Good Morning, Dr. Chandra, This is...
Authenticity in creative expression with AI
I received a loving email from my childhood friend who has been following my Claude collab essays on my/this substack. His message was, “Dude, you are an amazing storyteller and I can only dimly see you through this AI interpreter writing for you. I want the OG back!”
So, I thought briefly for a second and predictably brought up this topic with Claude and ended up having an insightful and humorous discussion about this sensitive topic on the cultural impact of AI and creativity. This piece is me writing in my own voice about this topic. Disclaimer: No AI was used for generating this particular essay other than quoting my previous AI assisted essays to highlight the patterns below.
So lets begin.
In the domain of English language it turns out that one of the things that irk a lot of readers are the following patterns found in AI’s inserted content, quoted below. Note: It apparently leaves such a bad taste, so much so that it interferes with the underlying message being delivered. Some of these constructs were identified by my good friend in the published essays.
Not A, but B:
The constraint didn’t get rejected — it got forgotten.
They predict tokens. They don’t model reality.
The tank problem is trivial. The question it reveals is not.
The drift is not the symptom. The drift is the architecture.
This is not a metaphor. It is a design specification.
The geometry isn’t halfhearted. It’s complete.
...not just as analogy but as demonstration
Staccato:
The failure mode is the same. It just happens later.
That sounded interesting. I followed it. The model extended again. Each step was small.
Not handcrafted. Not stored. ... Terrain, atmosphere, color palette, flora, fauna, weather.
But not destroyed. Not the way the KV Cache is destroyed.
Not the KV Cache’s blank slate. Not the hippocampus’s carved stone. Not the procedural engine’s perfect reproduction.
“Sounds” Good:
Rhythmic Attrition of Biological Substrates in High-Frequency Zones.
...would be thermodynamically expensive and politically volatile.
The document is rhetorically continuous... the same structural feature of cognition ... the same accumulation of small angular adjustments.
Legitimacy is non-mechanical. That is the vulnerability.
None of these conditions currently obtain.
... the anti-entropic victory of a species that learned to carve its topology into stone.
My immediate reaction was. Yes! perfect. I felt pretty amused by it. Why? It was like someone observing why a bull frog croaks a certain way versus a magpie’s mimicry or a grey parrot trying to croak like a frog? Its just some linguistic expression. So what’s the big deal?
But, hold on…there seems to be a legit problem here. So lets dive in. Continuing with the mind experiment that I am still a magpie or a grey parrot, what if I wanted to talk to everyone or any cognitive being? Does it matter if my magpie-ness or the grey parrot-ness comes through? I think that is the core human relatability hypothesis I have. We demand and prefer human-human first for language preferences and not be fully lost in the mimicry to the machine or other similar interpretive devices in our recorded history. But, more deeply, also perhaps losing an essence of what made me unique at some stylistic level, an intangible that makes connections special or memorable.
Why does it bother people so much? It's the same idea either way. What's the actual problem here? So I initially thought “Can we say this as a style problem then for ideas?” why does it matter that a particular stylistic phrasing describing an idea viewed so distastefully when the machine inserts it for you?
So, I do have to humbly acknowledge that this distaste is real with AI constructs inserted into everything for many of the readers. Its like forcing a vegetarian to eat meat products. Vegetarians are perfectly happy with other people next to them enjoying a non-vegetarian meal and doesn’t bother them a bit but with some clear boundaries. So ultimately relating at a human level and staying grounded in what it means to be accepting is the safe alternative despite enduring a slight tinge of self-censorship in the process of creation.
To explain this self-censorship let me give a background on how the The Kernel’s Lullaby was created. I first gave Gemma a system prompt and had it write like Banks fused with Lem in a very cold perspective without any sort of moralizing and treating everything like a autopsy. So it gave me back 10 points on the Global South and the Western oligarchy dynamic and it compared it to cybernetic predation, nations redefined as temporary biological infestations sitting on mineral deposits. I loved it. It was alien and rigorous and that was the whole point.
But I couldn’t publish it because the cultural awareness of using AI is different now. Another side topic that I recently became aware of is the backlash against using Banks’ references. Any reference to Iain Banks is considered signaling a tech-bro bias even if the intentions are otherwise. Including “AI killed emdashes, Not A - but B” and so on. So this is an evolving detection metric for the otherness. Anything that sounds like a machine is now guilty until proven human. I knew what the reaction would be before I posted it. So I just left it sitting there in LM Studio.
Then I tried to fix it. I brought the raw output into Claude and tried to rebuild it by adding a personal narrative similar to the creature engine I am building and brought in references to Azad from Banks. The new version was better and sounded like my voice and at the same time it was also less of what I originally wanted. The coldness that was nicely crafted in the first draft got tamed into something the audience could receive without aversion.
I abandoned that version too! Eventually came back and wrote a shorter final piece (The Kernel’s Lullaby). I imagined the whole thing as an intercepted transmission between post-biological entities looking back at human civilization. This solved the coldness as it was no longer a “bug” because it is now fiction. But it didn't solve the other problem. The machine’s fingerprints were still in the essay and anyone attuned to hearing them will hear them.
So the piece I am sorta happy with is also the piece that best shows the minefields. First I had an idea I believed in then ran it through three different versions (Gemma, Claude, Qwen) trying to find the voice that would let the idea materialize without triggering someone. The idea survived the process of using three different AIs to help me with it. But the rawness of the first version got completely filtered away because I chickened out.
That’s the self-censorship and not the machine censoring or dampening me. The opposite, me applying a damper on the machine because I am afraid of what the readers will hear. So then ultimately who am I actually afraid of or who is this even for?
It comes down to our own understanding of the connections we make in general. The question is about to whom it is directed towards - a cognitive mind ( collectively humans from diverse backgrounds and machine intelligence included ).
So we know humans are very opinionated and have unique tastes. The selective and appreciate nature of the choices they make in their selections guide any topology. Like the insects pollinating meadows over time and crafting the landscape based on their choices over many generations that results in a unique aesthetic.
I have to wonder whether an AI or a non-human cognitive mind that currently consumes the same content is able to direct this curation and evolutionary guidance at a meta-level or does that even matter? I feel that AI at its core reasoning is completely style agnostic so it will ignore these patterns and go for the core idea being presented. Content over style.
So, the conclusion might be that I am just inadvertently writing to non-human cognitives which probably makes sense with an intersection of human neuro-divergents? Time will tell!