I’m not going to go pick a fight with A.I., or even argue with the fact that this technology can mimic artwork, or assist humans in the creation of art, but I can say, right now, here, taking a break from working on my cat story, that A.I. will never be able to do what I can do because A.I. has never felt what I’ve felt. It will never move through the emotional matrix of living a singular, individual life.
Memory is filtered and turned around, examined and changed through time, and no machine has felt the pain that sits at the center of the story I’m struggling to create, a story that involves the complexity of race and love and desire that fueled me to imagine the first draft, and that now fuels me as I put it under intense scrutiny, every line, locating what the structure might reveal to me, the secret that I didn’t even know I was exposing when I first imagined it, the surprises that appear as I revise and cover my tracks, pulling down scaffolding that was built to support the original impulse, and in doing so, hopefully, lucking upon something profound, something readers will recognize in themselves as being uniquely human and, in the end, deeply mysterious.
A.I. will never feel the sense of mortality that forms around an unfinished draft, the illogic and contradictions of the human condition, and the cosmic unification of pain and joy that fuels the artistic impulse to keep working on a piece until it is finished and uniquely my own.
Artistic creation is something that, in the best moments, with a mixture of craft and care and release, flows beyond the self and whatever it is that the artist originally intended. No machine has felt the fear and jubilation I felt when I stood alone in the hallway of Columbia Presbyterian hospital — on a sizzling New York day — holding my baby twins swaddled in hospital towels, alone, establishing eye contact for the first time and feeling the isolation and responsibility and love that I felt. Just as no computer system, however advanced, will navigate a complex friendship with a person of another color or culture.
To be more specific; no computer has ever gone to Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., with its grandmother to watch the ships go through the locks, feeling not only the presence of the great ore boats moving into position to be lowered or raised, and certainly no machine has felt the presence of my grandmother in that moment years ago, back in the 1970s, as she stood beside me in a long green skirt and a fluffy white blouse, dressed up for the occasion, and then filtered that moment through memory up to this moment. No machine has sat on a hot summer night, with his head against the wall, listening to crickets chirping and faraway trains while it read “The Great Gatsby” for the first time and, at the same time, filtered that novel through my own family traumas, trying to connect one with the other and, at the same time, unknowingly, feeding a muse that would, years later, make me write stories of my own in my own way.
