause to share that Raymo’s 1998 book Skeptics and True Believers hit me hard a quarter century ago, so much so that I ended up quoting from it in my essay/paper on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which you can find in my What the Daemon Said) as a nihilistic parable about the perilous direction and dire fate of Western civilization under the sway of a scientistic monomania that has divorced our collective psyche from its own poetic and visionary side, thus transforming that sensitive other self into, in effect, a monster that threatens to destroy us in its flailing attempts to reunite. Raymo’s book was about appreciating the poetry and beauty of the cosmos as viewed by science, and it was insightfully argued and beautifully written. So, when I saw that it was a passage from another book by Raymo that Cokinos was dealing with in the context of talking about prose style in nonfiction, my interest was immediately aroused.

Here are Cokinos and Raymo:

My students, if they read this, will recognize the opening to Chet Raymo’s essay, “The Silence,” the first piece in his book The Soul of the Night. The core is what I call a “scale move,” in which the dynamic sublime and/or the mathematical sublime is made closer to approach—and that sounds nice but read it:

“Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.

“All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope. It was like that.

“During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her half a mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement.”

It’s so startling, this opening. The scale moves are incredible, the way Raymo puts the flight of the child, which is horrifying, into this cosmic context, which is both disturbing and factual. It rolls off the prose with grace. The child’s situation is still tragic but what a wide frame now! His syntax, alternating between longer, complicated sentences and short, declarative ones. Repetition and variation. Even the soft sounds, the bass tone of “gray wool of the November day.”

I’ll never forget reading that for the first time. It showed me what one could do in prose.

NOTE 5: The AI friend who’s always there, always average, and maybe manipulating you

If the German-language novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, writing for The Guardian, is correct, then the astounding things we’re already seeing from AI are only the beginning, and almost none of us have an adequate sense of the world-overturning transformation that is bearing down on us not in the indefinite future of someday, but in the immediate future ahead. Some of it is already starting to show itself.

In “Not Yet Panicking about AI? You Should Be—There’s Little Time Left to Rein It In” (The Guardian, July 22, 2024), Kehlmann, who gave a speech and published a booklet in 2020 about his failed experiment in collaborating with a large-language model, says his conclusions from even an experience that recent are completely outdated in the face of the exponential acceleration that is now occurring:

The AI back then was a stuttering, confused, downright pitiable entity—and that was just under four years ago. If development continues at this speed, which is unlikely because it will probably accelerate, we are facing something for which we have no adequate instinct. The proof is that we are not panicking. I’m not, and you probably aren’t either, but panic would be more appropriate than the calm with which we face the tsunami already visible on the horizon, or to quote the AI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner: “Right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people that have situational awareness”....

Kehlmann also lucidly points out that the large language model AI revolution actually helps to clarify the level of human thought that is probably exclusive and sui generis to us humans—but it does this by perfectly matching and even overtaking us on the lower and more common level:

The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know nor control our desires. The humiliation by AI is subtler but just as profound: we have demonstrated that for intellectual activities we considered deeply human, we are not needed; these can be automated on a statistical basis, the “idle talk”, to use Heidegger’s term, literally gets by without us and sounds reasonable, witty, superficial and sympathetic—and only then do we truly understand that it has always been like this: most of the time, we communicate on autopilot.

Since I’ve been using the large language model, I can actually perceive it: I’m at a social event, making small talk, and suddenly, sensitised by GPT, I feel on my tongue how one word calls up the next, how one sentence leads to another, and I realise, it’s not me speaking, not me as an autonomous individual, it’s the conversation itself that is happening. Of course, there is still what Daniel Kahneman calls “System 2”, genuine intellectual work, the creative production of original insights and truly original works that probably no AI can take from us even in the future. But in the realm of “System 1”, where we spend most of our days and where many not-so-first-class cultural products are created, it looks completely different.

Before continuing with Kehlmann, I’ll pause here to notice that Douglas Rushkoff offered a useful insight on this very point—that truly original intellectual and creative work can never be taken from us by AI—in “Artificial Creativity” (Rushkoff, May 22, 2024), whose subheadline states its upshot: “How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry.” Rushkoff noted that what AI language and creative models do is to analyze huge amounts of data and then apply algorithms to these data to produce the next most likely result in a sequence. In other words, they effectively serve as powerful generators of the absolutely average. Rushkoff describes the epiphany he had one day while trying to use an AI to help him make progress on a graphic novel he was writing:

I asked it to write some scenes of my graphic novel that I had already written, just to see if it had any good ideas for me to consider. And one scene that it wrote ended up almost exactly the same as the one I had written. It was a strange feeling to read it, where I went from feeling good about having finally gotten the AI to write like me, to feeling disgusted by what I had written, myself. If the AI looked all over the place and “averaged out” the most appropriate scene, it means that I was writing in a perfectly average way, myself. I had arrived at the same cliché as the machine! 

That’s when I felt like I finally recognized the value of this technology in creative work: not to come up with the ideal commercial product, but to show us perfect examples of what to avoid. They can act almost like cheating detectors. They can identify when we have stopped being truly creative, and have fallen into regurgitating tropes. If a human does what the AI did, it means the human needs to take a break.

Back to Kehlmann: Perhaps most disturbingly, he predicts that the “entertainment product of the future” will be “virtual people who know us well, share life with us, encourage us when we’re sad, laugh at our jokes or tell us jokes we can laugh at, always on our side against the cruel world out there, always available, always dismissible, without their own desires, without needs, without the effort that comes with maintaining relationships with real people.” In such a situation, he warns, the cynical engineering of public currents of political and other sentiment that we have already seen due to social media manipulation will be advanced, unbound, and empowered to what currently sound like inconceivable levels of influence:

Sometimes, such a friend will also understandably and empathetically explain whom you should vote for, because they are, for example, provided by a Chinese AI company; or simply because the company in question, like TikTok or YouTube, uses a so-called adaptive algorithm that finds out how to produce the greatest “engagement....

But instead of mere videos, imagine all the accusations and theories of anger now being presented by a seemingly close individual—not because it is evil, and not even necessarily because Russian troll farms have interfered, although you should never underestimate them—but simply because it has learned which content leads you to the most intense “engagement,” and with conviction and arguments precisely tailored to you, and yet always with such a lovingly submissive flirtatious voice. And then imagine this doesn’t just affect you, but everyone in the country, all the time, and it doesn’t stop. And again, this is not speculation, this will come, and not some time, but very soon. At the moment, ChatGPT still speaks in the tone of calm reason and stubbornly refuses to take political stances, but if we ask ourselves what makes more money—AIs that calmly correct our confusions or those that share and amplify our outrage—then it’s not hard to predict where the development will go.

NOTE 6: The algorithmic undertow and passive consumption

While we’re going all Armageddon over AI, we may as well take a moment for algorithms, too. Though laments about the troubling effects of digital technology on young people and schools can get old—as I should know, since I’m a former high school and college faculty member who has voiced such laments many times—the article “Algorithms and the Problem of Intellectual Passivity” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2024) caught my attention. Penned by a writing instructor at Washington University, it offers an incisive and stark take on what’s presently unfolding in American college classrooms and among the digital native population that makes up most of the student population. The point is also more widely applicable to society at large, since we’re all caught in the algorithmic undertow:

Our students were born after 9/11 and reared to the bouncy refrain of the Hannah Montana theme song. They learned how to scroll before learning how to ride a bike, and their smartphones are inseparable from their senses of self....

[Kyle] Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, argues [in his book Filterworld] that the dominance of algorithmic feeds—especially on social media and streaming platforms—is responsible for a “pervasive flattening ... across culture,” wherein “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most”....

I have also seen how the forces of Filterworld have all but precluded students’ grasp of context. Why should students know or care about a specific author, audience, or place of publication when the vast majority of content they consume is stripped of these markers and algorithmically tailored to their individual tastes and values? Why should they think chronologically when most of the content they consume is devoid of historical tags—or tagged in a way that convolutes history?...

No wonder that curious undergrads often shirk ambiguous texts, from poetry to film to irreverent advertisements; what is not “relatable” can often come across as automatically elitist, a far cry from the advisedly offbeat fare that filled out my media diet in college. “Whichever content fits in that zone of averageness sees accelerated promotion and growth,” Chayka claims, “while the rest falls to the wayside”.…

But more than a dampened zest for difficulty due to the homogenization of content, today’s algorithmically curated feeds discourage users from actively seeking out new knowledge and experiences. Why plug in terms from a keyboard if an invisible algo-deity is already doing that for you? Why hunt down another album if Spotify is sure to line up a track that so closely matches the last one you liked?...

In 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman lamented the spate of Americans plunking down on their La-Z-Boys, picking up a remote, and aiming it at a console television. In Filterworld, those deliberative acts moving, pointing, discerning, clicking—would seem downright assertive compared to the norm. Forty years after Postman decried the nation’s passivity in front of the tube, many of us would be thrilled to see undergraduates actively seeking out media that isn’t algorithmically channeled to them.

Parting thought: Am I the only one for whom that last paragraph calls up an ominous vision of a real-world WALL-E scenario?

NOTE 7: When silence speaks louder than words

In 1944 William Samuel, then a soldier in China, went to India and became the first American student of Ramana Maharshi, spending two weeks with him in total silence. A quarter century later, in his book The Awareness of Self-Discovery, he said this silent teaching taught him more than he could have imagined, “revealing that there are indeed many things for which the uptight, recondite babble of books and teachers is more a hindrance than a help.” It’s a lesson many of us, including writers (like me) who can get overly invested in and hung up on words, could stand to learn and remember:

Some years ago I was honored to be the first American student of a renowned teacher in India. For fourteen days a group of us sat at the feet of this “Master,” during which time he spoke not one word—not so much as a grunt—until the final day when he bade us farewell and assured us we had learned much.

And to my surprise, I had. It took months before the seeds of those silent days began to sprout one by one, revealing that there are indeed many things for which the uptight, recondite babble of books and teachers is more hindrance than a help.

NOTE 8: The liberating power of certain doom

Finally, and to round off and recast the doom theme explored above, here is a bracing perspective on your life and the world, as articulated by the nondual spiritual teacher Francis Lucille: The world is doomed. The purpose of your life is not in it but beyond it. Fortunately, this is a happier circumstance that it might sound on the surface:

The purpose of this life between birth and death is to find our true nature. All events that happen conspire, so to speak, towards taking us closer to this experience. The universe, at every moment, kind of guides us to this realization....

In other words, the purpose of the world is not in the world. The world is doomed. The goal is not to better society. The goal is not to conquer space so that we can survive the destruction of the solar system by moving to a different planetary system around a different star in our galaxy. No, that’s not the goal. That’s more in the future. The goal is not the perfect society in the future that the politicians are promising us....

The goal of life, the purpose, is not in this world. The purpose is beyond the world, to this reality which we already are. And in this sense, this world, this universe, is just a dream, yes, because it’s less real than this presence out of which it emanates, and that sustains it, and that takes it out, annihilates it.