With this article we begin a new Thursday series on AI who will take us into his process and chats while he explores this new AI world
A few weeks ago my wife and I were having breakfast in Lehi, Utah, with good friends who also happened to be the editors of Meridian Magazine. It wasn’t a formal meeting or a planning session, simply four friends who happened to be in the same place at the same time. The conversation wandered the way good conversations do. We talked about family, writing, publishing, and eventually, almost inevitably, artificial intelligence.
At one point my wife looked across the table and said,You ought to write a series for Meridian about AI. There was one of those brief silences that always seem to accompany an unexpected idea. The editors looked at me. I looked back at them. Then, almost together, we all reached the same conclusion—Why not?
The suggestion stayed with me long after breakfast was over. Not because I consider myself an expert on artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite. The more I’ve learned over the past few months, the more I’ve realized how much there still is to learn. Perhaps that’s exactly why this series makes sense. I’m not writing as someone standing at the finish line explaining the course. I’m simply someone exploring a remarkable new tool and inviting you to come along.
Long before personal computers, desktop publishing, or the internet, a handful of mystery fans found one another through amateur press associations, or APAs. Thirty or forty enthusiasts scattered across the country each produced a small magazine around the kitchen table every couple of months. We’d type the pages ourselves, duplicate them on mimeograph machines—oh, how I miss the smell of mimeograph ink—or photocopiers, collate them by hand, and mail them to an editor, who gathered everyone’s contributions into a single package and sent them back out. During those years I published several mystery fanzines of my own and made friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Some of those friends went on to become novelists, editors, and critics, but back then we were simply readers connected by thin stapled magazines arriving in our mailboxes every couple of months. By today’s standards the technology was primitive, the circulation tiny, and we thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
I’ve spent most of my life adapting to new ways of creating things. I’ve never been interested in technology for its own sake. I’ve always been interested in what it allowed me to create. That’s one reason artificial intelligence hasn’t frightened me. Every new invention arrives surrounded by predictions everything is about to change forever. Sometimes those predictions prove true. More often the new tool simply changes how we accomplish familiar things. We still tell stories. We still solve problems. We still share ideas with people who care about the same things we do.
AI does feel different, however, because for the first time the tool appears to answer back. It can carry on a conversation, suggest ideas, summarize information, and occasionally surprise you with an observation I hadn’t considered. It can also misunderstand what I’m asking, answer the wrong question with remarkable confidence, and make mistakes equal parts amusing and frustrating. I’ve experienced all of those things, often within the same conversation.
Over the next several weeks I don’t intend to explain everything about artificial intelligence. Frankly, I don’t think anyone can, and I’m not sure I care. The technology is changing too quickly. Instead, I’d like to share what I’ve been discovering as I learn to use it. What works. What doesn’t. What surprised me. What made me laugh. What has changed the way I think about writing, creativity, and learning.
Whether AI is completely new to you or already part of your routine, I’d enjoy having you along. Who knows? By the time we finish these conversations, I may even stop missing the smell of mimeograph ink.
