Some time ago I read an article by a man who was vastly in favor of AI, especially for writers. “It’s just a tool,” he claimed, “the same as a pen or a typewriter”.

Pardon me while I stop laughing. I have this image of a typewriter taking every word ever typed on it and composing something that may or may not resemble a novel. I picture a pen absorbing every poem ever written with it and then parsing them all in order to come up with something else, God knows what. Or maybe a paint brush might take its memory of every past stroke and all the colors it knows and slather out a Mona Lisa.

Or not. More likely if it were possible, it would be something that is good enough for people who don’t care as long as it doesn’t look too boring on their wall.

I have to admit I’m not really laughing. Or if I am, it’s to stave off pain. What sobers me is the fact that I know too many people who would consider the man’s statement to be brilliant. There have always been people for whom art is simply a picture of something. Or nothing, if you like that sort of thing. A novel is a long story, a TV show a short one. A poem is a bunch of words in no particular order. A sculpture is something made from clay, or metal, or plastic that grabs our interest for a moment. The fact that the sculptor died some time ago and will never make such a piece of art again, well, that’s okay because you can just feed the details of his work (and every other sculptor’s) into AI and voila! Why sweat over it? Bored? Change it up!

But now those people have decided to force on us the things with which we must become bored. For the sake of commerce, we can pick up an AI-generated book about spies or romance and for a while be entertained. Not made to think. Not made to feel a human connection. Just be entertained. By something that is a composite of everything gone before. Not something mind-bendingly new from the mind or heart or guts of a human being.

A few years ago I listened to a young woman describe how she wrote using a great new app: She pictured a particular setting or a person, or something happening for some reason. Then she put it to the app, or program, whatever it was called at the time, and set it to describe these things using as many words as possible. That way, she said happily, she could spend all her time telling the story and not have to bother with the boring stuff.

Boring stuff? You mean like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?

“Some things stunk, but it wasn’t all bad” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

There is a line on the first page of “The Hate You Give” that spoke to me long after I was no longer a teen (and I was never a Black one): “There are just some places where it’s not enough to be me.” I’d been to enough places as an insecure teenager to recognize this. I wasn’t bored.

Or: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.“

Never mind Shakespeare, just give us “We lose because we’re afraid to try.” Or maybe “She’s a hot chick” instead of She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

It works. But does it give the depth of emotion and memory that I felt reading Shakespeare’s line? So that I have never forgotten it and think of my mother every time I read it again.

Are we heading for a world drowning in a flood of art that has no depth, like toddlers drowning in a foot of water?

Frankly I don’t know if that young woman’s books were ever published. I never followed up, because I’m sure on some level I’ve already read them.

How boring.