How AI is interacting our creative human processes.

Vauhini Vara, 20 years after her sister’s death, was still unable in 2021 to tell her story. She writes in Searches,her new collection on AI technology that she wondered if Sam Altman’s machine could do it. So she tried ChatGPT. As it expanded on Vara’s prompts with sentences that ranged from the stilted, to the unsettling, to the sublime the tool she had enlisted stopped feeling so mechanical.

The AI model wrote, “Once upon time, she taught to exist,” of the young woman Vara idolized. Vara, who is a journalist and novelist called the essay “Ghosts” and she thought that the best lines weren’t from her. “I found myself irresistibly drawn to GPT-3 – to the way it offered to deliver words without judgment to a writer at a lost for them…. As I tried to write honestly, the AI appeared to be doing the exact same thing.”

With the rapid proliferation of AI, we face new challenges in authorship, authenticity and ethics. It also presents a particular human problem for narrative: how can we make sense out of these machines and not just use them. How do the words and stories we use to describe technology affect its role in our creative lives (or how it can even take over?). Vara’s book, as well as The Uncanny Muse, a collection essays by music critic David Hajdu on the history and automation of art, explores how humans have grappled with the relationship between machines and our bodies, brains and creativity throughout history. Pria Anand’s new book, The Mind Electric,reminds us that it may not be easy to replicate our own inner workings.

The Searchesartifact is strange. Vara’s essays are a mix of memoir, critical analysis, and AI-assisted creativity experimentation. They trace her career as a tech journalist and novelist in San Francisco Bay Area, along with the history of the industry that she watched grow. Vara was always close to tech: A college friend who was an early Google employee was also “friends” with Mark Zuckerberg when Vara began reporting on Facebook (now Meta). In 2007, she broke the news that the company planned to implement ad targeting using users’ personal data. This was the first shot in the long and gruesome data war. In her essay, “Stealing great ideas,” she discusses turning down a reporting job at Apple to pursue graduate school in fiction. She wrote a novel there about a tech entrepreneur, which was published as the Immortal Rao . Vara says that her art at the time was “inextricable” from the tools [she] she used to create it, such as Google Docs, MacBooks, and iPhones. These resources, which pre-dated AI, were merely tools. What happened next was completely different.

Vara’s essays include chapters of back and forth between Vara and ChatGPT, the bot serving as editor on Vara’s prompting. ChatGPT summarizes and critiques Vara’s writing in a corporate tone that is familiar to all knowledge workers. It suggests that the balance between these narratives could be the place where there is disagreement. Some may argue that the positives, such as job creation, innovations in different sectors, like AI and logistics and contributions to global economy, can outweigh the downsides.

As AI becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, it poses new challenges in terms of authorship, authenticity and ethics. How can we use these machines and not just makethem sense?

It wasn’t just the machine that was hiding behind that too good-to-be true curtain. The GPT models, and others, are trained by human labor under sometimes exploitative circumstances. Many of the training data were the creative work of humans before her. She writes, “I had created artificial language about grieving by extracting real human beings’ language about it.” The creative ghosts of the model were created with code, but they were also made by people. Vara’s essay may have also helped to cover up this truth. Vara, in the final essay of her book, offers a mirror-image of these AI call-and response exchanges. She sends out anonymous surveys to women of different ages and then presents the answers to each question one by one. She asks the women to “Describe something that does not exist.” The women respond with “God.” (Lost it. “Real people contradict eachother, joke, yell and mourn. Vara gives us the full roaring crowd of human creativity, instead of a single authoritative speaker–an editor or a company style guide. Vara asks her group, “What is it like to live?” “It depends,” a woman replies. David Hajdu (19659015), now music editor at The Nation (19459010) and a former music critic for The New Republic (19459010), traces the history of the machines that humans have used to express themselves. The use of player pianos, microphones and synthesizers as well as electrical instruments was a technology that was initially sceptical before it became accepted and sometimes elevated in music and popular cultures. They influenced what people could and wanted to create. Electrical amplification allowed singers, for example, to reach a wider audience while still using a wide vocal range. The synthesizer brought a new sound lexicon to rock music. Hajdu asks this question inThe Uncanny Muse (). And “what is so great about being a human?”

But Hajdu is also interested in how intertwined the history of man and machine can be, and how often we’ve used one as a metaphor for the other. Descartes saw the body as empty machinery for consciousness, he reminds us. Hobbes wrote that “life is but a motion of limbs.” Freud described the mind as a steam engine. Andy Warhol told an interviewer that “everybody should be a machine.” And when computers entered the scene, humans used them as metaphors for themselves too. “Where the machine model had once helped us understand the human body … a new category of machines led us to imagine the brain (how we think, what we know, even how we feel or how we think about what we feel) in terms of the computer,” Hajdu writes.

But what is lost with these one-to-one mappings? What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1 s and 0 s? Maybe what happens is we get a world full of chatbots and agents, computer-­generated artworks and AI DJs, that companies claim are singular creative voices rather than remixes of a million human inputs. And perhaps we also get projects like the painfully named Painting Fool—an AI that paints, developed by Simon Colton, a scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He told Hajdu that he wanted to “demonstrate the potential of a computer program to be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right.” What Colton means is not just a machine that makes art but one that expresses its own worldview: “Art that communicates what it’s like to be a machine.”

What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1 s and 0 s?

Hajdu seems to be curious and optimistic about this line of inquiry. “Machines of many kinds have been communicating things for ages, playing invaluable roles in our communication through art,” he says. “Growing in intelligence, machines may still have more to communicate, if we let them.” But the question that The Uncanny Museraises at the end is: Why should we art-­making humans be so quick to hand over the paint to the paintbrush? Why do we care how the paintbrush sees the world? Are we truly finished telling our own stories ourselves?

Pria Anand might say no. In The Mind Electricshe writes: “Narrative is universally, spectacularly human; it is as unconscious as breathing, as essential as sleep, as comforting as familiarity. It has the capacity to bind us, but also to other, to lay bare, but also obscure.” The electricity in The Mind Electricbelongs entirely to the human brain—no metaphor necessary. Instead, the book explores a number of neurological afflictions and the stories patients and doctors tell to better understand them. “The truth of our bodies and minds is as strange as fiction,” Anand writes—and the language she uses throughout the book is as evocative as that in any novel.

In personal and deeply researched vignettes in the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Anand shows that any comparison between brains and machines will inevitably fall flat. She tells of patients who see clear images when they’re functionally blind, invent entire backstories when they’ve lost a memory, break along seams that few can find, and—yes—see and hear ghosts. In fact, Anand cites one study of 375 college students in which researchers found that nearly three-quarters “had heard a voice that no one else could hear.” These were not diagnosed schizophrenics or sufferers of brain tumors—just people listening to their own uncanny muses. Many heard their name, others heard God, and some could make out the voice of a loved one who’d passed on. Anand suggests that writers throughout history have harnessed organic exchanges with these internal apparitions to make art. “I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her own experiences with ghostly sounds. “I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation.” The mind in The Mind Electricis vast, mysterious, and populated. The narratives people construct to traverse it are just as full of wonder.

Humans are not going to stop using technology to help us create anytime soon—and there’s no reason we should. Machines make for wonderful tools, as they always have. But when we turn the tools themselves into artists and storytellers, brains and bodies, magicians and ghosts, we bypass truth for wish fulfillment. Maybe what’s worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to contribute our own voices to the lively and loud chorus of human experience. And we keep others from the human pleasure of hearing them too.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.