I apologize that this post is nearly everything I don’t want for this blog:

1. Writing about writing,
2. my own take on a current issue (AI), and 
3. an acknowledgement of a recent, lengthy absence. 

I’m writing about writing—even though it gets dangerously close to a kind of creative cannibalization—because communication is the only reality in which I know myself. Conversations remind me I’m alive; writing keeps my thoughts breathing. 

Conversations remind me I’m alive; writing keeps my thoughts breathing.

Lately, my respiration has been happening in an intensely internal way. While that’s satisfied my mental survival needs, none of it has made it to the public page. 

In my line of work, where words are literally all that I do, AI has been rearing its ugly head. (Would AI even pen such a tired cliché as “reared its ugly head”?…or, “tired cliché”?) I can’t stay silent on the irony that it’s not the coldly mechanical bots of sci-fi that threaten livelihoods today—it’s the whimsy artist bot, the snappy turn-of-phrase bot, and the warmly empathetic counselor bot that are coming for the vocations and passion-projects of mankind. 

I imagine carpentry. If we stopped having our chairs fixed when automated processes made furniture that was cheaper to simply replace, why do we think we won’t stop thinking after we export our creativity? If someone retorts, “We won’t lose creativity because it’s a universal good for the human soul, and it’ll always be there,” then to that I’d counter, “Craftsmanship used to be too, but…where are all the handmade chairs?”

When asked why I wouldn’t use AI to write, I told my colleagues that my words are me. My words are (yes, it’s dramatic) my soul. I can’t let anyone…anything…speak them for me. 

It’s not that I think so highly of my own thoughts that I say my words are God’s gift to me; I say it because my feeble attempts are how I see His grace to work through me regardless. 

Subcreation: Only Humans Allowed

Tolkien coined the term “subcreation” to describe the human project of world-building through the arts. “Sub-creation,” because while God alone creates ex nihilo, He entrusts His children to make beautiful, derivative worlds within His world that even more fully bring beauty and meaning and clarity to His already complete cosmos. God is pleased to bring us in on the—apparently ongoing—Creation story of the Universe. 

Worlds were Tolkien’s Subcreation; words are mine (albeit much more modestly than they are so many others’).

What is yours? What is your creative endeavor (not just “artistic”—remember the chairs) that lets you bring a little more order to a disordered world? 

When I speak, respond, write or record, I find a centrifugal rhythm that centers my equilibrium. I find an existential sense-making that happens when I engage in good word-using. (And I like how bad that last sentence sounds.) A good conversation sub-creates a little pocket of profundity. A good blog post fashions a little bit of order out of a corner of untidy reality—even if that untidy reality is just my recently neglected WordPress. 

Words are my “subcreational” activity, and it’s worth not letting a robot write in my stead if only for what the process of writing does for me. And if that’s selfish, I’d rather let one human benefit (read: “me”) from properly subcreating than let a robot effectively imitate our God-given privilege.

AI might write better blog posts, provide more engaging conversations—even make better chairs. But only an Image Bearer of God can sit down on his own subcreated carpentry, sigh, and say, “It is good.” 

What Only We Can Say

There’s something else that only we can do, which I looped in at the beginning of this self-disclosing and slightly-embarrassing blog post: apologize.

Apologies, one could say, make us human. 

Human creatures alone can 1) recognize the difference between right and wrong, 2) culpably choose between the two, and then 3) freely seek reconciliation and receive forgiveness after having made the wrong choice. It’s one of the unique distinctives of being created in the image of God. 

Although AI asks pardon frequently (as anyone who’s had a short-to-moderate length conversation with ChatGPT knows), a large language model has no capacity for remorse, repentance, or reconciliation-seeking after willful wrongdoing. There are not a few reasons for that. 

One of them is that “willful wrongdoing” is not a phrase that makes sense within the bounds of algorithms and codes, no matter how accurately a digital program’s behaviors and parameters map onto our perception of personhood. While I fully expect the trajectory of AI to supply more and more convincing rehearsals and mimicries of such integrally human actions as repentance, internal conflict, and regret, artificial intelligence in all its forms remains a simulacral image of the Image—a kind of crude photocopy of the unique, Hand-written copy, if you will, which must always and categorically remain distinct. 

God’s image in us is not transferable to our creations any more than an artist’s life insurance policy could be left to one of his self-portraits, or than an author’s main character could sign the contract with her publisher. Even if her character were a more capable negotiator, no one and nothing else could fulfill a role that, by definition, only the author’s real, human self can. 

There are some things only we should do because, truthfully speaking, only we really can do them. Consider apology-making: even if someone (or something) else could compose more eloquent, understanding words of remorse for me, the heart of what it means to say “sorry” would be lost by outsourcing the process. 

There are some things only we should do because only we really can do them.

Whether woodworking, writing, or apologizing, there will be a real sense in which it can matter more that we are doing the things, rather than that the things are being done “better.” 

Seeing as only a human (such as myself) can truly apologize, and seeing as no one else can apologize for me, I may freely choose to do just that with my words here—if an apology after so long an absence were appropriate. In my human free will, I don’t believe an apology is necessary (though I confess I’d like to see—and hear—this space filled again with the subcreation of verbal ruminations).

It feels good to write again after so long. That is a sentiment that AI could parrot, but not—I believe—one it could feel. Even if I’m not the best writer—nor any better than AI—I am the best one to write this, because my thoughts are mine to think, my apologies are mine to make, and because I don’t want to be willing to deny even the littlest parts of what only a human can add to Creation.