I started watching Pluribus on Apple TV the other day. What can I say? A show about a curmudgeonly middle-aged lesbian writer made me feel seen.
I’m pretty sure there’s some alien invasion-type thing (may have dozed off during some key plot points) that infects the minds of nearly every person on the planet, except for the aforementioned crabbycake named Carol.
The people of this collective hive-mind act as if it’s utopia. They have all the knowledge and memories of every brain in the world, and they are kindly coercing Carol to join them. There is an apparent ease to everything they do, but Carol sees it as a form of enslavement. They cannot operate outside of this centralized thinking. They’ve essentially lost their minds.
The premise felt futuristic sci-fi for me, until I dove into a few book coaching sessions recently. I adore working with non-fiction writers who have the dream of becoming published authors. We wade into the metaphorical river with our sieves, scooping up long-buried sentiments in the sediment and shake the mundane out with the hopes of spotting those shiny flecks of gold that readers crave.
One of my writers confessed that he asked AI to outline his book. He dropped in a whole slew of potential topics, life memories and some previous journaling he had done. His Large Language Model program popped out a full book outline in record time that seemed to be pretty darn decent. It had a solid sequencing of stories and themes. It was clear, detailed, and organized. Perhaps he had found a writer’s utopia — a way to tap into the knowledge of a collective of authors’ brains. It was a time-saving path of ease on something that feels like a heavy lift to most writers.
There was nothing glaringly wrong with the outline for him to fix. It was technically his stories, matched against a common memoir structure in a way that made sense. Curious about how this virtually crowd-sourced (or crowd-stolen) knowledge might work out, I told him to try writing to the AI outline and let me know how it felt. We both discovered the disconnect.
Writing to the outline he was given started to have the energy of 9th grade English class homework. It was a task to complete now. The writing felt mechanical as he tried to connect each AI-driven dot to the next. Yes, it all made logical sense and there was a certain mental preservation by simply writing to the next prompt. He didn’t have to go through the labor of mining his own memory for what to share next, but perhaps that mining was part of the pleasure.
He lost the joy in the process, and with it, the heart of the story.
It’s like the difference between the Florida tourists who patiently scan the shoreline and dig into the wet sand hoping to uncover a shell that catches their eye, versus the tourist who buys the shell from the gift shop in pristine condition but with no effort attached. It’s always been the quirky, imperfect shells that come home with me. The memory of the effort it took is part of its value.
In our next coaching session, we agreed to toss the shiny outline to the side. Writing had to become fun again. Perhaps if we could be a bit more unserious about it, the readers would also pick up on that energy of creative joy. Maybe the story would meander more in its message, but the insights that emerged were more likely to be something worth keeping.
With the proliferation of AI in many areas of our lives, meant to bring efficiency and clarity, I’m also seeing an uptick in people asking to go back to the way things were. They’re eschewing the perfect polish for something that feels more real. Friends who once raved over having AI-created headshots for their business, are now shifting back to using professional photographers or even taking selfies because the energy is different. Writers are intentionally leaving typos in their work now (which is totally why I do it), because readers are now becoming endeared to them as the mark of a real human.
I’ve seen new complaints online about AI-written menus and burger ads from different restaurants that all seem to look the same. We’re falling into the strange Pluribus sameness, and, like Carol, are now seeking out those who still feel independent. Free. Like a rogue pupper at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, who may not win a prize but wins our hearts.
We want the quirky menu at the restaurant where every appetizer is named after an ABBA song. (Gimme! Gimme! Gimme some nachos? Yes, please). We want social media that doesn’t sound like “It was a quiet craving for dog food. Quietly asking you for a grain-free formula with 12 amino acids. Hungrily. Heartily. Healthfully. Not kibble, but the existential cornerstone of nutrition.” We want something other than the AI-slop novels, with their Chosen One protagonist named Kael or Elara, whose eyes “are the color of shattered hope.”
AI absolutely wins when it comes to efficiency. But do I believe that we will be “left behind” like the Gigantosaurus or BlackBerry phones if we don’t fully adopt it? Maybe. For me, I feel okay with being a Carol. Because this curmudgeonly writer knows that realness matters, and ease and adventure are never the same path.
Jillian Abby is the author of “Perfectly Queer” from Hay House and is on Substack at “Reframe with Jillian Abby.”
Sign up for the Watermark Out News eNewsletter and follow us for more:
BlueSky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok | Threads | YouTube
