Lab Notes
Stuff I’m thinking about that have something to do with writing and creating.
Interesting preprint paper comparing human writing to AI-generated writing
A new paper by Jenna Russell, Rishanth Rajendhran, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer, John Wieting from the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind dropped. They analysed over 60 000 stories written by both humans and AIs. A ginormous sample.
In the paper, AI stories were detected as being more direct and clear. This ended up in flat storylines, clean narratives, and explicit morals.
Human authors have been shown to write implicitly, allowing their texts to be understood in different ways or using their texts as vehicles for researching or expanding the writing prompts, not handing meaning over to the reader.
More importantly, human authors show greater diversity.
The differences are not found just in the writing styles used (from my experience, humans that write clearly get unfairly flagged as using AI), but the narrative structures beneath the surface styles as well.
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction paper from arXiv
My take
This analysis speaks to the importance of the human experience in writing and the use of subtext in fiction. Machines treat text as statistics, that’s how they predict output. That’s not how you write emotionally impactful stories. You don’t get to math your way into linguistic mastery.
As a reader, I want to read stories that challenge me. I want messy streams of consciousness, original voices, and none of those things can be mimicked. If it’s not there, there’s no amount of machine play-pretend that can come close. Writing fiction is not what machine learning is best used for anyway.
The thinking machine
For me, there’s nothing more exciting than spending time in quiet thought. Hear me out. I know it’s not on par with paragliding.
If you ever read a crime novel dying to find out who did it or watched a film that kept you glued to the screen, you’ll know the feeling I’m talking about. It’s that natural desire to find out what happened, to explore unknowns, to know what goes bump in the night. It’s at the basis of storytelling, it’s the hook or the inciting incident that gets you interested in something.
Sometimes, it looks like something that catches your attention while passing under everyone else’s radar.
‘Thinking’ might include:
Entertaining inarticulate thoughts you just can’t seem to push aside
Daydreaming
Finding relevant articles
Making notes out of what I noticed (this also reinforces memory, especially if the notes are handwritten)
Taking a different point of view
Going back and forth
Making new connections
Learning from available case studies
Testing out concepts
Digging through academic sources
Making hypotheses
Making projections
Being aware of what I know
Being painfully aware of what I don’t know
It’s very similar to what we think ancient Greek philosophers were doing when they were trying to make sense of the physical and the metaphysical world. Only you don’t get to have philosophical discussions on the streets anymore. Today, you have to get a job and go to work for that.
The best thinking machine today isn’t a calculator or an AI computer. It’s your own mind.
The common thread to producing great work, whether it’s an oil painting, a philosophical thesis, or a piece of code is the thinking that needs to be invested for the work to get made. Whenever I see people trying to skip the thinking part, which is the hard part (naturally, because using your brain makes you tired), it doesn’t end well, ever. The road to hell is paved in shortcuts.
Humans are natural thinkers, it’s what helped our ancestors survive and got us to where we are today. Maybe you’ll get an adrenaline rush when you jump out of a plane, but you’ll also get a dopamine reward when you get to the bottom of something you pursued because of your natural-born curiosity.
Transferable skills
Way back when, I used to train dance and performance semi-professionally. Anyone who meets me today would never guess, but when I would take a pilates or martial arts class, I would be arguably better than an average person of the same experience level.
Why? Because I already had coordination skills and knew precisely where my body was in space in relation to other bodies in that same space.
Fast forward a couple of years later, in the trenches of being a freelance writer. When I would apply to some gigs, sometimes I’d get a rejection saying I’m not the right kind of a writer. They were looking for a particular kind of specialization, and I wasn’t it, or they just didn’t see that I was, in fact, “it”.
Now specializations are a thing. But they are a thing that has something to do with knowledge. And knowledge, friends, is something attainable, especially when you know what you’re doing and where you need to look.
Today, I don’t perform modern dance on a stage anymore and I’m sure my knees would say thanks if they could. Instead, I started to work in marketing and events, then on computer games, and then on software products, all in the capacity of, basically, a writer.
How did I manage all those quick leaps? And how did I learn stuff in marketing that helped me be a narrative designer and how did narrative design help me be a UX writer… not to mention how useful screenwriting ended up to be when there’s a sudden need to produce a video, but make it very fast.
Here’s the thing. When I learn something new, I spend a lot of time on a single skill and that’s expensive because it’s time you never get back. It better be worth it, right? So I never learn something that I can’t apply to many other aspects of my work. Wherever I look, I look for connections. Here cometh the lesson:
Context to a writer is what physical space is to a dancer. As in recognizing what’s the situation and what it needs from you. It’s the key that unlocks your brain.
A lot of people like to work on repeat and think others do too, that’s what’s good with specializations. But specialists are not that safe of a bet. You need to be on the lookout for people who know what to do when they see something new. This is what it means to have a transferable skill.
Worry ruins the work
How to stand your ground against doubt in the writing process.
Have you ever worked on something for a while, thinking it’s good progress, just to start asking too many questions at the wrong times?
Writing on your own
Using those questions to make changes you didn’t really think are in character with what you had planned at the beginning. Bit by bit … until the work stopped raising doubts about how it would appear in the public’s eye, but it didn’t feel good anymore.
That’s called overthinking and it’s a trap.
Asking the wrong type of question too early, questions fueled by emotional shortcomings and hidden fears, before the work had a chance to stand on its own legs, is a recipe for disaster in any line of work.
I’ve seen the same thing come up both in creative writing groups and in corporate settings where people may think they are above the pitfalls non-professional enthusiasts fall in. On the contrary, the dynamics of self-doubt affect humans pretty much everywhere. We’re all susceptible.
The secret of working with or in spite of doubt is to treat it no different than drinking a cup of coffee. You need to feel comfortable in dealing with the unknown. Working on anything, the next big American novel, a triple A game, a productivity app, it all involves a lot of unknowns.
The unknown is your best friend.
It feels counterintuitive, but the right thing to do here is to stay calm and not let panic control your actions. You let that energy of the unknown wash all over you, give you ideas, present bumps on the road. The thing with energy is it never goes away, it shifts from one form to another. So instead of panicking, being afraid, or worse, throwing things away, you keep riding that wave, using the energy to produce something of actual worth.
Debilitating doubt is a symptom of not being in control of the self. It feels like fuzz in the mind. Like an unknown entity telling you what to think, what to do. That’s your internal critic.
By all means, do not ignore it. Voice the worry you have, to get it outside of yourself. To take power away from it. But don’t let it take control of the work.
You’re always the one who’s in control.
Working in a group
Especially, be careful in group settings. To a group, voicing concern can behave like wildfire. A virus that takes over every member of a group through a set of social conventions and the cavemen instinct of needing to mimic belonging.
When it comes to other people, the worst type of critic is a vocal, confident one, without experience of their own or a single argument to stand on. You need to learn to shut voices like that down. Whether that means ignoring them completely, or opposing them with your own confidence backed up by actual experience.
I’ve always thought about reviewing, criticism, and groupthink like this:
You can talk anything down as a bad idea. And if not everyone is aware of that, bad things will happen.
A lot of good ideas die very early on as a result of self-doubt or groupthink.
When the group gets tired of talking everything they see down, suddenly the first other thing that gets shown ends up being “good enough.” Why? Nobody minds it.
It doesn’t make people uncomfortable. It doesn’t create impressions or reactions. Usually that’s a symptom of being mid-ground, something everybody can say it’s okay, but it’s not great or the best or the worst.
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
Something you publish ends up being not good enough. So what? Most things are.
Did it still produce a good result? Did you learn something from the experience? Did it lead to a new opportunity?
Aurora borealis by NOAA from their photo library, here to symbolize the unknown.