I am going to tell you what I think of AI writing. We have to time travel first, back to when I was a senior in high school in Harwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was then that I wrote a paper about Moby Dick.
I got from Queens, New York, to the Cape as collateral damage from the divorce of parents who married as hip beatnik-y beautiful people and came apart because of money and the un-hip vibe and harsh realities of having a family. My mother had been born and raised on the Cape—Chatham, to be precise, and when it all went sideways, she ran home, nearly—to the town next door, anyway--and took the kids.
I wrote that paper about Moby Dick for Barbara Ford at Harwich High School. A young deacon at our church had shown me a paper he had written in college about the gams of the Pequod, and I read it. I had some other ideas about those gams, so I thought it would make a good topic.
Up to that moment in my life, I had thought a "gam" was slang for “a leg”—a word mouthed by gangsters in movies from the 40s that featured the likes of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. The gams of the Pequod, Ahab's ship in Moby Dick, were the interactions between the Pequod and other ships. Meetings at sea.
The ocean is vast and the chances of meeting another ship at sea are few. Feelings of isolation must set in. I was in the U. S. Navy from '69 to '73, so I now have some firsthand experience of how the emptiness out there becomes an emptiness in here (tapping my chest). Imagine whalers on sailing ships, though. That's the isolation only interrupted by the terror that accompanies going after a whale in a rowboat with a harpoon (glorified spear). I am happy that is mostly in the past. Happy for the whales, happy for the sailors.
Despite the endless view of water that is the reality of being at sea, in Melville's tale, the Pequod encounters nine other ships. Each encounter is fraught with difficulties in communicating. So the gams become a clever device for enhancing the isolation, and increasing the sense that this is a doomed voyage.
I thought I'd take a stab at writing about those gams. I had a few ideas of my own about how it should go. It took me nearly two months to pore through the book, write little 3x5 index cards full of notes, make outlines and drafts and finally write it all out. I had this cool idea that I would try to make Mrs. Ford feel as if she were at sea. I tried to get a kind of rolling cadence to the narrative, and I mentioned salt and spray like so much salt and pepper on a meal.
Mrs. Ford demanded that we type the final. We had an old Underwood. It was heavy and loud as typing on the keys made this whacking sound as the letters struck the paper wrapped around a platen that clearly should have been replaced at some point in its life. I had no keyboard skills--those came later when the Navy decided I would need to know how to type in order to be a good sailor. They also taught me to ride horses at one point. That's not normally a skill of your average bosun's mate, either, but questioning authority hadn't become a mantra yet for me.
The "Nine Gams of the Pequod" was pretty good and I wish I still had it, but copy machines were primitive and expensive so only the original existed and it didn’t survive my itinerant lifestyle. Mrs. Ford criticized the typing, typos, ribbon darkness, paper (I only had this onionskin stuff that was dry, crinkly and nearly transparent) and other physical infrastructural issues. All fair criticism, I must say. I can't remember what she said about the gams. I came away having learned that appearance is as important as substance. Ask any chef. Chefs know it tastes better when it looks good.
And finally, I get to the topic at hand, AI. I alternate between thinking it's coming for us and it's already got us. I thought, I wonder what AI would do with my Nine Gams. So I posed it, and (iask.ai) produced a perfectly succinct version in about five seconds. No typos. All nine gams. No rolling cadence, though. No salt. No spray.