So is Everybody Giving Up On, Like... Doing Things?

automating everything in order to spend more time watching our own brains turned to porridge by algorithms

This post isn’t really about AI, so relax.

There’s a lot of reasons that I don’t use LLMs in my written work, many of them related to the ongoing and deep deficiencies of their output when that output is analyzed with any concern for deeper layers of aesthetics and sophistication. But I also would never have an LLM generate text for me because… generating text, to put it unromantically, is what I like doing. I will sometimes have Bing slop out a piece of art for one of my posts because I don’t have any skill in creating art and don’t really care that much about it. (I would pay somebody to do it, but something like 80% of my newsletter pieces are written the night before I publish them.) Nobody is subscribing to my newsletter because of the quality of the cover art and I would just as well be gone with all of it. (But Substack brass told me very confidently, years ago, that posts without art do much worse than those with, and I have a 6.25% mortgage to pay, so.) What I do care about is the words. And of course I do. I became a writer because reading and writing are the only interests I’ve ever really had, the only things I’ve ever been good at, the only activities I’ve ever cared about. I built a life as a writer because this is what I like to do. If I didn’t care for the actual process I would have become an actuary.

You can extend that research, to revision, even to being edited by others. I built a life around doing these things because this is what I love to do! It’s not a value judgment about what has meaning. It’s just a matter of what fulfills me.

And yet there’s an awful lot of writers out there who seem to be more and more unembarrassed about handing over the work of being a writer to ChatGPT, and if they’re as open as they are to farming out their work to a sophisticated autocomplete, they’re likely going even further than they have admitted. I just don’t get it. If this field were more mercenary, maybe I’d understand. But anybody who tries to live the life of a writer for fame and fortune, here in the 2020s, is a very deluded person. You’ve got to be motivated by the thing itself. My buddy James Frey has recently been trying to get attention by suggesting that he might use an AI to write his books. Aside from the inherent dishonesty in that… Why on earth be a writer, especially for a man who’s already quite wealthy and who insists (lol) that he doesn’t want the approval of others? Why be this thing, if you don’t like doing the thing inherent to being this thing? There are so many other jobs that you can do which provide a far more reliable path to financial security.

Like I said, this isn’t really about AI as such. It’s about a modern culture in which so many people seem unwilling to work for anything other than skipping work. I always laugh at social media “hustle” culture, not just because of its aesthetic absurdity and juvenile brand of machismo but also because the people within it have a very odd definition of hustling. If you dig into that world, you’ll find that a primary fixation lies in “side hustles” that are meant to represent supposedly passive income, like owning property and collecting rents. The question is, literally, “How can I get something for nothing?” This is all built on delusions - I assure you that being a landlord is very far from passive - but also underlines the fact that this culture valorizes work as an abstract demonstrator of value but has no actual intrinsic respect for work, itself. For effort, for struggle, for exertion. If you click a #hustle hashtag on Instagram you are very likely to find yourself looking at posts about crypto, which for most people at this level of sophistication represents the hope of buying a speculative asset and waiting around until it makes you rich. And you call this… hustling?

I guess there’s two different ways to interpret the word “hustle,” right? You have hustle like Pete Rose, hustle as in busting your tail to get the job done. But you also have hustle as in a hustle, a con, a trick. And I don’t think this is an issue of people preferring the latter definition to the former. I think it’s an issue of people not understanding the distinction.