writers are dying

writing is dying

There’s a particular kind of —

Not this. Not that. But this.

It is not just about x. But y.

So I — Not reaching. Not performing. Just existing.

And maybe — Maybe —

So honestly —? That’s —

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the goat toni morrison

I’ve always loved writing. From the primary school compositions where I’d be kidnapped by someone close to me and escape narrowly. I would then end it with the cliche ‘Not all that Glitters is…’ The ellipsis had to be there ever since I first learnt of them for dramatic effect and mystery. In others, I’d sneak out to a party with some friends after school then the whole thing gets swarming with police looking for someone dealing illegal drugs to minors. The compositions would end in morality lessons that I break every time now in my adulthood.

I moved from class writings to poetry that read of stories. These were stories of the hero and the villain. Them falling in love, tragic betrayals, finding out the hero was actually the villain. My god! Those were the bomb. Musing about forbidden love tropes, rooting for the misunderstood characters. What a time to be hopeless dreamer!

Then in high school, I got to writing novels on notebooks. You know those people who smuggled their written short stories? Yeah, that was me. Thorns of Roses. Writing during night preps while everyone was doing the expected five sums a day and chemistry dailys. I was passing my time to write for people who were actively studying. I still passed my exams though. Thorns of Roses is my masterpiece. At the back of the notebook, people wrote their acknowledgements and signed. People used to put bookmarks and mark pages where they stopped. This notebook was passed from different forms, different classes. People I didn’t even know were reading it and writing their reactions on the lines as they went along. It was so amazing. I am not yet done transferring the writings in my spiral notebook to my Wattpad account. I should get back to that.

You genuinely just had to be there. There were multiple writers and multiple stories being passed around. Secretly too to ensure that the teachers never found them. When I was in Form 1, someone got discovered and SK read that smut out in the office to their parent. (SK was the senior teacher, a man). Looking back at it, SK was weird. What business do you have reading word by word filthy smut written by schoolgirls? Okay wait, he did have all the business. Also, apparently, he didn’t have a wife so- Anyways, I digress. In high school, I was such a Paper 3 enthusiast. I loved the set books, and I loved critically writing about them.

Then came university and legal opinions and case briefs and everything in the age of AI. I won’t even lie, I have used AI in my school assignments and writings. Because wah, who has the time aki? I blame capitalism. This rush to always be ahead and to progress and perfection. We don’t want to slow down to actually learn material and put in the work of looking for sources and answers. Anyways, capitalism is to blame but I am taking active responsibility in my learning. Guys, we have to.

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said that they see a future where intelligence is a utility we buy from them. This is just like the business trick companies use. They get you used to a product, then start charging for it at the height of your inability to maneuver without it. Look at the Nestle incident, they got African mothers dependent on the baby powder from birth. As in, the moment you give birth, there are nurses there suggesting that baby powder to you as better than breast milk and even cow milk. They literally hired ‘milk nurses’ to promote that product. Then once everyone was using it, the cost became an issue. It led to an insane death toll because of its use especially in lowly countries. Capitalism will kill us.

We have had AI for a while now. It has been forced into literally every platform. Everyone is using ChatGPT, even for the smallest reasons. People are marrying ChatGPT, using it as their therapists, even assigning pronouns to it like it’s a live being. We are getting inseparable from it in real time. It is difficult to even imagine a world where students got through university without it. They’ve got us good.

Now, I do not know a lot about AI and I do appreciate pointers in the right direction and if you do know, you can expound in the comments.

Apparently, we shouldn’t even concede to calling it Artificial Intelligence. I need to get down to that. Read this essay. Calling it AI, takes accountability away from the multi-billion tech companies that made it. They deliberately use it, to hook us to it. They profit off of us not using our brains and having that quick AI search.

I came across something known as AI theft. This is where AI is trained with creative works from real humans. AI is tech, now I hear that it is evolving to be more conscious, but eh not so sure about that yet. AI cannot form original ideas and thoughts. So it needs that training data, it needs to get creative work to form ideas, to know how to create. For AI to create it needs creation from us humans.

I’m scared. I’m scared of posting my works, my writings on the internet. I’m scared because AI picks up on it and uses it to answer prompts. When someone asks AI to write a story for them, to write a Substack post for them, AI just pulls from various writing material online and creates something out of that. That is theft. Only recently I found out that Substack is set to default to be available for AI use. You have to manually turn that off from somewhere in the settings. How certain am I that AI is not pirating my work to someone somewhere?

There was even a certain time in this app where people would feel your work to AI just to critique it! Hello? INSANE. How can I trust that you guys won’t violate my work like that?

AI is embedded in almost every platform. Not only to get us hooked and used to it but also to get a wide scope of training data to improve it and its creativity.

Now onto AI writing.

There was a tiktok someone made about how Substack is filled with a lot of ‘The intimacy of -’ ‘The art of-’ and now, I kind of get the frustration people feel. If you read them no matter how diverse they are, the kind of sound… the same. These articles feel AI. Maybe it’s just me. They feel like generic slop. Again, this is just my opinion. Also, when you first start using Substack, you get these articles by very famous writers and they are so- I don’t know how to put it. But they feel so informative, yet they write about emotion. I hope you’re getting me wah. No shade to the writers, hence I won’t mention names.

There’s also been sentiments of how Substack articles are sounding the same. I believe there is a way you can write about the same thing but it comes out differently. However, if the writers are using AI to write, then everything comes out the same. I can’t really feel you, I can’t really hear your voice.

There is a way Ida Nyamweru Odinga writes, the way Teddy writes, Ongalo Glenn, Obanyi, Nicole, blendingwallflower, Ngito Makena., Prudence🇰🇪, Kimemia Macharia, w🍥nja write (just to name a few). I can legit hear them differently. From their writings, I can distinguish them.

Substack is losing that.

It really pains me to read someone write about feelings and it’s coming off as generated. Telling AI to write your essay for you, will definitely be seen. It will come off as generated and robotic because heck what does AI know about emotions?

AI starts by naming it, then it builds, then it circles back in forming a conclusion. I can tell, I can see it. And it pisses me off because really, we don’t always have an answer. We don’t always have our emotions figured out. I’d like to see that ending that ends in your uncertainty, or not even an ending. I am tired of those “And maybe that’s the thing. Maybe that’s what it is—” endings. Tired.

Writers are dying. Writing is dying. Actually, it is being killed and if you are using AI to write you are among the wielders of the murderous weapon! Shem, we are tired.

It has reached a point where I wonder, is AI writing like us? Or are we writing like AI? I think the lines will blur to it being non - existent. In the same way it is getting difficult to tell whether an image is generated or not. Real writers will be coexisting with AI slop, and it might get hard to tell them apart. This sounds so scarily dystopian.

There are people who argue ‘well the idea is mine’. So what if the idea is yours? I believe there are no original thoughts and ideas. If you have an idea, follow through with it completely. That writing is what will make it yours. Writing is a craft. The process of writing it, also matters.

Writers on Wattpad used to be 10years old with English not even being their first language yet they’d write amazing literature.

I believe that writing and your audience reading your work is an intimate act. Even in the errors and wrong sentence structuring, that points to your humanness. I appreciate that. I don’t want to engage with something that feels robotic. We are already divided enough now you also want to put a ledge using AI between your feelings and the written work you publish.

What is it? Are we afraid of our own voice? Are we afraid of sounding ‘wrong’? We can blame capitalism. But it doesn’t just end there. We have to actively write. I am an advocate of writing on paper. Using AI to write, to generate ideas for you, literally removes your humanness. Stare outside the window seat on that lengthy commute, listen to your thoughts in the shower, go out in the wild, sit with boredom. Work your mind, get creative. Read more. Through reading you get to learn new worlds, how to string your thoughts, how to show not tell etc. Do the work. Jot down your thoughts, brainstorm, piece everything together.

You can do it! What I expect from you, is the desire.

I believe that AI is also a form of colonization, yet to read this. AI also perpetuates gender inequalities and racism. Please, abeg, REBEL!

Now, if it wasn’t actually worth the writer writing it, is it worth my reading it?