I look up at the sky as I'm nearing the end of a 30-minute run around my neighbourhood.
It's winter, and the weather has taken a sharper turn toward cold, as it does.
I'm fuelled by the endorphins; by a brain that tends to chug along in thought.
An airplane soars high up in the air, and I contemplate what it means to be human.
What does it mean to be human?
It definitely has something to do with the fact that we are proud to have invented and utilized the airplane, but if it ever goes down, all that technology and tattered metal wouldn't instigate even the tiniest chest-tug—we'd only ever mourn the lost and precious humans.
There's a connection between us all that's both grounding and electric.
The intangible cycles that sharpen the air into cool during the winter, that make us age and wrinkle, that expand and contract endlessly—those are the things of this world.
Those are the things linked to the well of creativity that we as writers, as humans, get to draw from.
It's why literary writers implicitly understand that while generative AI may construct sentences well, it has a flatness, even deadness, to it.
It's missing that hum because AI doesn't pull from our wordless well of creativity.
AI draws from what we've already produced.
And there's much more to art than recycling.
Yeah, "writing is rewriting," sort of.
But we each add something energetic and unique and impossible to pin down every time we consider then expand on a work, a thought, an idea.
Like how if we trace back writing lineages, we see that Paramahansa Yogananda’s work contains echos of Ralph Waldo Emerson whose work reverberates with Plato.
Yet each writer is distinctly original, bringing their own ineffable quality.
That is the difference.
That's also why what's human will continue to be preserved and propped up and even longed for.
Because our wordless electricity will always flow. It will always reign.
