[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.)