A Field of Blueberries

I wonder if all I think of as the real world is just a structure, a container for relationship.

Carri

I sit listening to the wind, blowing in the trees outside. We had a lot of rain yesterday, and the air is still cold on this quiet Easter Saturday afternoon. I am trying to put words to something I've been feeling. My thoughts blur and refocus, only to fragment as I struggle to define their edges.

Over the past months I have read articles and listened to conversations about ChatGPT-4 and other AI technologies. I have listened to people talk about both the benefits and challenges posed by these machines. I feel bewildered by the forest of information and opinion that swirls around it all. The issues are complex and confusing. In conversation with fellow creatives last week, I tried to articulate my own unease and found myself floundering.

This afternoon I sense a coalescing of my thoughts. I love words. I always have. I find in them both sanctuary and challenge. I am sometimes sheltered and sometimes nudged out of my comforts by what I read. And what matters most to me about these words is that they emerge out the lives of real people. It is not the words alone that have power, but the imprint of embodied experience, translated and distilled into words. This is as true of fiction as it is of non-fiction. The words are born out of relationship - to an experience, a person, a place.

I appreciate that this technology may have applications that are good, and that my understanding is limited. Creatives are engaging and collaborating with AI technologies to create work that is beautiful; innovations such as AlphaFold have the capacity to revolutionize medicine and improve (and save) the lives of many. I am concerned in particular about the implications of machines like ChapGPT-4 to the field of creative writing, and troubled by the idea that words in themselves, when produced by machines trained on data, reflect the complexities of individual human experience with integrity.

I find these words by Jaron Lanier helpful:

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book... It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video...The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals... (You Are Not a Gadget)

I leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver, one that articulates the kind of embodied experience and relationship I'm referring to. Such relationships take time, love and care to cultivate, and cannot be packaged, replicated or commodified.

Blueberries

Mary Oliver

I’m living in a warm place now, where you can purchase fresh blueberries all year long. Labor free. From various countries in South America. They’re as sweet as any, and compared with the berries I used to pick in the fields outside Provincetown, they’re enormous. But berries are berries. They don’t speak any language I can’t understand. Neither do I find ticks or small spiders crawling among them. So, generally speaking, I’m very satisfied.

There are limits, however. What they don’t have is the field. The field they belonged to and through the years I began to feel I belonged to. Well, there’s life, and then there’s later. Maybe it’s myself that I miss. The field, and the sparrow singing at the edge of the woods. And the doe that one morning came upon me unaware, all tense and gorgeous. She stamped her hoof as you would to any intruder. Then gave me a long look, as if to say, Okay, you stay in your patch, I’ll stay in mine. Which is what we did. Try packing that up, South America.

With appreciation,

Carri.

P.S. You will find another poem by Oliver in this week's CKTR post, Gorgeous Things, a poem that celebrates what it means to be alive in the world.