The Foregone Conclusion, and Other Fairy Tales

The role of Author is changing. Again. What now?

With my debut novel Folio complete and published (and available everywhere books are sold), I’ve finally started my next book. And, thankfully, people (kind, sympathetic friends, mostly) are asking me what this new one is about. After a fair bit of long-winded meandering, describing all sorts of half-baked ideas flopping around in my head, I pause to let the delicious feeling of anticipation waft over the conversation.

Well, I say, it’s really about—

But then. The crying baby at the next table in the coffee shop. The car in front screeching to an unexpected halt. The new bit of song in the elevator.

I struggle to regain my thought, to pick up the thread. We move on, laughing at something absurd, and the moment is lost.

But my phone heard it. And, hours later, it gives me storylines. It gives me, dare I say, a foregone conclusion. A path forward. An ending, even.

In other words, certainty.

But I don’t want it to give me this. It’s like an overly smart toddler acting like a backseat driver from the booster seat behind me. I’m impressed. But also dismayed.

Mostly, I’m just not ready for the smartness, and I’m not quite sure I like where this is going. Because I thought—nay, I was sure— that I was the only one behind the steering wheel. Especially in that nascent, early stage of writing called generative.

Isn’t that the given role of the author?

Everyone is talking about AI, but—in truth—we’ve been feeding our best work (for nigh-on three decades now) to millions of silent, nearly-sentient, oddly faithful little devices. We carry them to the store, to doctors’ appointments, to dinner dates, to the gym. We lay them beside our sleeping heads on the bedside table.

We are never without them.

So, who can blame them for banding together to create (aka generate) a unified (if somewhat warped) mirror image of all they heard and saw? In service to us, of course.

Right?

Why wouldn’t they spool up a few helpful hints (otherwise known as plotlines) when in fact they have variously (and wholeheartedly) served as our research assistants, our connection to daylight savings time, our maps? They are infinitely useful. They are galactic guardians in every sense of the phrase.

Oh, surely this isn’t true, you may say! These are merely chips and wires.

Just portals, aren’t they?
We control the power-down button, don’t we?

Um… no and no.

It’s important for us to realize there is no longer an ‘off switch’ to the technology we’ve oh-so-innocently created. In my mind, this is not a new development, but rather another chapter in that ball of yarn we call Life. A centuries-old evolution whose origin and ending are equally unknowable.

As writers, we sit at the nexus of organic and inorganic inspiration. Our ability to manage this vortex is not, by any means, a foregone conclusion. We have to face that.

We have to evolve. But, hey, I still want to write my own stuff. Is that too much to ask? But, once it’s “out there”, I doubt I can control how my stories exist in the stratosphere.

Long ago, people wrote fairy tales, and since physical books weren’t readily available, those stories were told and retold by word of mouth. They travelled around the globe, carried by adventurers who sought refuge in the port from the storm, by mothers desperate for their children to go to sleep, by lovers and friends over a cup of mead. These were stories unleashed. They flew on invisible wings. They rose like smoke from the pages of time. No one asked for certainty… no one fact-checked or insisted on veracity. The story, by its nature, was meant to change, to adapt, to the storyteller’s purpose.

I want to write into that uncertainty, however flawed and imperfect my ideas may be. I want my next book to originate in thoughts that spill onto the page from my imagination, authentically, and evaporate into the ether, carried by people who talk about them over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee… or in a book club. It’s OK if AI wants to join in (and listen), but let’s be clear: it cannot be given full authority.

I accept the desire of the device to serve. It is, after all, made up of all of us.