Eyeglasses for My Brain

Assistive devices.

I'm really upset. I'm trying to get published — trying to make my English degree count for something. Twenty-three years have gone by and I never sat myself down and bothered to write anything long-form. I didn't have dreams of being an author, but I went to school to do one thing well — write and communicate — and then life happened. I've written a lot of emails and blogs and things like that, but I haven't made good on that education in a formal way. I want to get published.

And I think what I want is my flowers, right? That's the modern expression for it. I just want to get my flowers, man. I want to see something I wrote contributed to the great digital library of humanity. Whether it's an outstanding work or a base-hit commercial normal whatever — I just want to get called up to the show and get my base hit, say "hey man, I did that," and then we'll see if I can stack more after the first one. But the first one feels really hard.

What I'm running into is a bunch of gatekeepers online who are effectively saying: if you use artificial intelligence, you're out. And it's a kind of bias, a kind of antipathy, and it's very frustrating — because this thing is Adderall. I posted about that. AI is Adderall for a brain like mine, a brain that can only walk and talk. Expostulate and expound and use big words as they come across my lips — not beforehand, not with thought, not with intent. I just kind of yap. And through the yapping, all of a sudden, stories spin out of my words.

It's why I thought about trying my hand at stand-up comedy. I make people laugh when I talk to them for long enough. But it's always in the moment, always on demand. And being an author, trying to get something published — that's not an on-demand skill. Most authors in the traditional sense had to sit with their words — pen and paper, typewriter, laptop, whatever — for a long time.

You could argue that originally it was access to materials — a quill, an inkwell, parchment — that allowed somebody to be an author at all. Then those materials got easier to come by, and it became about time: you weren't a serf, you weren't a peasant trying to till the fields and pull in the harvest, so you had the time and the space. Then the proliferation of the typewriter meant that people who couldn't get their words out quickly with pen and paper could type much faster — which broadened not just the market for content but the pool of authors. Then the laptop: quicker still, and portable. Put it on your knees, sit in the park, sit in the coffee shop. And as recently as the late 90s, dictation software — I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, trying to train it to my speech patterns, and it sort of kind of worked. Fast forward to today and it's automated speech recognition, ASR, speech-to-text. Lots of people dictate. Physicians, doctors, nurses — they dictate because it's much, much faster than typing. And people like me, whose brains turn on and the spigot opens — we're going to talk, not type. That's just not how the ideas form for me.

Sometimes I have to say something five, ten, twenty times in a row in different ways to land on the right wording. And maybe in written form you delete nineteen of them and keep the one that hits best. That's fine. But my way of getting there is never going to be sitting with a laptop and typing it out with my fingers. In the moment of ad-libbing my thoughts and breathing life into those images, sometimes I trip over my words. Sometimes I stutter-step and have to come back to it. Sometimes I circle ideas again and again. But the ability to just talk and record has changed the game for me.

Because when I type, my fingers are a school zone. My brain is going sixty miles an hour and the speed limit through my fingers is twenty. Sometimes the thought flashed in my mind and then it was gone — I knew I had some excellent metaphor or simile, and it was gone, and I hadn't written it down. That's happened more times than I could ever count. Frustrated by my own inability to catch up with my thoughts.

So here we are in modern times. I've got this English degree. I've been taught the craft. I want to contribute, I want to create — and I need to use artificial intelligence. Here's why. I need to dictate. I need to not think about the function of punctuation or the proper forms of grammar, conjugation, what have you. That's what happens when I sit in front of a keyboard and start typing: I get in my own head, and the mechanical side of writing interferes with the creativity that's just flowing out of my lips.

So what do I do? I record. And then I take my recording and I fling it at artificial intelligence and I say: you clean this up. Put the periods in the right places. Put the commas where they belong. And oh, by the way, once you're done, go through it and highlight the things that might suck — the places where I said the same thing five times in a row but used a different metaphor each time. Look at all five and tell me which one works. Give me your opinion. You're a large language model. You're trained on language. You can dip into all the editorial feedback that's ever been written in a magazine and say: this sentence is weak, this metaphor is weak. You can help me cut through the crap.

And — this is the benefit, actually — not waste the time of a human being to do it. Why waste a human editor's time on a first rough draft that is basically dog shit? Why not go directly to getting the best thing we can in front of people?

And yet they say: no. We are not going to do that. We are going to deny you participation in our economy of building worlds with words. We are not going to publish you because you used AI, and AI is bad — they're a bunch of thieving, copyright-stealing, selfish motherfuckers — and we are going to stand on principle and effectively tell you to fuck off. You can't be an author because you didn't do it all by yourself.

Well, look, man — no one did it all by themselves. That's my point. Not a single one of us. We didn't do it without quill and ink pot and parchment. We didn't do it without typewriters or laptops. Then dictation came in in a big way and let our words reach a recorded medium — digital, in this case — very quickly. And now that I finally have the ability to let the creativity flow ad-lib and something can keep up with it, you're going to tell me that because some company used a bunch of copyrighted material to train their model, and that model happens to be helpful to me, somehow I'm part of the problem for making use of a tool?

Okay, then let's go backwards. You can't use microphones. A doctor can't even click record on a tape deck. Can't use typewriters. Can't use the parchment and quill. Are you going to take glasses away from people with poor sight?

Because an assistive device is what AI is for me. If neurodivergence is a real thing — and I've accepted that it is now, after a lifetime of basically calling bullshit on it — then I'm one of these people, and I need to be able to participate in my way. If I need an assistive device to help me do this thing called writing, and my way of writing is different than yours, I don't think it's any less pure. Just like acting: one actor rehearses their lines a thousand times, another actor improvises, ad-libs their lines. The performance is different. The performance is not less pure. And you can't tell the difference. You can't tell how much the AI helped me or not.

We can't draw lines in the sand and say editing is okay, cleaning up dictation is okay, but identifying five weak sentences in your prose and workshopping a couple of alternatives with you — that's not okay. They're still my words. They're still my stories. They're my thoughts and my ideas. They roll off my tongue; they just don't roll out of my fingers.

So I want to create, and I want to — and have to — use these tools. Otherwise I can't do it. If I could, I would've. Okay? If I was able to spin out these stories through my fingers, typing it out, I would've done it over these twenty-three years. But obviously there's some part of me that just can't get it together. The thoughts come too fast. My fingers can't keep up. And I've lost more stories than I can tell you to my own impatience, my own inability to sit still, my lack of medication — whatever you want to say, man. I feel the loss of the creative content I could've contributed.

And in my small way — if twenty people read it, or two hundred, or one person — as long as I created something, isn't that the point? Aren't we authors? Aren't we part of the continuum of artists, because we are trying to create something, put something into the world? This is my way of doing it. I need these tools or I'm not going to be able to create.

So: assistive devices. Coming back to my original opening thesis, which was messy — I think we need at least somebody advocating for them. I'm not saying AI should think for me. I'm saying AI, for me, is like a pair of glasses, except it's not fixing my eyesight. It's fixing my mind. It's allowing me to think as fast as I think, because it can keep up. And for you to tell me that my creations are less good or less pure because I need help is like telling a guy who needs glasses that he can't wear glasses. Then he can't do anything. He can't see.

This is eyeglasses for my brain. It helps me see.