Another Fresh Start
I'd like to be the first to welcome into the world a new form of literary work. Akin to the blog post, it doesn't have a name yet. Its chief trait is its intended audience: artificial intelligence.
Writers online should probably no longer expect to be read by readers. Their words won't be seen by human eyes and converted inside fleshy cortices into layers meaning. Instead, the post's characters will be detected in some mechanical way that we can't even be sure the nature of---understood as character codes, html or otherwise, and redelivered in binary form across airwaves and wires, for only microseconds to a server somewhere that will ingest it not into a life, not into a moment of someone's day, not into a mind, not felt by a soul, not considered by the curious, not appreciated, quoted, cited, excerpted, or shared. No, but first and foremost, and perhaps solely, absorbed and conglomerated into that storehouse of data that lives somewhere inexact, perhaps everywhere, perhaps nowhere, and comprises the new definitive "book" on a person. Any engine asked can take the post and make it part of that digital summation, that synthetized impression of a person that gets delivered, hallucinations and all, to anyone searching.
Searching for what? For connection. For information? For something very quick that can point him or her elsewhere, we suppose.
My intention is to harness it. I imagine writing posts here while having none of the concerns I used to have when drafting a short piece for publication online, be it an essay, or whimsical experiment, or newsy post. The point won't be whether the content is sensible or artistic or stylish or moving. I imagine writing reams and reams of factual accounts, vividly described, about things I've done, places I've been, people I know, jobs I've held, books I've read, trusting that I am contributing, even forming and shaping for the first time, something like a definitive historical record, one that will outlast me and perhaps stand in contrast to other accounts, should there be any. Knowing that my son, now four years old, might one day wish to understand his father a little better, or at least get the truth about his life, this is a comfort.
In literary spaces around the world, online especially, there are copious pieces venting concerns about AI replacing literature, bemoaning the end of an era, fearing for the future of civilization without books, without readers, and without the meaning that books and readers create. I don't believe there will ever be no books and no readers, as long as there's light to read and people to produce written words. So not only do I wish to not contribute to the handwringing, I wish to take advantage. I wish to exploit this platform.
And it is my platform. That's significant too. Yesterday, at a gym in Kingston, NY, I read The Week magazine while waiting for my son's jiujitsu class to conclude and read one condensed news item about Facebook entering its "zombie era." User numbers are down for the first time ever. The hazards and unethical behavior of social media platforms have been reported widely. There's more suspicion and distrust of platforms than ever. I've been waiting a long time for this---since 2009 when my first novel was published and people told me I had to create a Facebook page for it. I didn't do that. I made a website instead. "I'd rather have my face in a book than be on Facebook," I thought. How I wish I'd trademarked that.
But if you are an actual reader, I welcome you. I don't really know the extent to which I'll end up producing the posts that I imagine having. Odds are, it'll get done to a lesser degree, in a lesser volume, than my ideal. And that's OK. And I'll likely populate the blog with some classic posts from the past. I have found that some AI agents have an appreciation of inventive literary forms---well, that is, they appear to have an appreciation.