Yesterday evening we attended a talk on AI at the Frost Science Museum in Miami. The three speakers were all from the University of Pennsylvania, which sponsored the event, and two spoke about the aspects of AI that I am most intrigued by: its application to medicine and to writing. I am all for the first and dubious about the second.
The woman who spoke about medicine only reinforced my belief in AI as a force for good, while not ignoring its (current) limitations. But the ability to access vast quantities of information in a short period of time in order to make a correct diagnosis is something that is going to help doctors, and patients, immeasurably.
The man who spoke about writing referred to a study in which students wrote a story by themselves and then one using AI. In the first instance, most of the stories were young adult stories, as those reflected the students’ experiences. When they used AI, there was much more variety: science fiction, fantasy, etc. This was seen as a good thing.
OK, but isn’t that cheating? To me, a writer using AI is like an athlete using steroids. I can envision, in the future, a writer being stripped of her Pulitzer after it’s discovered she wrote her winning novel using AI.
But could an AI-enhanced novel win a Pulitzer? Writing is personal, or at least it should be, and AI is not, at least not yet. And if it ever becomes so, we will have a problem. When I was a travel editor, rejecting lots of freelance stories, I noticed flaws that appeared again and again. And the most common, and frustrating, flaw was the absence of a distinctive voice. In fact, I used to joke that there was a machine somewhere in the country that was mass producing travel stories that all sounded pretty much the same.
And now there is – or at least there can be.
The article by Michael Schulman in the Jan. 27th New Yorker contains this sentence: “Every house is haunted by its previous residents, but prewar apartments in the Village have particularly colorful ghosts.”
If I were still teaching writing, I would write this sentence on the board to illustrate how the word ‘but’ – an ugly word, one ‘t’ away from one of my least favorite – can often be replaced by ‘and.’ And not just for aesthetic reasons. A ‘but’ tells the reader something significant is coming, often something surprising, in which case the surprise is considerably lessened. An ‘and’ smoothly and seamlessly connects the two parts, leaving the reader unaware until the last delightful moment. ‘But’ is a divider with a spoiler tendency; ‘and’ is a uniter with a subversive streak.
On social media recently I came across a video someone had posted from Ho Chi Minh City. It was of a central square, which looked familiar, and as the camera turned, I saw the Rex Hotel, where I had stayed in 1994. There were a few new additions – a Gucci store – but the high-energy scene of traffic and people and lights was just as I had remembered it. I recalled how I would stand on the hotel steps, taking it all in and wondering how I could describe it to readers back in Florida, most of whom had never seen such a show. And, watching the video, I realized that travel writers are now relieved of the responsibility of description, for the physical world is now all on film.
Scenes from South Florida: https://realsouthwestmag.com/2024/11/south-florida-days/
On my way back from Lancaster last week, I stopped in Wayne, a pretty Main Line town I used to hitchhike to when I was a student down the road at Villanova. Back then there was a paperback bookstore on Lancaster Pike; now there’s a bookstore, Main Point Books, on the perpendicular N. Wayne Ave.
Walking in I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while: a display of all the new Best American anthologies: Essays, Short Stories, Mystery and Suspense, etc. The one that caught my eye was Food and Travel Writing. Food had always had its own anthology, as had Travel, before it was discontinued in 2022. The return of travel writing was encouraging, even if it had to hitch its wagon to food.
Opening up the anthology, I found that almost all of the stories were about food – not surprisingly, as few writers had known about travel’s rebirth. One of the travel pieces was an essay on the fate of travel writing by the former editor of the Travel series, a man who, tellingly, now writes about wine and spirits.
Next year, presumably, there will be more of a balance. True, everybody eats and not everybody travels. But eating is almost always more pleasurable than reading about eating, while reading about travel is frequently more enjoyable than travel itself.
Last week I received an email from an editor asking if by chance I had anything to send him. (The editor is a friend who's started a new online magazine.) The subject line read: "Submit (but in a good way)."