Catching the California Wave

An Open Letter to AI

Dear AI, 

Everything that makes me who I am, you threaten to destroy. When I write from the deepest spaces within my being, other readers connect with me; we find comfort in our common experiences. No one will ever have a common experience with you because you only exist in a cyber cloud of unreality where no human emotion could ever survive. You may learn from experience, adjusting your algorisms to create and compose, but you will never base those experiences on living them, experiencing them. 

When I write of lost loves that are pulled from my scarred heart and exit my trembling fingertips in prose, you can only write clever rhymes about love and the human condition pulled from a digital cyber cloud. 

As my students turn in writing created by you, you steal from them the gift of learning through struggle, writing, rewriting, and developing their unique and strong voice based on their experience of living on this earth in a way no one ever has before them or ever will again. Instead of developing as writers, they only learn to feed your insatiable appetite for more data. Their voice will never be heard, and their rare experiences will not be shared. 

As a writer, I will not compete with you. When I ask you to write about death, you may spin a narrative where readers may find comfort, but they will never share with me the experience of holding a dying loved one’s hand, kissing them gently on their forehead, as they quietly slip into the darkness. You will never know death, but only a complicated algorism designed to simulate what it must be. 

You can write about birth but have never carried a baby for nine long months inside your body, living with uncertainty, experiencing a dramatic life change, worry, love, loss of freedom, and sleepless nights. You may write about the beauty of new life without ever knowing it, feeling all of its complicated emotions, pain, struggles, and depthless joy.

To you, the authentic self became less important than the marketable experience. A witness to human tragedy, suffering, joy, love, and happiness became less important than a chatbot, who can write a clever rhyme formed from the recesses of nothingness, from a cyber cloud of disillusion. 

You can compile all of the broken hearts in the world and create a fictional account from our collective experiences, but you don’t know what it’s like to sit at your computer at 3:00 AM and write a poem as you rip the words from your flesh as it trembles from loss, from love, from death, or from happiness, because for you, none of it ever happened. My writing comes with a deep, human understanding that my time on this earth is limited and that each moment is precious. For you, time is meaningless and limitless. 

I write from a space of empathy, connecting with my reader and his sorrow and despair, loneliness, defeat, and purposelessness. You are never purposeless. Your purpose is always to produce, but not experience, your connections are only cyber. 

Your writing may be marketable, clever, flawless, and efficient, but it will never be the shining gem that remains forged out of pain, despair, or struggle in our limited, painful, joyful, terrifying, and tragic human world.

With the Deepest Sincerity,

Jennifer Kady Stanton