Thanks so much for engaging this conversation, George. I've struggled with how to 'address' this topic, and I can't think of a better, more thoughtful place than here on Story Club. So, thank you.

Since last May, I've been actively exploring AI's impact on the creative process. I've embarked on the process of co-writing a non-fiction weekly newsletter about the history of AI with AI (I'll refrain from sharing a link, because I'm not trying to plug.)

This exercise was always intended to be an experiment. It came out of a course I took via Parsons School of Design about Creative AI. I went into the course with a mix of terror and major trepidation, and was fully prepared to safely dismiss the inability for AI to truly be creative. But the deeper I got into the course, the more I found myself having to adjust, and/or refactor my definition of creativity -- this in itself I found to be a worthwhile exercise.

So, I have been writing NON-FICTION on weekly basis with AI for over a year. I have also been working on my own fiction/short-stories over the course of that year and I have never used AI in my fiction writing process. I've tried to analyze why I draw that line. I'll try and keep this short.

I have deep concerns about using these tools for creative purposes in general. But especially as someone who believes "we need fiction like we need water" and that stories flowing from unique human perspectives are essential nourishment for our consciousness. It comes down to intention.

Lewis Hyde argues in The Gift that creative work is fundamentally different from commodity exchange; it's a gift that carries the spirit of the giver, creating connections between humans that transcend transaction. When we substitute or dilute this gift with algorithmically-generated text...well, its no longer about the human experience, is it?

I believe there is something fundamental that happens in our brains when we attempt to ‘extract’ the very personal waves of creative expression that flow within our ‘hearts and minds’ onto a blank page, canvas, etc. I am troubled by the potential effects that replacing that fundamental act of creative expression, or even by altering it slightly, will have on our minds, emotions, and collective creative consciousness.

All that being said, I’ve come to believe the best way to be prepared for contemplating, defending, and discussing these concerns requires active engagement with these technologies. Hence my non-fiction, history of AI newsletter.

But, I think maybe I stumbled on the clearest way I think about this when I was reading a passage this morning from the Zen master/teacher Henry Shukman's book called, "Original Love." On page 117 of the print addition he talks about The Soul, and specifically how philosopher and psychiatrist, Ian McGilchrist has framed his own experience of studying poetry at Oxford University. To summarize slightly, "Gilchrist came to feel that a great poem offers an embodied experience (the flesh tingles and the heart rate changes.) A poem's meaning is implicit, and each is unique, with its own way of being a poem." But in the seminars he attended students were encouraged to take a poem as "a disembodied experience, to make its meaning explicit, and to generalize and categorize poems. In other words, all its most important ways of being a poem - embodied, implicit, and unique - were directly misconstrued."

Gilchrist went on to study this at a neurological level and essentially sees it as a symptom of "brain lateralization" - Poems are essentially product of the right brain (embodied, implicit, and appreciative of the uniqueness of things) in contrast to the ways students were encouraged to study a poem which was left brain: disembodied, explicit, and category-making.

Ultimately, I find this to be at the crux of using AI to write fiction, and the trouble with the process the AI is seemingly using to draft fiction (keeping in mind maybe we are missing what is actually happening inside these neural nets and LLMs).

Shukman points out that when we are in this 'zone of the soul' - right brain - we: "know it when we are. We know ourselves more deeply, and we know how to appreciate being alive and feel grateful to be ourselves. Love is in the mix. And we have a sense of purpose, of how we want to live and grow."

That, I hope and pray, we never lose.