Welcome to The Muse

Once upon a time, literary authors lived upstairs from urban coffee shops and stayed far away from other human beings. They didn’t eat and they didn’t sleep, they drank insane amounts of coffee and alcohol, smoked their lungs to shreds, and got no exercise whatsoever. They slept on piles of journals and notebooks, typed their work on old-style typewriters and set hundreds of unfinished pages on fire in their fireplaces.

Fast forward a few quantum time crystals.

Today’s author is an outgoing, socially uber-connected, mountain-climbing powerhouse that imbibes staggering amounts of kale juice and avoids cigarettes like the plague, and produces thousands of words of stunning prose every day starting at 5am.

Mmm, scratch that.

The modern author is an entrepreneur, a publishing innovator, a researcher of life, a reluctant if not awkward publicist, a café regular and/or a parent with a fragmented schedule that only permits time for writing before or after the kids’ bedtime.

This would work except… this AI thing. You really think it can write? Let’s ask it directly.

For now.

The Internet has exploded with giddy excitement seasoned by a dash of terror, and a flood of hand-wringing about all the copyright infringement, unauthorized usage of creative work, and the death of creative jobs, that are potentially going to result from these AIs that are chomping down every word we write online every moment of every day.

Are we, the creators, the artists, writers, poets, musicians, designers, really going to capitulate our very soul to some artificial neural network? Hell no.

The fear is real, albeit just a little misplaced. There is one thing people are overlooking in the great Will AI Kill Human Creativity debate. Hence this Substack.

(I spend a fair amount of time thinking and researching the articles you see here… hence the non-daily publishing cadence. Being human, I need to eat, sleep, take care of the fam, all those things that AI doesn’t need to bother with. But if you do have burning questions, thoughts, or musings about AI and human creativity that you’d like to share, send me a note.)

~ Birgitte