Dear Diary
Staying Human in the Age of the Machine
I did not plan to become a writer, despite keeping a journal—or diary, as it was dismissively called back then—from a young age. No, I did not consider writing a job in the sense that a job is something you grow up to do and get paid money for. In all truth, it is still not something that most people who call themselves writers are paid for. Myself included.1
No, when I was twelve, I was going to grow up to be a doctor or a famous soccer player. I would leaf through the family copy of Gray’s Anatomy, wondering at the layers of tissues, blood vessels, and bones, wondering how anyone could ever memorize all those Latin names. By high school, I was going to be the next female Secretary of State, like Madeline Albright. But even though I read voraciously, it never occurred to me to want to become the next Michael Crichton, even though his books that I loved were so successful they were made into blockbuster movies.
I did have a postcard with Yeats’s black-and-white portrait on my wall as a teenager because I thought he was handsome—not because I’d read much of his poetry. Being a writer was a vibe in the 90s of my youth, and not one that was related to earning a living.
And yet. In grade school, high school, and college, I wrote. In addition to my tortured diary entries, came little essays for my church newsletters and college newspapers. I wrote letters to my parents and friends. Then it was emails—book-length ones—and in college, instead of writing a thesis about lord knows what kind of political tragedy I had been studying, from East Timor to the Iran hostage crisis, I chose the “alternative thesis route” and wrote a hundred-page book about my travel stories and how they related to my sense of American identity. It was my first memoir.
Now I see that being an avid reader, thinker, and over-reflector of all-things-that-have-ever-happened-to-me-in-my-life made me a prime candidate to become a writer. But not everybody who overthinks is destined to be one; it’s a fine line between anxiety, rumination, and actually being creative.
I became a writer more officially later in life for two reasons: first, because in Germany, you have to give everything you do a title that matches the preselected categories for what people do in life and get insured for. And in Germany, being a writer is something that one could—at least in the past—get paid to do. Secondly, and more relevantly, I got my MFA in creative writing because of a use-it-or-lose-it situation. My military veteran education benefits were running out, and I needed to pick a program or lose them. I had been mulling over the creative writing MFA for a few years, so it was not a hard choice. Who wouldn’t want to spend two-plus years reading, writing, and getting to know respected and even famous writers “for free?”2
When I got to Berlin, survival was my goal, economic and mental. Especially once COVID hit and existential dread began. Just as COVID started, I was three months into my MFA, and so began my initiation into the world of the literary arts. Who knew that there were three genres that most people’s creative output gets categorized into? It was news to me that poetry, fiction, and non-fiction were distinct forms of writing in an academic and literary sense and that I would have to pick a track for my MFA. I was a little slow, perhaps on the uptake, but I saw that it made sense.
If Berlin is known as the city free from constraint (from City of Rumor by Gideon Louis Krauss), then my experience here was initially paradoxical, or rather mixed. My work visa permitted me to do only the specific job for which I had applied under the visa. I was not supposed to do anything but try to make a living as a freelance translator from German to English or as an editor. No getting a side gig in food service to make ends meet or cleaning houses (all things I’d done in the past). This was a novel constraint from a naive American perspective because the idea of making it and hustling was so deeply ingrained in me that I couldn’t conceive of the reality of a managed social market system in which labor—especially the migrant variety—was also managed.
But here I am now, many years later, having passed through the stages of immigration trials by fire in the German system. Having reached a successful level of integration and belonging in the official artistic labor category, I am working on “my Berlin book.” They say everyone who spends time in Berlin has at least one book about the phase in them. Whether it is publishable is another story.
So I sit at my desk overlooking my lively residential neighborhood of Wedding, in the formerly French-occupied African Quarter, and attempt to keep writing. I glance over to my special shelf, where a section is dedicated to “my writing,” and grab my old college thesis. In a black-bound book, size 8.5 x 11 inches. I wince flipping through it. This was before the days of spell-check, and the typos jump out. Ofs instead of ons, not a single em-dash but en-dashes with spaces. Apparently, I was using British punctuation back in 2002.
Yet somehow, I look back at these errors fondly. Those were still human days before AI3 came and made everything shiny and samey. Even the AI icon across all apps and sites is a sparkling star. We’ll all become glowy and be stand-out stars of whatever we put our minds to online. Whatever the endeavor, AI can make it all sparkle, like plastic rhinestones.
The promise of AI is one of endless exponential growth, arriving at the singularity of machine-overlord domination, and it has been dominating the news and our lives for the past few years. For shits and giggles, I decided to listen to the Bloomberg Daybreak news podcast every morning for half a year to get a feel for the business world and balance out some of my more esoteric interests. Not a day goes by that tech and AI stocks are not mentioned in breathless tones, akin to religious leaders admonishing their followers about the Second Coming, describing the vision of these heavenly powers. Tech company bosses’ every move is scrutinized for signs of the times. Their words are taken as gospel, and their actions are to be emulated.
I no longer know how many hours I have dedicated to reading about AI and people’s opinions for and against. We know that people are already going crazy due to AI chat use and even killing themselves. This is terrible and a cause for great alarm, and it should be addressed by lawmakers, but it’s still rare, thankfully.
What I’m interested in is the all-pervasiveness of AI’s application. If everything gets fed into the great machine of AI, and over the next years and decades, eventually a whole generation of people grows up only consuming AI-created texts and images, the very nature of human culture will be affected. We will lose our ability to sense what is real, and true human genuineness is at stake. Being human-only, or produced or curated by humans rather than AI—or whatever it is that’s in question—will become the premium product, what people are willing to pay for. AI isn’t driving the world towards excellence but dumbing everything down, and only those with means will be able to afford the human touch. There are a few positive news items about this, like this one on literary translation.
Recently, I got an email from a woman offering services to help writers market their books. I know of this type of service and its potential for scams because I am constantly online, writing and reading about writing and the business of it. The email was written in AI-speak and said that my book on Amazon about my life in the US Army was so compelling... Blah blah blah, fill in the AI slop here… that it deserved a wider audience, and so I should hire her for marketing, etc. I decided to engage with the machine. I replied, saying that I didn’t want to receive such AI-slop messages.
The email writer wrote back with another flowery, AI-generated email, claiming indignantly to be a real human and continuing the charade. Oh, really, I replied. If you’re a real human, then tell me more about this book of mine on Amazon and link to it. The next reply continued in the same vein, trying to flatter my writerly ego and desire to “reach a wider audience,” but pretended that it didn’t say everything it said in the first email. And still no link to Amazon. That’s because, of course, I haven’t published my memoir! So there is no link to be had. Being gaslit by a machine is no fun. Maybe there was a real human using AI to create the responses to my emails, but I doubt it. I more than doubt it; I know that it wasn’t a real human. Deep in my bones and in all the crevices of my mind and soul, I know the subtle differences in writing from humans, and I’ve tested AI to write for me: though it’s useful for so many things, it can’t write for me. It doesn’t have access to my true creative self.
Perhaps many people who use AI like this genuinely can’t distinguish between their own words and those they tell a machine to create. They are already so divorced from the process of creating from within themselves that they mistake the machine's output for their own. I am afraid that soon the majority of people won’t be able to tell the difference between AI and reality. Me included. Writing AI prompts takes a certain type of thinking and skills, but that trained way of thinking and interacting with a machine is not the same as the dance with inner and outer realities that is the creative process. Losing touch with our inner realities, most of all, is what I fear. When we lose access to our true creative selves, we go crazy. I know what it’s like to go crazy quickly (exhibit A: basic combat training), so I’m not under any illusions about how sane we are individually or as a collective. We know we’re being manipulated into extreme emotions through fake content on social media, yet this is not limited to Instagram and the like but everywhere we turn. How can we know if what we are seeing and hearing is “real”?
I’m not alone in being a woman skeptical of AI, as this astute essay points out. It hasn’t been created with the good of half the earth’s population in mind. The question is why it’s being pushed down our throats, and often non-consensually.
Another digital communication I had with someone who works in tech was almost comical in its obvious use of AI. The flowery bullshit sentences were used to pad the wording, and then I could see where the real human re-entered and wrote something, because they repeated something from the BS but said it in a human way, that I could relate to.
I’ve read that when you put anything into any of the many AI detectors, it will tell you it is AI! But there’s no such thing that can guarantee AI detection, because AI was trained on everything, so what you’re doing is going about the truth-finding in reverse. The machines can’t tell the truth or discern it because they are not the source of any truths but a clever amalgamation of them.
I’ve known some very clever and smart people in my life, and often they were the most socially clueless and incapable. Their intelligence seemed like a gift of the universe—often an alien one—that was shiny and wowing but irrelevant to life on earth as a human. What good was such brilliance when there was no receptor in it for fellow humans? Raw intelligence is not personal, as AI, or rather, computation, has proven. This so-called AI effect might be unstoppable as more and more human capabilities are taken over by technology, but there remain some untouchables that define our humanity: original creativity and truth. There are more still, but I’ll save them for another manifesto.
Don’t get me started on the military/veterans’ benefits topic. The least the country can do for veterans after sending them to get fucked up in ill-advised and illegal wars is to pay for them to attend school and learn how to do something other than destroy. But I digress.
I know AI is a marketing catch-all phrase that is hotly debated, but I’ll use it here for brevity’s sake. I am going to go just a little bit into the distinction between intelligence and consciousness in this essay, but in a roundabout way.