It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools

             I mostly concur with this proverb, though I have had tools come apart in the middle of a cut, all on their own, resulting in marred work and much cursing, mostly directed at the tool’s manufacturer.  Though the villain is nearly always the operator, in whose charge proper tool maintenance justly resides.

            I started trying to write in a time when the only available tools involved ballpoint pens and mechanical typewriters.  For me, the typewriters were non-starters.  Too clunky and hard to use, the travel distance from key to paper amounting to several inches of quarrelsome

springs and levers.  The pen, in this case, was mightier, though the handwriting was abysmal, assuring that my works in progress were basically unreadable by anyone but myself until I succumbed to a typewriter for the final draft.

            Word processors saved my life and finger joints and I’ve never looked back.  Only now there's a new tool widely available, artificial intelligence, though I submit that this isn’t a handy assistant, but rather a fraud, pure and simple, and unworthy of any other designation.

            

                When I wanted to buy my first electric guitar, my father asked me if it played the music for you.  It took me a moment to figure out what he was saying, but quaintly, he actually thought that maybe the electronics industry had leaped ahead about sixty years and invented a device that rescued the musician from the inconvenience of learning to play music.  This would have been quite a technical achievement for the time, but I doubt it would have resulted in creating The Beatles’ oeuvre, much less anything else people would be interested in listening to.

           

                So why would you hire a robot to do your writing for you?  Well, I guess if you don’t know how to write, and have no interest in doing so, AI is some sort of blessing.  It’s no accident that Kurt Vonnegut called his anti-automation novel Player Piano.   There’s nothing wrong about having an upright piano in the living room to entertain guests with Scott Joplin and Gilbert and Sullivan before acquiring the luxury of vinyl and cherry-veneered stereo consoles.  But no one but the fully deranged or duplicitous ever claimed to be performing the works themselves.

            

               The promise of AI is that you can have your exposition scored and performed by someone else, and then easily foist it off as your own composition.  In my old-fashioned brain, this is merely deception, forgery, plagiarism, theft of intellectual property and the kind of plain old cheating that used to get you heaved out of whatever legitimate pursuit you’d be engaged in.

        

              I don’t think the subject is even worthy of debate, though I’ll try anyway.

           

               The Luddites famously got all out of sorts when machinery began to replace manual craft.  I’d like to get one of these guys in my wood shop, show him a table saw, drill press, dove tail jig, plunge router and a stack of raw wood and tell him to whip up a Federal-style highboy.  I bet, like my father, he’d learn that these modern machines don’t do any of the work without human intervention.  My son is an expert with the type of hand tools favored by the Luddites, but can also make mind-blowingly intricate wooden objects with laser cutters and CNC milling machines.  The designs still come out of his head, and the computer applications only know how to do what he’s programmed them to do.  They are tools, and if you think they make the art easy, just give it a try.

            I imagine someone could enlist AI to render work in his style, but the product would be akin to the slop anyone could crank out by asking Chat GPT to write a Hemingway short story.     

            There’s a gigantic qualitative difference between using a machine to make something and having the machine make it all by itself.  I have great admiration for anyone who can make a perfect dove tail joint by hand, but I just don’t see the point in spending a month doing something I can do pull off in an afternoon with a jig and a couple routers.  One could also spend a few years designing and manufacturing a machine that can make a thousand dove tail joints in that same afternoon.  But unless I have a furniture factory, why bother?

            

             Before straining the analogy past the breaking point, it’s important to note that writing isn’t manufacturing.  It’s a craft and an art, and in its fullest realization, it’s creation.  You can’t hand this over to a robot and expect to come out of the experience whole.  Even if no one notices, you’ve sold a crucial part of yourself down the river.