What Are We Doing Here?

With AI closing in from every direction, threatening to colonize all human interaction, I’ve been thinking about what I do as a writer and trying to work out why it (still) matters—and why you’re here, reading this.

The truth is, writing’s always been under threat, not only from technology, but from the easier paths through life: the surface, the obvious, the already-said. AI is the latest incarnation of this threat, churning out “content” that sounds like writing but comes from nowhere and from no one. It produces text without memory or experience, without the friction and texture of a life that’s actually lived.

I’ve been reading J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, and it’s been a bracing tonic for these bewildering days. The book reminds us that “art arises from experience—from encounter, from the souls and bodies of living beings” and that “a picture made by an algorithm, however ‘black-boxed,’ can never equal even a rudimentary human doodle as testimony to the Real.”

Think about that for a moment: even a doodle, even the most casual mark made by a human hand, carries something an algorithm cannot touch—the fact of a lived life behind it and the accumulated weight of all the mornings and mistakes and moments that brought that hand to that page.

Real writing comes from life, from the specific textures and tones of a particular existence, from the walk I took this morning when light hit the pavement in a way that made me stop, from conversations that stayed with me for days, from books that cracked me open, from friends who told me the truth, from years spent in jobs, cities, relationships, this body.

This is what cannot be replicated. This is what will only grow more precious as we drown in what resembles writing but is only its hollow echo.

And this is where you come in.

Here’s something else I keep coming back to from Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: “Great art is made not for an abstract audience but for the lone percipient with whom it seeks to connect.” When I write, I’m not writing for everyone. I’m writing for you—the one person who needs exactly what I have to say, the reader who will recognize in my words something you’ve always known but never had language for. As Martel writes, the symbols that compose artistic works “can only emerge within a field of awareness…within the context of a life being lived.”

My life, my awareness, my particular way of moving through the world—that’s the field from which my work must grow, and your attention and willingness to meet me there are what complete the circle. We’re making stories together, you and I. Your reading is not passive consumption; it’s an act of co-creation and a salve against artifice.

I promise to keep paying attention, deeply and differently, to what haunts me. To reread the texts that astound me in search of the secrets they sought to disclose. To listen for the clues that hide in synchronicities, the scattered dreams, the things that won’t leave me alone.

And I ask something of you in return: Show up. Attend to the real. Read not to consume, but to be changed and to let the work work on you.

Because the work we do together—this act of writing and reading, of reaching across the page toward one another—is the work of slowing down and of listening to what’s underneath the noise and chatter of our perpetually connected lives.

Nothing, not even the seeming inevitability of AI’s domination, is written in the stars above. Everything is written from within. . .and completed in the space between writer and reader, where you and I meet.