Thanksgiving, Community & Why AI Won't Replace Us...Yet

 

Hello magical friends!

Gratitude from the Beachhouse

As Thanksgiving approaches, I find myself reflecting on this past year with deep gratitude for my readers, my family, my community, and our magical rental from which I took this sunset pic last night. The view from the beachhouse has significantly improved my outlook on life.

We’re still savoring every moment of borrowed time in this special place—a constant reminder of how much our environment and connection to nature can impact us.

This past week, I’ve received several heartfelt letters and messages from readers telling me that my books have found them in tough seasons of their lives, giving them the escape they desperately needed while also somehow helping them to feel less alone.

That’s the beautiful, quirky and somewhat contradictory nature of books, though. The act of reading is solitary, yet it makes us feel so deeply connected. What a novel (pun intended) way to spend some time alone.

Why Human Stories Will Always Matter

Recently I read an article about AI and the future of books. The author was pontificating about it all and painted a somewhat dystopian vision (to me) where fiction was about to become completely personalized. He predicted that in a mere two years time, everyone would be using generative AI to create tailor-made books for themselves and no one would need authors any more.

While I don’t doubt this sort of self-servicing fiction might soon become an option for many, I’m not worried about it replacing authors. Here’s why:

Reading is communal. Although it’s a solitary activity, reading fiction is fundamentally about community. It’s deeply personal but also a shared experience we have. How many times have you read a book that wasn’t exactly “your thing” because of the communal experience of reading and discussing it with others? When we read together we experience a sort of shared reality. Sometimes it’s even more vivid and bonding than the actual reality we share, because we are experiencing it like a mass hallucination from a shared perspective, rather than our own individual one. That’s a powerful experience, and one that gives us a lot of dopamine, I might add.

Authors are an integral part of that community and communal experience. We consume fiction for the stories. But in order to open our hearts and minds, most of us want to know at least a little bit about the source of that story. We want to know where it comes from, just like we want to know a little bit about where the food at our favorite restaurant comes from. We want to know whether the produce is organic and, at the very least, that our servers wash their hands.

For most writers, the act of writing and sharing your insides with the outside world is an intimate, revealing, slightly exhibitionist, and profoundly human experience. Our words are only a part of the equation that puts good fiction into reader’s hands. There’s also us, the humans who survived something terrible, and invested in the good materials to share with you, and remembered to wash our hands.

Can machines generate prose? Of course. Is some of it good? Certainly. Will it replace human creators entirely? I really don’t think so. I have slightly more faith in readers, and people in general, than the author of that article had.

Words hit differently when they come from a human entity. I believe that AI won’t spell the end for writers for the same reasons microwave meals haven’t replaced all other forms of dining.

Reading, like eating, is a communal experience. It’s infinitely more satisfying to enjoy a well-prepared meal in good company and meet the chef than to eat something reheated from a box while standing alone in your kitchen.

So while AI will certainly change the publishing industry, and likely in profound ways, I don’t believe it signals the end of human storytelling. Instead, I see a chance to evolve, much like we did with the printing press and the camera. I’m hopeful that the assistive technology that comes alongside generative AI will make it easier for more gifted and diverse storytellers to share their tales.

Undeniably, it’s a tough time to be an author. We’re constantly being told the sky is falling, that in two years our careers won’t exist. That we better adapt to AI and learn to accept it, while the same time we are being told that we better not use it in any way, shape or form or we will be cancelled. It’s an impossible calculus.

And yet those of us who are here for the stories keep writing and telling our tales as best we can, from our hearts, because we crave the same connection and shared experience our readers do.

This Thanksgiving might be a good time to reach out to your favorite authors and share your appreciation and a reminder that they are not so alone either. I’m sure they’d be as grateful as I am for the readers who’ve recently reached out to me.