In my freshman year of school at Bethany Lutheran College back in 1998, I elected to enroll in an 8 am English Literature (my first and last 8 am class, BTW). That semester, we were assigned to read two books. The first was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and the second was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (had to look it up).
Let's face it, Jane Eyre sucked, and it didn't take me long to realize it was not for me (I don't care how great a literary masterpiece it's considered to be), but I suffered through that first chapter until George and I realized that "There's a movie!" We called nearly every movie rental store in Southwest Minnesota, watched it in the middle of the night the day before our paper was due, and got a B+.
Great Expectations was easier. First of all, I loved the movie, and didn't hate what I read in the book, but I got one thing very wrong when I turned in my paper. The main character in the book is Pip, and in the movie, it's Finn. A small yet significant detail, your term paper should get right if you're writing a report on the BOOK.
Several things happened during that class. The first is easy; I realized I will never wake up that early for a college course again, but had I not, I wouldn't have met my best friend, George Kohlmann, who mistakenly enrolled in the same class. I also learned that if you read the first and last chapter of a book, and the first and last page of every chapter, you can write a B+ paper. The bigger lesson wouldn't come for years when I realized that I don't hate to read, and absolutely love to write.
And now, when all I want to do is write, I'm constantly thinking about whether my audience is questioning the validity of what I'm saying because of the gigantic elephant in the room.
Back in college, I would have given anything to have a tool like AI at my disposal to write those papers, as I'm sure George would, too. I joked how "we would rather die" than read "Jane Eyre," but now, in my mid-forties, my mindset has taken a complete one-eighty. Even though I'm being facetious, I'm not afraid to say, "I would rather die" than supplement my brain with "Sam's" revolutionary technology.
That's because I believe, now more than ever, when you read something, it won't be the em-dashes, the emojis, the formatting, or the strange mannerisms only a GPT prompt can write that your readers look for; it will be any evidence of something real, something original, something compelling, thoughtful, filled with substance and truth.
We are living during an era where everything appears to be fake, and even with the best of intentions, it's getting harder and harder to escape the temptations to bypass our creative thought process with the click of a button, as the lines between what is real and fake are blurred.
Ironically enough, that fall back at Bethany during my first year was the same year everyone in our dorms gathered every night in the living room to watch Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa go back and forth after the single-season home run record. Those were fun times, maybe the best of times, and not once did it ever occur to us that we were being duped. Now, both of those names are synonymous with cheating the game and highlighted by a single symbol.
An asterisk*
The irony for me is that twenty-five years later, I fell in love with writing in a similar era, only there will never be an asterisk next to my name.
Never.
Thanks, Derek
#notwrittenbyAI
