I’m on book tour, which means that wherever I go and whenever I can line something up, I’ll be giving a reading at bookstores, libraries, schools, and other venues, even virtual ones. As I do this, it has occurred to me that this may be one of a writer’s best defenses against the abuses of generative AI. Here you see me heading into Three Bells Books in Mason City, Iowa, with a box of physical books. We had a nice small crowd for an intimate reading that Saturday evening. I’ve had bigger and smaller turnouts in recent weeks, but the one thing that remains a constant is the human interactions I get to have.
That’s one thing, AI bots will never achieve. No matter how much the bots’ voices might improve or how convincing their interaction might become as they learn to mimic us better and better, they will never be more than a shallow copy of human experience. They will rely on reconfiguring and regurgitating the human experiences they take in through their large language models (including the unauthorized use of my last book, apparently), but they will have no direct experience of what it means to be human, to read or listen to a poem and feel the impact of those words resonnate with your own experience. They can only learn from us, but can’t become us (at least not until an AI is implanted in a living, breathing human body, which is a very scary thought (sorry)).
As a teacher, I’ve learned that one of the best ways to combat AI use by students is to develop a personal relationship with them, to work with them on their writing at every step in the process, to guide them, yes, to ensure that they are working on their own, yet also to let them know that what they write will utlimately be passed on to a real human being who values what they produce because I value their experience and their thought. Writing can no longer just be about the final product. It has to become about the journey that the person who wrote has gone on to reach that final product. That might be their intellectual journey, but is also and equally their very physical journey as an embodied person whose self gets poured into a paper, a story, or a poem.
As writers, we embody this principle when we give a reading. We are a living, breathing human being who obviously cares about the impact our words could have on the living, breathing human beings in front of us. The poems are no longer just about a final product, they are about the ability to communicate our experience (of life, of image, of language) to people whose lives or language or imaginations may be impacted by the experience. By reading (and talking about what we read), we not only prove that we wrote it, but we engage in conversation with those who gather to hear it. A reading is not just about the poems that were read; it is about where those poems take the room and how the people in that room react and give back to the writer through the conversation.
This can happen, too, in a virtual reading, but I predict there will be more and more emphasis on in-person literary events: readings, workshops, or salons of all kinds, as the public thirsts for more human interaction in response to the unfulfilling interactions with our increasingly technology-centered world (from the self-checkout at the grocery store to the customer service bots we all encounter online or on the phone).
What is most valuable about literature is its humanity — something we are in serious danger of losing right now — and what better way to show humanity than to show up in person, read from your work, and open yourself up to the vulnerability of taking questions. By doing so, we reaffirm the value of human interaction at a moment when so many forces seem to be moving away from the human in favor of the automated, the regurgitated lowest common denominator, and the predictable. By giving readings to a crowd of one or one hundred, writers can resist the tech-bro billionaires pushing a technology on us that most people didn’t ask for and don’t even want, simply by being human and putting our humanity out there through our words.
Kendall Dunkelberg 