The Prompt is Not the Craft: On the Artifice of Artificial Intelligence

Joshua A. Klein

ar‧ti‧fice    /ˈärdəfəs/    noun:    “clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick or deceive others” (New Oxford American Dictionary)

 

Since 2019, Mortise & Tenon has self-consciously sought to “cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft.” This is admittedly a surprising goal for a publication ostensibly dedicated to woodworking. Don’t we know anything about the publishing industry? Woodworking magazines are to be focused on handy tutorials and furniture plans. Why the “reverence”? Why the “dignity”? In short, because these things matter.

I’m not sure I know many people who use hand tools for exclusively pragmatic reasons. The decision to shape wood with finely honed edge tools is almost always a decision to exercise agency, to purposefully involve our very selves in our work. The world outside smugly sneers at the nostalgia. “Making things should be easy,” they tell us. Why bother learning manual skills or sweating fine-grained joinery details when you can play with composites and 3D printing? In this new wave of “craft,” our designs can be untethered from the constraints of wood grain or traditional construction methods. We are no longer hindered by our lack of skills or underdeveloped sense of design. There’s an app for that, and if we want things to run smoothly, we’d best just get out of the way.

This is simply another way of illustrating the fact that outsourcing is the obsession of modernity. 

We moderns don’t like work, and we look for every possible way to get someone or something else to do it on our behalf. Firewood is heavy, so we’ve installed furnaces. Walking to the store is slow, so we jump in the car. Writing is hard, so we summon up the chatbots. As we continue down this path of further outsourcing our life’s work, we further relinquish our agency.

This is the exact opposite of the vision we’ve been commending over the past decade. Mortise & Tenon Magazine exists as a celebration of genuine craftsmanship – a gloriously human kind of thing. Unlike technology, craftsmanship depends upon the careful exercise of personal skill – attunement to the variables of the materials and tools, and faculty to perform exactly the thing needed at each moment of a given task. It’s tacit knowledge of both the “know-how” and “know-what” types. Craft is about dexterity, yes, but it is a dexterity that pays attention. This is to say that a true craftsman takes care. 

By contrast, technology is not an apparatus of care. Indeed, being nothing more than belts and gears, ones and zeroes, technologies cannot care. Only a person can care. Woodshop machinery, for instance, is unconcerned with grain direction or the most attractive orientation of the lumber – that is the purview of the artisan. But the logic of the development of technology is to ever more distance the artisan from the work.

Writing is a Craft

If you’re paying even a lick of attention to the world right now, I imagine you, too, have sensed that the initial allure of generative AI is finally beginning to wear off. We’ve been inundated with deepfake videos, bombastic memes, and blog posts of conspicuous emptiness. People are no longer impressed by the instantaneous appearance of 1,000-word AI-sludge essays that simply regurgitate what everyone else on the internet already said. We’re now a society of people who scroll past this stuff all day long, and deep down, we’re indifferent. We can’t bring ourselves to truly care about any of it, because we know that it’s nothing more than garble. 

Let us be clear on this point: Writing is a craft. And if writing is a craft, it follows that authentic wordcraft is something that could only come from a writer – someone who has something to say. When we instead have nothing to say, yet we believe that something should be said, we embezzle the words from a chatbot. We publish the drivel, and no matter how readable it might be, no warm-blooded soul could be moved by it. But it’s not because there is no logic to the string of words (there often is), nor because it’s clunky or awkward in its phrasing (it’s getting better all the time), but because we have conflated our desire for having something to say with actually having something to say.

But the prompt is not the craft.

Writers who still have something worth saying should resist this trajectory. In a recent essay, author Paul Kingsnorth has taken it upon himself to call for such a resistance. He’s calling this the “Writers Against AI” campaign. He’s not taking money or starting some kind of organization. He’s simply calling writers to opt out of the text-churning Machine and to doggedly remain flesh-and-blood wordsmiths. We at M&T have long prohibited our authors from using generative AI, so this campaign was music to our ears. Being writers (not to mention, being humans), we knew this was something we wanted to trumpet. So, with Paul’s kind permission, we whipped up a website for the campaign. It can be found here: https://www.writersagainstai.net/. Please share this link with whoever out there you know who still cares.

It’s a simple website, and I have no intention of making a behemoth out of it. The domain simply gives us a place to direct our readers, as we’ve now begun placing the WAAI logo in all our publications. We encourage you to read Paul’s essay on the website, and, if you’re a writer yourself, go download that logo and stick it on your writings. As he put it toward his conclusion, “In the war against stories, I am taking a side. If you take the same side, then we’re in it together. Let’s gang up. There’s strength in numbers.”

I realize that the expression of my viewpoint here may come across as a touch uncouth or intemperate. But I insist it is not. These conclusions are the result of a lengthy and deliberate reflection. I feel a bit like Wendell Berry’s character Jayber Crow as he defends his criticism of the callously institutional orphanage of his childhood (named, ironically, “The Good Shepherd”). Crow explains, “You will get the impression that I am looking back very critically at my old home and school, and I acknowledge that I am. But I mean to be critical only within measure. It is true that I dislike the life of institutions and organizations, and I am slow to trust people who willingly live such a life. This is not a prejudice, but a considered judgment, one that The Good Shepherd taught me to make, and so I acknowledge a considerable debt to that institution.”

Not prejudice, but a considered judgment. Having tasted and seen that the Machine is no good, the only thing left to do is distrust it. For that insight, I must express my deepest gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

We at M&T do not build furniture and write essays simply because there is a dearth of data in the modern, technocratic world. That world is not starved for information or facts. Neither does it lack furniture, for that matter. What it lacks is soul. It lacks good ol’, honest-to-goodness humanity. This means that, at M&T, we continue to stand against the use of generative AI. 

Standing Against Artifice

And no, this is not some kind of posture of purity, as if we’re striving to remain free of this particular strain of digital defilement. We make no pretensions that our lives or work are exempt from the incursion of this technology. At this point, AI is everywhere. Search engines, email, the backend of our web store – everywhere. Throughout most of the screen-based activities of Mortise & Tenon, Mike, Grace, and I are constantly beating back AI-generated suggestions and disabling any human-displacing elements we possibly can. It’s exhausting work and, at times, it can be demoralizing. 

The most fundamental issue, however, is with the generative aspects of AI and the artifice of it all – the fake and the fraud, the counterfeit mind, the pretended One behind the ones and zeroes. But there is nobody in there. By its very nature, that automated arrangement of words, no matter how amusing or convincing, is devoid of actual meaning. “Meaningless?” you ask. “How so?” Nothing is meant by those words, because there is no one who means anything by them. The results of AI inquiries are often little more than the amalgam of internet blather and Reddit posts. They are not intentional, and they are certainly not attuned.

The utility of AI is sometimes defended on the grounds of a perceived impartiality and the raw facticity of its output, as if statements of raw fact don’t need human-derived meaning to be valuable. “A true sentence is a true sentence,” we’re reminded. Although this observation is obvious enough, it fails to account for the reality that generative AI is not, in fact, free of programmed biases and it is most certainly not simply in the business of spitting out raw facts (however factual any of the results may be). Most perniciously, chatbots are designed to simulate the human mind – to counterfeit it.

M&T is a human publication through and through, and the reason we refuse to grant AI a place in our writing is simply because we care about our work and because our authors actually have something valuable to say. Why would anything be worth reading if it wasn’t worth writing in the first place? 

What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Some AI-resistant writers have responded by going back to paper and pen, typing their final drafts into a word processor only as necessity demands. Others have rediscovered the manual typewriter. Wendell Berry still hasn’t given up on either of these methods. He continues to handwrite his drafts, and his wife, Tanya, types them on the typewriter they purchased in 1956. From there, the manuscripts are sent to the publisher where they are digitized for printing and dissemination. Other writers today are installing distraction-free writing apps on their laptops. 

So, there are a lot of ways to do this. 

In my writing process, I am less concerned about the technical difference between typing and handwriting (although there is definite merit in being forced to slow down and write out each word as an aid to memorization or reflection). Neither is the screen the issue, per se. I have found a sweet spot in outlining, drafting, and editing all my compositions in the most basic feature-stripped word processing software. 

As I’ve already stated, my primary concern with AI remains with regard to human agency. I disdain the coercive distraction of uninvited prompts and suggestions. I don’t want the computations of a language model to steer the ruminations of my mind. Writing – the craft that it is – is communication from one person to others, and it is therefore essential to me that the generative aspects of my writing process be 100 percent human. Suggestions for better phrasing, etc., are off the table. While I am happy to consult a simple thesaurus for alternative word selections, I will not ask a chatbot for better illustrations or rhetorical advice. My editorial revisions entail several rounds of reworking, occasionally printing out the entire document and reading aloud for flow and cadence. Once I’m satisfied with the wording, I’ll clean it up and make corrections. 

If my software notifies me that I’ve misspelled a word, I happily acknowledge the error and fix it. Misplaced comma? Duly noted. I want my writing to be grammatically correct. This is why M&T enlists a copy editor to comb through our print publications: We care about quality. Fortunately, many of the simple slip-of-the-finger errors I make while typing are flagged by the software before it goes out for further editing. I am not ungrateful for such automated alerts – what I dislike is auto correction.

So, when you read my writing, this is how those words have come to be. I sign my name to them in order to signify that they’ve come from me – not one syllable was generated by AI. And you can, therefore, know that what I write means something. You may not agree with what I intend to say, but it’s at least worth knowing that there was someone who intended it. 

I trust I’ve made it clear by now that the purpose of this essay is to take a stand for humans, and to stand up for craft. As Kingsnorth encourages us in his essay, “Despite the rush and the pull of this insane age, we are not powerless. We remain human, and we have choices. The deskilling and the dehumanising impacts of AI can be both resisted and refused, at least in our own lives. Nobody can make us use these things - not yet, at least. Nobody can stop us reading or writing real stories.”

So, let’s keep it real, folks. You can read more at: https://www.writersagainstai.net/

Joshua A. Klein, editor