Thoughts, Musings, & an Update on ACR

In an era of technology similar to and yet so vastly different from the depictions of the future we envisioned in Star Trek and Back to the Future, the current landscape of AI is startling. Aside from the various ethical issues that AI poses, my decision not to use it is largely rooted in the simple fact that I've never felt I needed to. For everything that AI can offer me, I can also do it myself. I can draw, I can write, I can research, and there is power in that... but as of late, it seems almost impossible to escape this presence that we've built to answer a call for a need that was never realized. Even as I write this, an AI engine offers to write this post for me, to generate words and images based off of a scrap of an idea.

Since I published A Clockwork Melody, a lot has changed. It feels fruitless to go into the specifics of a declining journey of health, since so much of it is the same story told differently, told anew. I've said before that much of Charlotte, Dante, and Jasper's journeys mirror my own, but in truth theirs is only a small part of mine. As I struggle with a body that is failing me and a mind that seems intent on betraying me, that ever present force that promises to generate endlessly seems tempting for the first time. And I hate that.

Endless creation is not costless creation. My art has already fallen victim in the past to some of the multiple incidences of data-mining used to feed AI algorithms, because while we call it AI, this is a misnomer. It may one day reach a point of true artificial intelligence, but what we have created is machine learning, and that is exactly what it does -- it learns, it consumes, it regurgitates. As someone who grew up autistic and was accused of parroting without possessing original thought, the irony is not lost on me. To be compared to a robot is almost as commonplace as being compared to an alien, or a changeling.

But despite my ethos, when my hands and my wrists ache so much it prevents me from drawing, when my mind feels like a vast and starless night, what then? When AI now offers me something that I seem to be physically or emotionally incapable of doing myself, has it created enough need to justify molding my morals around it? To permit something previously inexcusable for the sake of progress?

To say nothing of the current climate, as the country burns and we rapidly approach a great and terrible conflict. I've always found myself drawn to dystopia, but it becomes increasingly difficult to write a dystopian society when you find yourself living in one. What place does art have in the landscape of oppression?

I've said this to my partner, and I will try to take my own advice in this dilemma; now more than ever, the world needs art. When met with the cynical opinion that humanity has contributed nothing good, I have always been a staunch believer that the arts are the best of us. Our words, our songs, our stories -- preserved in oil and ink. I think the worst thing we ever did was to suppress and delegitimize the arts, because in doing so we suppressed the very drive we had to exist.

All this to say -- I don't know when I can finish A Clockwork Requiem. It has remained ever present in my thoughts, and I am always thinking about the characters, how their stories grow and evolve, and how their tales will eventually end... but the act of writing it, at least for the time being, seems to be beyond my capabilities for the moment. And if anyone is going to write this book, it's going to be me. I would rather wait until I am feeling well enough to finish this story myself than to have an attempted amalgamation of human intellect create an imitation of what might have been.

There is freedom in being a small, unknown creator. I'm writing stories for myself, with no deadlines or expectations beyond my own indeterminate lifespan. There has been no small amount of guilt over not having finished A Clockwork Requiem yet, and that guilt has lingered and festered for many months... until I finally came to the realization that there is no due date for this book to be finished. I have no publisher demanding a draft from me, and there is power in that. I don't have readers pressuring me to finish a story, and there is freedom in that.

Until next time, friends -- may this story be even better for the additional time I take to write it.

Love,

JP