Category: Other

Originally appeared in Marguerite Richard‘s newsletter, reposted with permission. 

My boys are already complaining about going to school. They want to stay home and play, or stare at the sky. Or at a laptop. They know I prefer the sky over the screen, and because I’m still their hero, they lovingly oblige (most of the time). But you do need to go to school, I tell them. Why? They need answers. You have to go to school so that you can be a superhero like mama. Especially if you want to be Spidey. After all, webbing up supervillains is difficult work requiring geometry, physics, and complex communication skills. When you’re three and six years old, this is an idea you can get on board with. At least the Spidey part is clear.

The following Saturday morning, my older one wants to play chess. I set up the board on the lower bed of his bunk, the rainbow rocket sheets firing off beneath us. I’m pleased he’s curious, I want to encourage him. I fall short, only remembering the basics. That’s when it dawns on me that learning a strategy game like this one is crucial for him now. Not because he’s 6. But because by the time he’s an adult, people will be getting by without needing any strategic thinking skills at all. My sons will grow up in a world where their thinking can be outsourced. And if they don’t learn how to think, and how to learn (deeply, critically, strategically, empathetically, collaboratively) right now, they will indeed miss their chance at the superhero jobs of the future, whatever those may be.

Is AI unethical? MOOT QUESTION.

Most conversations about AI in my circles are idling in the ethics debate. Some of my favourite publications and writers are broadcasting their rejection of AI all together. Seeking solidarity? Probably. Admirable? Definitely. Pointless? I am afraid so. Especially if you’re in creative industries that won’t influence (or slow down) the development of the tech, swearing against AI is about as effective as it would have been to declare you’d never buy a calculator because it might lead to the downfall of our civilisation.

A close friend of mine watched her very lucrative translation career disintegrate in the span of a year. She attended a major translator conference in Frankfurt a few weeks ago, pumped up to strategise with her peers on the problem. She came home with the same story: most folks were preaching on soap boxes about why we should not be using AI. Keep in mind that this is an industry that has long benefited from tech advancements—Trados released its first computer-assisted translation tool in the early 90’s.

Just yesterday I saw an advertisement for an AI tool made for anyone wanting to create a children’s book. Upload a photo of your child, choose the story type, and voila, a book featuring your own kid as the hero delivered right to your doorstep. I am at once fascinated and repulsed by this. I am worried for our society—no question. Still, there’s no way out of this. 

It’s time to get ahead of it. 

As for my career, it’s crystal-ball clear, I’m going to need to leapfrog this issue if I want to keep writing, editing, and book coaching. Formulating new books is my magic. In a one-hour interview with the author, the book structure begins to synthesise in my mind. It’s not a linear, calculated process. It’s entirely alchemical, driven by intuition and instinct during a very specific exchange between editor and author. At the end of that same meeting, when I pitch the newly birthed idea to the author, I feel like a stork dropping a baby book into the author’s arms, all the goosebumps, fear and excitement of a new life ahead. AI can’t rob that from me. Even if I use it to support me. I’m not worried. What’s really baking my noodle is that future readers may not even know the difference between my human-generated book and the AI-generated one. It’s probably already happening. We only have one play.

We have to level up.

Watching my translator friend’s story unfold, and keeping my kids’ future in mind, I’m trying to figure out how I can build my business by developing my human artistic prowess. To get there, I am convinced that I first need to understand what our human superpowers actually are. Until now, I hadn’t realised I was in competition with my tools. What I’m learning is that it’s not the creation itself I should look at, but the process of creation that sets us apart from the tools. Human processing is labor intensive and full of pitfalls and imperfections. These mistakes often lead to a final result that is more beautiful than the symmetrical, synthetic output that the AI would create. Writing a book can be one of the most enriching experiences of your life. Ask any author—it’s the process, not the book itself.

It’s the toil that makes the treasure. 

The other day I met a friend wearing a designer shirt that looked like it had been scribbled on with a black felt-tip pen. It was messy. Human. An expensive, beautifully designed mess. It was special because the human mind is subjective, spontaneous. A machine could never spontaneously create something so surprising for both the wearer and those appreciating what he wore. The machine could never be part of the exchange that he and I had over the shirt. My surprise and his appreciation for my surprise. The machine could never learn from our exchange either. Unless we trained it.

If making unique connections in our own minds (and between multiple minds) is one of our superpowers, we can’t start letting the AI make those connections for us. Take brainstorming, for example. The brainstorming act is a creative human process. If you consistently ask your tool to perform the ideation for you, not only will it soon outperform you, but you will eventually be stripped of the ability to do it yourself. If you don’t use it, you lose it. And isn’t that kind of ah-ha moment also one of our greatest human pleasures? It’s like making music. Why would we want to give that up?

So how do we leverage AI to support growing these superpowers instead of doing them for us? I’m not sure, but I hope that becoming more aware of what makes human nature special is a start.

Is there actually anything to fear?

The fear conversation leads down dark tunnels. It’s natural for the human mind to explore exponential what-if dystopias. As always, there are optimists and there are pessimists. In his interview with Wired Magazine, author, scholar (and pacifist) Yuval Noah Harari, likened the birth of a superintelligence to inventing the railroad.

“In a laboratory, people were able to see if steam engines would explode due to a malfunction,” Harari said. “But no one could simulate the changes they would bring to the economic and political situation when the rail network spread out over tens of thousands of kilometers.” We just don’t know. And we won’t know until we get there.

In my view, we are moving too fast. Much of society in the developed world is largely built on competition. Our drive to outperform each other without slowing down to consider proper regulation will lead us into territory beyond our control. We don’t actually know what the superintelligence will be capable of. And if we could adamantly regulate developments and create transparency measures so that we could use it in favour of globally agreed upon endeavours, we could potentially solve so many problems with it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure humans trust each other enough to get there. How can we fall short on something so basic?

It starts with the kids

These are some dark feelings. If you know me, I’m not dark. Here’s my plan for now. I’ll inspire my boys toward life-long learning. Teach them teamwork and relationships. Teach them trust. Foster an appreciation for nature. Get them out of the city. Teach them how to work with their hands. I suppose that means I’ll have to learn how to use my hands, too. That, and chess.

Madison Utley speaks to debut author Emma Pattee following the publication of her novel, Tilt, which is both a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and USA TODAY Bestseller. The two discuss Emma’s dual writing pursuits, what powered her through the four-year process of getting her inaugural book out into the world, and how to know when it’s time to let go. 

MU: To start, can you give me an overview of your writing career thus far?

EP: I went to Emerson in Boston. Right after I graduated college, I worked with Stuart. I got so much out of his teaching. In formal writing school, stuff like plot gets talked about in a certain way whereas Stuart brought a fresh, innovative perspective to it. I’m incredibly grateful to have gotten to work with him so early on. When I moved back home to Portland, I continued to write but as my side gig, as I built a career and tried to make money. I got really into journalism and started building a career as a climate journalist. Then, I had an experience in my real life that spawned the idea for this book, Tilt. 

MU: What is the relationship between your two very distinct areas of writing–creative fiction and journalism? What do they lend to each other, and how are they different?

EP: I think of them as very separate. Being able to write articles about the climate crisis is an ethical calling for me. Creative writing is more of a lifelong passion. 

That said, I take a lot of both into each other. Journalism has taught me not to be precious about writing. People that read news are frequently busy. You have to have a lot of respect for their time and attention span. I think I bring that into my fiction. Fiction often comes from such a self-exploratory, true internal place, that I think it can lack an awareness of how it’s landing for the reader. You can’t think about that too much early on. When I’m writing fiction, I’m trying to process something that’s happening internally for me so it’s a very self-serving exercise. But at some point you do have to ask what a piece of writing actually does for the reader. 

But ultimately, at a prose level, journalism is about trying to answer a question that is easily verbalized. I want someone to read the article and, at the end, understand the answer to the question. When someone reads my fiction, there is no crisp answer to a single question. I instead want them to have an emotional experience that transcends words, so that the feeling that is in my body ends up in the reader’s body. 

MU: Where did the idea for Tilt come from? Did the genesis of the idea feel different from other creative projects you’ve worked on in the past?

EP: It really did. My book opens with a very pregnant woman at Ikea. She’s shopping for a crib. And then the earthquake hits. In reality, I was also very pregnant and at Ikea when the building started to shake. I thought, “Oh my god, it’s the big earthquake.” It wasn’t. A truck had backed up to the loading dock or something. When the building stopped shaking I was like, “Oh, this is my book.” It was almost fully formed in my mind. 

The belief in the project lasted a week, maybe. That was 2019. I sold my book in 2023. In between, I had tons of periods of doubt. There were months and months where I was in despair about the book. People thought the idea was weird. No one really got it. I couldn’t explain it. So yes, there was that moment of inspiration but I think it’s a miracle this book made it out into the world because of the amount of times I gave up on it. 

MU: What kept you going for those four years?

EP: I talk about this a lot; for me, it was about community. I have a couple very close friends I meet with every week. They held the belief in me and in the book during the times that I could not. The more I’m in community, the more I’m moving forward. The more I’m alone, the more I’m standing still. (To be honest, that’s the core lesson that my narrator learns in Tilt; it was clearly a lesson I had to learn too). 

MU: From the conception of the idea for this book through to earlier today when you had a meeting about TV rights, what has surprised you most during this process?

EP: I wrote a first draft of this book and I was like, “This is not very good.” People reading it were like, “Yeah, meh. Not that good.” Based on that, I thought: Okay, this book idea is a bad idea. It didn’t occur to me: Emma, you’re going to write 15 drafts of this book. Nothing in this draft is going to exist at the end. I didn’t understand that the ideas in the first draft–and the second, third, and fourth–are very separate things. 

So the true amount a book changes really surprised me, and the way you have to have commitment to an idea that is almost completely separate from whatever words you have on the page. That was a lesson I will definitely keep with me: to not hold my early drafts that tightly. To be more committed to my idea than I am to a timeline or to a specific draft. 

MU: How do you balance that with knowing when you’re done and it’s time to query agents?

EP: That’s an eternal question. You ask if it’s done when you query, but then you ask that question again with your agent about sending it out on submission. Then you ask that question again with your editor when you’re trying to finalize the book. I did not feel like my book was ready to progress at any of those junctures, so I think chasing that feeling of doneness may speak more to perfectionism. 

There are definitely people who wait too long, but there are also people who write one draft and they’re like, “This is great! Let’s go out.” I think we need to work against our worse impulses. For the people who write one draft and think they’re done, I’d say they need to write until they can’t stand it anymore. And the people who are inclined to think they have to write 20 drafts before trying to get an agent, they need to send out way sooner than they feel ready.

MU: What final advice do you have for other writers?

EP: For me, consistency and commitment to the idea was more important than my given talent on any day, my writing ability on any day, or how much somebody at a workshop did or didn’t like what I was doing. So talent is enormously important, but it’s really not within our control. What is within our control is our commitment to the project and the consistency with which we show up–literally, with our time–to the project.

This month, Inkhouse Public Relations debuted its fifth book of employee-authored essays. Entitled Faded Lines, this volume explores the unlikely teachers that helped us connect across difference. The prompt asked:

When did you learn something important from an unlikely place? It could be a person you overlooked or misjudged, an event that revealed deeper significance than you anticipated. What chance encounter, unlikely alliance, or uncomfortable situation taught you something meaningful? 

InkHouse founder Beth Monaghan described succinctly why such corporate culture books are important: “Stories are a foundational way of forming community, in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in the world.”

Over the course of the previous year, Book Architecture assisted as editors and writing coaches, with the proper dash of literary theory thrown in there. And, of course, we wrote, too! Catch a glimpse of Stuart’s contribution here.