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“Curse AI Forever!” said Chuck. “Not so fast! But yeah, maybe,” said Mike.

Posted by :James Howden On : August 26, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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[5-minute read.]
[Like everybody, I mutter about AI, but author Chuck Wendig RAGES. My buddy and fellow scribbler Michael P. Freeman, an occasional guest voice here on JH.com, also has thoughts on the subject, but has more fun.]

Wendig’s website objected to my borrowing a cool author-with-Destroy-AI-teeshirt photo. Fair. This Atlantic cover on AI will have to do. As ever, courtesy of my bedside table.

THE WENDIGO’S LATEST “AI IS AN ABOMINATION!” JEREMIAD,

to be followed immediately by

MICHAEL P. FREEMAN’S FREESTYLE RETORT,

with supplementary elucidations and distractions by

A READER AND WRITER OF HIGHLY LOCAL RENOWN.

Chuck Wendig is a friend of mine, but he doesn’t know it. He’s an American writer that I first listened to for his friendly, no-nonsense, practical, encouraging and way more profane than Steven Pressfield advice for writers, mainly in his books: Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative has nuts and bolts and screwdrivers, while Gentle Writing Advice: How To Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself is more of a blueprint/guidebook to the writing life. (And a sweeter approach, I’m told, from his earlier Kick-Ass Writer e-book.) I’ve enjoyed his on-line presence on socials and am on the list for emails from his own site. I have also, for years, kept a photocopy of a storified series of his tweets on writing close to my own scribbling nook; it’s currently taped in the back of my journal. In his usual irreverent and humble style, it was called “Ranty-panties Grr-Talk About Writery Things”, which he described as “an arse-kicking essay with 21 abrasive feet”. (I hear Number 19: “Your excuses are not interesting. Your fear is not valuable. Your doubt is killing you. Hold your nose and dive the f**k in.” It’s super-loud right now, for example.)

He’s mainly a novelist, though, and an astoundingly productive one. He’s primarily known as a horror writer, with lots of comparisons made to Stephen King, especially for an epic dystopian-America plague novel called Wanderers, which took me in completely and is the “best” of his books, in the gospel according to Chuck. (This little diversion reminds me to seek out its sequel, Wayward. Done. Thanks, Ottawa Public Library!) He’s written in the Star Wars universe, and I liked two in the “Aftermath” series. He’s written about evil apples, death-visioning girls and haunted staircases in the woods among his two dozen adult and YA novels. He’s a MACHINE.

Well, actually he’s a self-described “meat-brain” who remorselessly “type type types” away on an ergonomic keyboard, makin’ stuff up and writin’ it down, and who ABSOLUTELY HATES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and its apparent unthinking inevitability. Hence, I retract the “machine” epithet. (But he’s a remarkably driven wordsmith, eminently human though he be.) One of his recent essays – it begins as a strangled, coughing, curse-laden series of imprecations that quickly resolves itself into a thoughtful (but unapologetically enraged) essay about AI and literature and creativity – came into my Inbox from terribleminds.com. It’s called “YOU CANNOT USE ONE BULLSHIT MACHINE TO CATCH ANOTHER BULLSHIT MACHINE”.  Sample phrases (because Wendig is a nimble, aggressive and memorable composer of both foolery and grandly indignant locutions):

“I hate AI because it steals our books, and then then it pukes up and shits out all our books into one half-digested pile, and then everyone reads the shitpuke it pukeshitted up and then they see ‘AI tells’ in it…”

“I think people who use AI in any capacity for [creative] writing are…at worst (and most common)…lazy unethical worms who care nothing for the craft or the end result or for other writers or for their readers….[T]hey are glad to help destroy the entire foundations of art and literature all so they can get their little kicks without having to do a single iota of actual work….Slop-slags. Word-stealers. Greasy leeches.

“ANYWAY I AM SORRY I AM YELLING…” he (nearly) concludes.

The whole rant is worth a read, if you’ve been thinking about the implications of AI at all, especially from the artistic point of view. (And if your profanity vaccines are up-to-date.)

Michael P. Freeman, meanwhile, is also a friend of mine — which he knows, and too well. Chuck Wendig’s “Bullshit Machine” piece is especially worth reading if you have the stamina to finish this (come on, it’s not really all that long) post, because what follows is Freeman’s tongue-not-entirely-in-cheek (but still rather cheeky) response to Wendig’s AI outrage. Mikey was on a short list of email sons, friends and other writers to whom The Rantings of The Wendigo had also been commended.

Here’s what Michael P. had to say:      

“Well, Chuck, me thinks thou doth protest too much. You sound like a puritanical kid about to have the mask ripped off; a wry, innocent smirk after mother discovers the cat has been shaved.

“‘Meat-brain’, you called yourself – but now with silicon chips. If yer on line, yer using AI. Type type type of the electric upgrade from the thump thump thump of the Walt Whitman broken silence of the cool crisp writing air as he pounds away on his old Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. Much noisier than the handwritten silence of his writing youth.

“So, you don’t like, dare I say hate, AI as an intrusion on your sensibilities. It’s an affront to your technique and style. You make valid points buried deep inside your profane rant. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like a good string of profanity myself. I especially liked your ‘then everyone reads the shitpuke it pukeshitted up’. Quite the visual you’ve created. And one that AI has already targeted for extraction, to be placed into some marketing genius’s presentation selling barf bags to wayward travellers on the new trans-Atlantic Chunnel Train.

“Is it that you don’t like progress? I’d bet that Thor and Grog grunted about the invention of charcoal pictographs on cave walls. Ugg. Goh. Wagot mah nogot. Ugg. Translation: ‘How’s this going to change our communication style?’ Do you think that the monks were impressed when Gutenberg posted a flyer, fresh off his printing press, denouncing cloistered handwriting covens of book copiers? Do you think pencil manufacturers were overjoyed when the first feather was plucked out of a duck’s ass and the quill pen was born?

“No.

“Modernization sucks. Especially for those that made a living from previous technologies. Hard time transitioning? It’s like frikkin’ toddlerhood all over again. Everything is new! I can’t figure it out! I can’t keep up! I’d better whine and cry to anyone that’ll listen and wet myself in the process, for good measure.

“AI sucks. But so does scouring tomes looking for one elusive quip, only to realize how I’ve romanticized it into importance, wasting days in the process. There are so many faults with AI. And the concepts of plagiarism and intellectual property have been bastardized and redefined, so as to turn them into paragons of virtuous behaviour in today’s literary world.

“Data centres are winning rights to water while earthlings are told that water is a privilege, not a human right. Land grabs and zoning adjustments are turning small North American towns into uninhabitable slums with anti-circadian rhythms and rampant unemployment.

“And! Most of the regurgitated slop that spews from AI intervention is just plain unreadable. But, it’s getting harder to detect. Who knows, maybe this rebuttal is the work of a skilled AI user who’s trained his AI tool to create marginally coherent blather that approximates intellectual scrutiny?

“Just for fun,

Michael Freeman”

And now you know why I like these two guys. And why my brief but torrid love affair with a certain Claude Code ended.

(Keep thinking, kids! READIN’ an’ WRITIN’. Thinking on purpose. Fighting cognitive surrender every day and every way.)

Kurt Vonnegut (on the usefulness of the arts)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 11, 2014
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Category: He Said/She Said

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It’s Vonnegut Week, I guess. I’m re-reading Fates Worse Than Death, which has suddenly jumped the queue ahead of Bill McKibben’s Enough (readable, surprisingly funny for a grim assessment of our more is better! culture) and Seth Davis’s Wooden: A Coach’s Life (which I want to plough through uninterrupted). Given that Wooden and Vonnegut may be my top two American heroes — and hey, come to think, McKibben’s not a lot lower on that list — it’s not shocking that fiction is (again) on a lower shelf, not to mention the stack of magazines that arrived in our Ottawa mailbox during our last year in China. Woe is my reading list. (Reading lust.)

The following bit of KV is not from FWTD, or from Palm Sunday, its predecessor as a Vonnegut “autobiographical collage”. It’s from a more recent book called A Man Without a Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush’s America — again, non-fiction, but even stronger in its searingly angry, despairing and somehow still spookily funny condemnation of the ruling elites in the U.S.A. (Canada currently has little, other than good luck, to boast about in this regard. Don’t get smug, Canucks.) This was among the happier quotes, one that gets cited again and again, and mostly out of context. I still like it out of context, and I print it below in this way because it contains one of KV’s goofy autograph/self-portraits.

A little context: the passage actually begins, ““If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is…” Adding that opening — which most quotation-hounds subtract, and now I’m among them — gives back the true bite of this shard of Vonnegutian advice.

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Ken Robinson (education as strip-mining)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 5, 2009
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth – for a particular commodity – and for the future, it won’t serve us.”

                                     Sir Ken Robinson, English educator and author, in his well-known address to the TED conference.  www.ted.com/index.php/…/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

If I Had Only Had…

Posted by :James Howden On : November 7, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s a perfect day to account for my failings as a writer, quite apart from the practical consideration that I have to teach school today. The call came. It came to me. I’m a class act.

I find myself at one of the real centres of juvenile creativity in Canada, Canterbury High School. It’s a specialized arts school. The annual musical is spectacular, and a far more important event than any number of Big Football Games. (Actually, there is no football at Canterbury. There aren’t even that many boys at CHS; it’s about a 70/30 split. The kids who attend here because they live in the immediate district are also a minority. They’re called “Generals”, as opposed to “Visuals” or “Instrumentals” or “Vocals”, and they can find it a hard place to come in some respects. The place is crammed with keeners who applied from all over the region to come here and dance, sing, play, act, paint, sculpt and write. It may still be the only school in the country with a Literary Arts program. My family’s move to Ottawa five years ago was made, in large measure, because Son the Third had been admitted here as a ninth-grade writer. It was a 500-kilometre move, and an easy decision, finally, and a wonderfully fruitful one.

Replacing Ms. Barkley today, my Dave’s ninth- and twelfth-grade writing guru, I’m in a class where to write myself seems not only possible but necessary. Grade 12s. Supremely pleasant and diligent and highly motivated, which does not suggest that they are not also distracted by the epic conversational possibilities with fellow writers they’ve shared and performed and edited and sweated with for four years now. Still, they don’t need much from me. It’s a strange kind of a high school. It’s beyond okay to be smart, to read, to care about social issues and cultural richness. Among the seniors, it verges on being a requirement, which explains why coming from the school catchment area without actually belonging to the Arts Canterbury crowd can be a bit of a trial. Generals. Of course, it could be a rich and fascinating place to wind up in if, say, you were a smart, sophisticated and confident adolescent, unbounded by cliques and suspicion. In other words, for only a few.

But back to me. (It’s all about me.) I am prone to think, Gosh. Sons One and Two would have been so much more at home or challenged or stimulated by a high school experience like this one. But I am also subject to selfish and exculpatory thoughts: Damn, if I’d been exposed to the idea that writers were real, if I’d had the chance to be among other kids that read as much or more than I did, if I’d been encouraged to write and party ARTY when I was young, I wouldn’t find the literary learning curve so steep in my advancing age. I coulda bin a contendah. I coulda bin a star. Yeah, I just didn’t get the breaks. Sigh. Et cetera.

All of which helps me not at all, but it’s a soothing diversion. And it’s writing, and so am I. And it’s now. And the bell hasn’t even rung yet. Maybe I’ll even get around to posting about the WritersFest, as I recently promised.

ODY: Week 6 (42/365). Old, Blue, Borrowed and New.

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Just picking up Old Dog hairs from your carpet for the first time? The creation myth is here, and the first step is here.

I spent the first part of the week at a training seminar in Toronto, bunking at Sue and André’s place in a cozy Beaches neighbourhood. I’d dragged the guitar along, and kept the faith with some late-night strumming on Sunday. On Monday night, I got caught. André, husband of my wife’s old friend Sue, came home from work late and heard something that reminded him of music in his spare bedroom. He poked his head in to praise Sue for dusting off her guitar. Instead, he found me playing the ol’ Dégas in my underwear. Hurray! Male bonding!

I was training as a facilitator for the Virtues Project , an approach to teaching, child-rearing and relationships that puts fundamental human goodness right up front. Guitar Virtuosity was on my mind. Let’s examine a partial list:

Courage? (Check. Terrified of this thing, started anyway.)
Creativity? (Okay. I am making things. Basement noises. Muttering blogs.)
Enthusiasm? (Muted. Taking a jock approach: never too high, never too low. Should make more whoopee. Not what you’re thinking, though that’s not a bad idea, either.)
Determination? (Check. Day 42, kids!)
Diligence? (Long past due, but duly done.)
Humility? (If I needed more, this newfound clumsiness really helps.)
Idealism? (Larded with practicality and order, but hopefulness leaks through.)
Orderliness? (I have a good place. As for time, though, I shoe-horn practice into the absolute heel of my day, and the night-time, blues be damned, ain’t necessarily the right time…)
Patience? (Man, it doesn’t come easily, but it comes. Haven’t thrown anything. Yet.)
Self-discipline? (42 in a row argues for Yes, but the frayed edges of disappointment try to shout them down. I am disciplining Self to listen more to column A. All those days, whether purposeful or not, count. “90% of life is just showing up,” saith the prophet Woody Allen. I have showed up at fretboard and keyboard.)

Virtues I haven’t the nerve to acknowledge yet as part of this off-key odyssey:

Confidence. (A rumour, a far-away voice. So far, will and embarrassed enthusiasm rule.)
Excellence. (I have, however, just emerged from a pothole in the footpath to the parking lot next to the on-ramp to the road to excellence. That counts.)
Joyfulness. (I hear its giggle, but it runs away when I look.)
Service. (Hard to see what this does for others. Nobody-but-me for the moment…)

Tuesday was Day 3 of the Virtues seminar, and I was presenting some ideas and exercises on COMMITMENT. In part to counter-balance some of the syrupy-sweet or new-age ethereal music that had been played – but mainly to jumpstart my own courage (and humility!) – I went LIVE. I played a perverse kind of musical chairs (If you call that music. If you call those chairs!) with my new best friends. I had them scribbling some ideas in response to questions and challenges, and I (mercifully) didn’t give them much time to write. Mercifully, because their writing time was defined by my playing of “A Blues Riff”, first very slowly (à la Week 2 and 3) and, later in the exercise, as fast as I could go. Going public. Visible (and risible) commitment. (Merde, did I make a lot of mistakes!) Concentration was probably hard for them, as I inserted some startlingly realistic enactments of mock frustration. It was lively, let’s say that, and we laughed a lot. (Commitment is too often a grim, ominous and guy-unfriendly concept.) And that turned out to be my playing for the day, because I wasn’t back to my borrowed bunk ‘til 1:30 a.m., with an important meeting about the Old Dog Year the next morning, bright and early. But most importantly, I chose an intimate circle of gracious encouragement. So many pats on the back, so much praise for this tiny outreach to the Muse of music. I smiled and smiled.

The Wednesday meeting was an assessment of interest about this Guitarzan spasm of learning and all the on-line thinking I’m doing about it. Interest? ‘Fraid not. A busy man had the courtesy to indulge me with a meeting but hadn’t even looked at the submitted collection of entries on the first 31 days of the Old DogYear. Garn! I’ve learned what doesn’t work, anyway. And then it was the long trip home and another exhausted midnight guitar run. Commitment feels strong, though confidence is wobbling. This would have been the night of my second group lesson, but I missed it. I wonder how much farther KW took us.

The end of the week found me back in the beloved basement. Same old stuff. The dullard within. But doing all this repetition feels like early summer days, when the strengthening sun slowly burns off the fog of morning. KW had thrown lots of chords at us, and they’re coming. I’m starting to remember how to configure the C chord, but I’m also hearing what C sounds like and how it speaks to G and D. The little finger-picking sequence that the guitar guru showed us, an initially unruly little gang of 4 notes, began to resolve itself into a smooth and brainless pattern. Look, Ma, no eyes! It’s very relaxing, actually, quite a mind-emptying finger-dance where the digits are starting to remember their steps without my help. Sweet. A little less old. A little less blue.

And a LOT less borrowed, broken-necked Dégas guitar because, on Sunday, I finally pulled a Major Commitment Trigger by buying A NEW GUITAR. My guitar! I wanted to dance and giggle but, to my credit (or shame), I took it all in stride. It’s a Walden guitar – a D550, baby! – a solid-topped beauty that I got on sale for $200 at the Ottawa Folklore Centre. It’s a folk guitar, not low-rent classical as the Dégas was, so the strings are metal rather than nylon. The B and high E strings are like razor wire, so there is another level of fingertip toughening to come. They’re also the same colour as the – what is it, the pick-guard?—that guitar-body armour below the sound hole, so these eyes have trouble picking them out. Guitar Guy at the OFC spoke warmly and knowingly about my Walden, and I feel good about this machine. I bought a stand, an electronic tuner and a humidifier, none of which I know how to work yet. The humidifier is a fairly simple and obvious thing, though I hadn’t considered how dryness could affect a wooden instrument. I’m not sure how it sits, so that’ll be Question 67 or 68 when I go for the next groupthink lesson in a couple of days.

It’ll be fun to show off my new lovely, but I’m scared to play with her. She makes sweet and unfamiliar sounds that my borrowed love was incapable of making. The music we made was obviously much more full and rich, but I strummed as if I was nervously coaxing melody from a crystal vase. I missed the Dégas. This new friend doesn’t yet sit comfortably with me. I wanted to whale away with my mock solos and percussive energy, but I felt nervous and reserved. I wanted things to feel comfortable right away, ‘cause heck, she’s beautiful, she has a gorgeous voice and body, it’s a fresh and exciting start and besides, that first date had cost me a pretty penny! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there were those awkward pauses in the conversation, that I was unsure about how to treat her and how she might respond to my overtures. It was a tense kind of fun, though, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing each other again.

Fumbling Toward Creativity

Posted by :James Howden On : December 4, 2005
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve been working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, one of the most intelligent and illuminating personal development books I’ve come across. It’s an openly spiritual (and determinedly non-religious) take on the act of creation, and its message is simple: there’s a Creator, whatever you choose to call Him/Her/That; the world may be material but it is infused with spirit (and so are we); creativity is not some hoarded magic bestowed only on the few, but essential to human life and accessible by the many. The book asks a lot – it’s a 12-week program in “creative recovery” and there’s a lot of work involved in finding that free and open acceptance of our possibilities.

And Carol invited me to talk about art and spirituality at a meditative gathering she does in her home. We prayed, we talked about the forms and the importance that creativity takes in our lives – beauty, order, reverence, making, delight – and then we demolished gorgeously adorned trays of spirit-lifting goodies. Sweet. I’ll do that again, even if the food is not so smacktacular. “Tapping the Creativity Within” was our title; sounds like maple-syrup time. And it was, actually. I was suggesting that we need to provide an outlet for the sweet and juicy stuff that unceasingly flows from our spiritual roots to our intellectual (and hand-some) leaves. Nice. I like this image because it makes art something useful, delicious, natural. Sappy if necessary, but not necessarily sappy.