Writers on the Stormy Seas of AI -Listen to Your Captain!

I bought an old book while visiting Cape Cod a few years back. It was Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau—seemed appropriate. I read the first pages, then placed it on a shelf—another ornament nestled between Emerson and Hawthorne; dusty old chums. I resigned myself that my concentration was gone, and all that archaic, 19th-century rhetoric had been obliterated by the mesmerizing blue of my iPhone. Ah, but those sweet summer days on the shores of Wellfleet in 2021 were simpler times. Artificial Intelligence was then a baby flounder in a teeming sea of mackerel. Now it’s a whale. And call me Ishmael!

But even with all the cries about how AI was going to change the nature of writing, I remained a curmudgeon. I’m an old publishing guy; I’ve seen it all. Until a colleague in our family real estate business showed me some AI-written marketing copy describing a new home listing. “It’s perfect!” she gleamed. “It describes the house completely—and so well written!”

“So it does,” I solemnly mumbled, while flashes from my Romantic Lit professors swirled in my head. I glanced over my book collection of dusty description-laden artifacts, those former metaphoric “Great Whites”—Dickens’ David Copperfield, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina…Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago!

“AI described the look of the house, perfectly,” I slowly and reluctantly retorted, but the thought lingered, is that really enough? And then my eyes fell upon Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod. And it came to me like an epiphany that the reason I had only lasted a few pages was that I thought the book was going to be a boring litany of descriptions, and describing beach grass and fishing vessels would never keep me awake.

It dawned on me right then that this was my literary “John Henry is a Steal Driving Man” moment—the Thoreau literary hammer against the AI steam-powered description drill!

I politely motioned my real estate colleague away, pulled Cape Cod off the shelf, popped the cork off a nice Bordeaux, and tore into it again. What I uncovered was a story subtly woven into its descriptions. I could feel the chilled winds pushing in successive bursts across the struggling beach grass, falling still along marshy ponds and over mountainous dunes framed against a crystal blue summer sky. Homes were described by comical broken fences pieced together by wood washed ashore by shipwrecks, and scrawny potato gardens half neglected out of frustration, or through blurry windows scratched by decades of wind-blown sand. Minute, creative details; not big glaring ones. Thoreau had me. He won hands down!

So what is the point in all this verbal rigamarole, my attention-strained reader asks? To get there, I’ll go back to one of my first interviews when trying to get a copywriting job in the early eighties. Back then it was cruelly fashionable to have an applicant describe a paperclip in a full paragraph. The aim was to glean a person’s level of creativity.

Today, in my curation of educational writers, or in consultations, I would hand the applicant a picture of a plain two-story colonial and say, “Describe this house to me.” If the person describes the window trim as white and the beautiful, green, shady Maple over the porch, I’d show them the virtual door. The new AI whale will eat them up. Learn to see and feel in your writing, even educational writing and real estate marketing copy. See behind what you see with your eyes.

For as Captain Ahab said: “Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks.”