At some point during the advent of LLMs, I realised that writing in my journal, with a pen, on paper, had become an act of resistance. I carry my current journal with me pretty much everywhere I go. I take it to work every day. I like to have it on my lap or to hand when I'm watching TV or reading, or next to my laptop. It sits on my desk, sometimes spread and sometimes closed, with ballpoint breaking the pages into 2 segments. The journal I'm using at the moment is a pastel blue Agenzio notebook with dotted, rather than lined, pages. The cover has become nicked and shows dirt easily. It's larger than some journals I've used, but sits open nicely on a flat surface.
Although I take it most places, I don't write in it every day. I find a notebook fits pleasantly in one hand, like a prop. I think of it as a talisman, a charm. Somehow its proximity brings protection or good fortune. Without it on my person, I do tend to feel uneasy.
I like to write. Obvious as this sounds, I mean it in the quite literal sense: I like writing, by hand. I like the sensation of using a pen. I like the act of forming letters on a page. I also like writing in the more abstract sense: thinking, planning, researching, drawing together ideas into a single stream of language. I do also enjoy the sensation of typing, though not as much as writing with a pen. I feel it's got a lot to do with having a writer’s sensibility for the romantic and the arcane. Technologies of the past seem to thrum with mystery: typewriters, wired phones, radios, wind-up clocks. It struck me that it's now quite unusual to write in this way. The majority of the writing I do, whether personal or professional, is typed. The majority of writing that most people do is typed. Typed and digital. Typed and digital and so often, shared online.
Recently I see my journal as a sanctuary. When I write here, no one can get to it. Others can barely read it for that matter. Even I struggle to read back my handwriting on occasion. But it's inaccessible. It can't be guzzled up and embedded in the training datasets of large language models. It can't be crawled by bots or scraped. It's offline, disconnected, analog, airtight. There's a circuit breaker, a gap that can't be crossed.
It's a kind of privacy and security that one rarely enjoys these days: our digital lives expose us to the entire web and everyone using it: marketers, commenters, scammers, trolls, governments, hackers, Yahoo! boys. By contrast, a physical notebook is so much more limited. It can’t easily be copied, and it’s only in one place at any one time and has to be accessed physically to be read. It’s disconnected from the web. Even if it’s sat next to my Internet-connected laptop, there is no way to make the leap from the digital into physical.
Of course, I still publish online. I find release in publishing a poem or essay, marking it as “finished” and sending it out into the Web. But I’ve come to accept that all of what I write and share online will be eaten by LLMs. There is little one can do about it, if you want to share what you produce online. Fortunately, I don’t rely on my writing for income. I write for self-expression and for the sake of art. Much of the value is therefore intrinsic, removed from the pressures of monetary reward or the appreciation of others.
In some ways, the advent of LLMs has allowed the individual in me to flourish. Large Language Models are trained on as much text as can be found on the Web. Any time you take a large volume of data and take the patterns from it, you naturally approach its averages. You can think of LLMs as the “average” of language: what you get if you mash up everything that everyone has said and get a kind of generic every-speak. I get the sense that people are starting to notice the blandness of LLM output.
In this this environment, I find more reason to write, not less. These systems can produce human-like content. But they can’t produce content that comes from my perspective. They can’t produce writing in the way that I write, in my idiolect. And even if they could, that wouldn’t be *me*. It would be an imitation of me. As more text is churned out by AI systems, and text converges on a soulless corporate jargon, the voices of individuals become even more distinct, flawed, and human. I find the vocation to write even more compelling: an act of personal resistance. Thrown into this relief, never has it been more important to write.