The Hip Hop of Writing

If you’re a writer like me, reading and hearing about the ongoing feud between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), like most of the news these days, puts the fear of God into you. Or aka the Apocalypse, the end of original writing is nigh because here comes Artificial Intelligence! The Antichrist! And what’s it gonna do? It’s gonna replace originality, the bedrock, the potential greatness, the shot at the moon from which every newbie writer must launch. Let’s face it. Nobody launches their newly minted masterpiece without believing it’s their rising star.

Without that hope, there is no hope.

I have always had an ear for good writing. I hear words like popular music. That is, I will use a word in a sentence, and a sentence in a paragraph, almost purely based on how the words sound and not whether they make the best sense. This is not to say that writing has come easily for me. I work at it. I work with an editor and I re-write, re-write and re-write. I like the sound of that much better than the meaning of that, which reminds me of the saying, attributed to Thomas Edison, that I grew up hearing: “Success is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration,” or that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Since I knew I was no genius, I never liked the meaning of that, nor the sound of it.

For me, writing is very hard work. Only occasionally can I hit the ball out of the park with a really zinging sentence that hits the nail on the head right in onomatopoeia’s solar plexus.

My sympathies are with the Hollywood writers who are currently picketing against the AAMP. I write psychological thrillers that are a series, so of course I imagine what I write would make a great HBO series. Everyone says so. I just need my writing to get under the right noses. But that’s not my point here in this blog. Here my point is, without knowing diddley about Artificial Intelligence, I think of it as the Bugaboo coming to take away my shot at success.

He begins his conclusions with the following declaration: “Linguistic AI is no messiah, and it is no anti-Christ. It is a fundamentally mysterious tool whose confounding inabilities will be as surprising as its wondrous capabilities.” When he threw that stake in the ground, I knew I better listen up.

So, the other day I came across an article in the Atlantic Monthly that caught my eye because of its catchy title: The Future of Writing Is a Lot Like Hip-Hop, by Stephen Marche. Like a cool looking label on wine, or the cover of a book, and the association of writing with hip hop grabbed me. And here’s what I learned.

Marche says, speaking about both the WGA and the AMPTP: “Neither side knows exactly what it’s talking about, but they feel they have to fight about it anyway.” That got my attention. Here’s the gist of Marche’s article.

Very little of all the talk about AI comes out of anyone’s experience using AI. When Marche was approached to write a novel generated with AI, he jumped on it, and subsequently wrote a mystery entitled Death of an Author. He was clear that his experience using AI to write it was equally “phantasmagoric and grounding.”

After describing his process of writing the novel, Marche comes to some pretty startling conclusions, that are worth listening to, essentially because he now can say he speaks from experience. And that gives him a leg up in my book.

He begins his conclusions with the following declaration: “Linguistic AI is no messiah, and it is no anti-Christ. It is a fundamentally mysterious tool whose confounding inabilities will be as surprising as its wondrous capabilities.” When he threw that stake in the ground, I knew I better listen up.

And I admit, what he goes on to conclude rocked me big time. He basically says that if you value human originality, which I always have and still do, forget it. Originality died a long time ago and we are currently riding the rapids of the most derivative period of human creativity since the Industrial Revolution. As evidence, he lists all the top grossing movies of 2022 as sequels. Bummer! In my head, I demanded my brain to provide me with a counter argument, but my creative brain failed me.

However, Marche comes up with some good news – I think. Because of his own access and familiarity with the world of technology he claims his awareness of the limitations and the possibilities of AI give him credibility. He likens the process of using AI to hip-hop. How does that work?

When the original hip-hop DJ, Kool Herc, took two turntables and a microphone in 1973 in the Bronx, and used them to isolate and repeat a funk beat, what he did was completely derivative since he was replaying a piece from a hit record over and over again. And yet, he was also doing something equally original: inventing the break. According to history, hip-hop burst out of that moment, creating a whole new genre that dominates music today.

So, who knows? Maybe writers who start to experiment with AI may lead us into something none of us have ever heard, read, or experienced before.

How am I going to use this information? If it’s all derivative to start with, play with the pieces, throw words around, toss the rules and let it all fly out!

The Hip Hop of Writing

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