On Friday, on somewhat of a whim, I wrote two long, heartfelt letters to people (and their spouses) who have worked with my husband for a long, long time. Both of these men are retiring from their long, successful careers at the end of this year. And so I sent them each letters and a small gift and then I woke up on Saturday morning with a vulnerability hangover. I get vulnerability hangovers a lot, because I tend to get deep. I tend to get quite open with people whom I care about, and then afterwards I feel kind of exposed and embarrassed for sharing my deepest, heartfelt thoughts. It’s a really sick, scary feeling honestly.
But then this morning, I received a text from my husband whose colleague was “gushing” about my letter. He told my husband that receiving the letter made he and his wife’s day. And at that moment, any ounce of regret and terror I had felt from my vulnerability hangover, vanished with a feeling of happiness that I had risked my open heart, to add love and sincerity to my words.
Supposedly, so much of what we read on the internet is now being written by AI. Teachers have new tools to figure out what percentage of their students’ writings are being written by Chat GPT and others. Apparently, the percentages are quite high. All expectations are is that this is only going to increase.
Still, I strongly believe that as humans, we intuitively know the difference without any tools to tell us. Robots don’t have hearts. Sincerity is hard to fake, even for other humans. It takes two open hearts to feel a true connection. It takes gumption and feeling to be vulnerable with someone, and it takes strength and humility to be able to receive someone else’s message from the heart, and to believe it and to be grateful for it.
When AI started really coming into the news, I think that a lot of us writers/creative types felt a little panicky that we would become obsolete. We started to fear that a vocation that is already finicky, low-to-no paying, and not often highly valued, would become our own hungry ghost – putting our efforts (and honestly, our deep compulsion to write) into the darkest realm of oblivion and obsoletion. But then I remembered some of the most amazing lines I have ever read and they were all written by humans throughout the ages. These lines were all written by people desperate to get the story right. These incredible lines of poetry, lyrics, prose, created a picture for me that connected me to something deep within my own living experience, that only someone who has actually lived a life, can fully portray.
Robots aren’t messy. They aren’t confused. They aren’t sad nor elated. Robots aren’t fearful, because they don’t have hearts. Robots are imitators. They can imitate deep feelings (and some of them are excellent imitators) but they can’t have them. And sometimes, I envy them for that fact. Feeling our feelings is one of the most difficult things that we humans do. To get the best out of our writing, we writers have to open up our hearts and our feelings, and pour them out on pages, watching them bleed outside of us. This is something that a robot will never be able to do.
If you don’t want to be obsolete, don’t imitate the imitators. Be vulnerable enough to be yourself and to share it with the world, through your most intimate creations, whatever form they take. How ironic that soon human creation will be the rare form, as we give way to everything which we know, being engineered by robots. How ironic that we might be entering an age where human-made creations might end up being the most rare, exquisite and valuable conceptions on Earth. The thing that will clearly set your own creations apart is how much of your heart and your soul you are willing to pour into them. Risk the vulnerability. Robots can’t do this.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
