Craig Smith

In recent months, I have observed a growing resistance to using AI as a writing tool. Among educators and artists, there is a concern that integrating this technology undermines the authenticity of creativity and the validity of self-expression.

I do not share this concern. Rather, I feel that the source of this resistance is less a rejection of AI, than of what this technology reveals about the nature of writing and truth.

Other than writing shopping lists, writing has always been more than a functional act. Writing is not an act of recording; it is an act of uncovering. It is a confrontation with the self and the world. In other words, it is how we face the void.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the limits of language mean the limits of the world. Or, close to it - what he actually said, is that 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' My language. My world.

That was four years after the First World War. Now, we are interrogating the limits of Large Language Models and what they mean for the limits of our world. Pratītyasamutpāda - in Buddhism, dependent origination. If this exists, that exists.

Martin Heidegger thought a lot about technology as he kicked dust in the hills of the Black Forest. In the middle of the last century, technology caused him to consider its presence as Gestell, German for 'enframing' - it frames the world as a resource to be harvested, and we embody this position through a process of self-concealment, where we lose ourselves to the enframing of technology's goals.

But this was not the only possibility - technology could also be an Entbergen, Heidegger's term for 'unconcealment'. Think about what a microscope does, a telescope - it unconceals the world, reveals nature to us, and not necessarily at the expense of our own concealment.

Heidegger's teacher's teacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote an idea in 'The World As Will and Representation' in 1818 that has come to be referred to as 'Schopenhauer's Telescope' - the idea is, while telescopes are usually used to look through the narrow end towards some distant position in space, what if we were to turn the telescope around, from some vantage point fifty years from now, and direct it at ourselves? What would we learn about the origins of our future by observing the decisions we make today?

Keiji Nishitani of the Kyoto School published a book four years after the Second World War called 'The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism' (lesson of history here: always look towards the books published four years after a major conflict). As a young man, he used to carry a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' with him.

Nishitani felt that while Nietzsche correctly identified the void - the lack of meaning that exists when metaphysical and authoritarian power structures fail to remain relevant - Nishitani felt two things:

• first, that this wasn't a problem to be overcome, but was an opportunity to be lived through; and

• second, that the opportunity of nihilism could only be lived and experienced on an individual level. It is not a social phenomenon to be generalised, it can only be engaged with by the self.

Nishitani's take on nihilism offers an immediate lesson that reinforces my commentary on Hermann Hesse's perspective on self-truth in another essay: too often, reactionaries seek to diagnose their feelings towards a phenomenon as something that should be systematised and regulated for others.

Gilles Deleuze might chime in here and say two things as well (lesson of dialectics, always have two examples):

• first, that taking new phenomena and making them fit into templates from the past is silly and dull - embrace affirmation, create art, don't revert to the tools of the geometrician (and make everything fit neatly into a model that can be sold); and

• second, sure, technology can be an agent of control by restricting our experience of the world to a curation of information, but who is only getting their worldview from technology? And, does it render that curated information void?

Back to Wittgenstein, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. You could do worse than use language as an analogy for consciousness. We know that language isn't just words - you don't need to be Ferdinand de Saussure to recognise symbols, gestures, artefacts of meaning, a handshake and the memory of a wave.

Douglas Hofstadter follows Saussure by suggesting that meaning arises not from isolated symbols but from the relationships between them (especially those fed into the mind of a computer). Through analogy, through self-reflexiveness. In other words, through a mirror.

What is it about the mirror that is so off-putting? Maybe it is Jonathan Haidt's contention that the availability of the forward-facing camera on smartphones correlates precisely with a sharp statistical rise in teenage anxiety.

Or, perhaps it is Oscar Wilde's quip, that if you give someone a mask, then they will tell you the truth. And, of course, back to Friedrich Nietzsche - if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

This might all be well and good for the writer in his forties deciding to talk with AI, but what about the children? I think of Michael Silverblatt (a lot, I hope he is well) and his take on teaching children to read: he says, don't give children graded readers with accessible narratives - "Tim walks. Jill waves. Baby laughs. Dog sits." Give them works they can't understand and teach not the mechanics but the fire. Then, write in this direction.

I always looked forward to the day, as a child, when I would become an adult confronted with video games that I couldn't understand. How I longed to play a game that utterly confused me on every level, for which I couldn't recognise the graphics or the sounds, for it all to seem so alien, like my Atari 2600 games were to my parents—"Which one am I?"

Which one am I? That's for each of us to negotiate. For me, confronting the writer's mirror, facing the void, with AI both here or there, I try to be Nietzsche's midday: I'll quote Alenka Zupančič when she writes that for Nietzsche, midday is not a moment of unification, when the sun embraces everything, but is, instead, presented as the moment when “One turns to Two".

Nietzsche associates midday closely with his notion of truth as nuance. Midday, the middle, is not something arbitrary; it does not mean “some of each,” but is, rather, something very precise.

Writing with this technology, without this technology - it is not about some of each. It is something very precise. Have you seen that Damien Hirst artwork of a medicine cabinet, a very literal frame of six shelves filled with pharmaceuticals, that he calls "Nothing is a problem for me"?

He liked the joke contained in the title - for Hirst, the concept of 'nothing' is a problem for him. For Nishitani, nothingness was the ultimate opportunity. It offered an opportunity to engage with Entbergen, unconcealment, that his mentor, Heidegger, raised.

Writing is not an act of recording; it is an act of uncovering the self. Don't worry about AI getting in the way of this, it's fine (regarding economics and pedagogy, who knows).