Call for Writers

Reclaiming the Prompt: writing and imagination in the age of text-machines

deadline: 10 nov

* in a hurry? find the submission guidelines at the bottom of the page *

Except for the boomers in the office, most of us can (until now) pretty comfortably detect if a text was generated by a machine.

The "undesirable idiosynchracies" of chatbottification that many of us have already intuited some years ago, now have been formally identified by actual research, together with the fact that widespread use of textual generators decreases diversity in content, lexicon and style. This is concerning on its own, but studies have also found that people who use chatbots in general just feel less responsible and affected by the ideas and texts they churn out.

Has the great disinvestment from words began?

This is the future of writing: Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk talking in an interview about her process as of late: “Often I just ask the machine, 'darling, how could we develop this beautifully?' Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.” (https://lithub.com/nobel-laureate-olga-tokarczuk-apparently-used-ai-to-write-her-latest-novel/) Should we be scared, defeated, or downright angry?

A machine generated text is uneditable, editors warn. Writer and editor Eve Fairbanks lamented: "Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There's nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin." There is nothing under the surface, no point or intention that wants to come out, no subconscious threads to follow and uncover. It seems all surface. Yet, chatbots at the same time are a black box that is tapped into the depths of the human mind. Language models are the closest we have gotten to an oracle, a monstrous oracle that has digested the sum of human writings, burping up platitudes that are meaningless in their algorithmic monoculture.

How is it that with all that knowledge, these chatbots still cannot match a child's writing in terms of imagination, wisdom and joy?

Too often I think of banana plantations, how all the banana trees are clones of each other, which makes them especially vulnerable to viral infections and pests. And that we have already lost a more tasty banana variant because of this. My preoccupation with bananas crosses a little bridge towards the internet, digital infrastructure, and writing. Do we want a text-plantation that erases all place and variety, any sign of where a text might have come from?

I.
in another imperial core
cogging into moloch
increase blue saturation
increase
increase
increase
what has been hatched from it?
what will you find if you take your spoon
to the great egg - or eggs? - of america?
omg your english is so good
you have like no accent

Maxime García Diaz in The Network Must Be Built

Maxime García Díaz in her brilliant bundle The Network Must Be Built talks about "cogging into moloch". Moloch is a biblical deity or practice associated with human sacrifice for power that we find ourselves implicated in by using the digital technologies. The end of this fragment suggests it might be the sacrifice of human difference, our accents, eccentricities, incapacities and inclinations, on the American (or more broadly Western) altar of growth and dominance.

In the mindset of those running the show, written text is a commodity that needs scaling. More copy and content, less writings. Writing is too unpredictable, too time-intensive. Hard to scale the stare-down with one's own internal contradictions. Hard to scale a journey into the abyss.

But we LOVE our abyss. Even if we sometimes say we hate it, it is our lovely abyss that makes writing worth anything at all. Don't build your transhumanist text-machine in OUR abyss!

But for how long can we resist the promise of frictionlessness? The students couldn't. The marketing agencies and the coders already lost. General knowledge workers, policy advisors, researchers are next. Soon, it will be a marginal position to be careful. What armour do we need against being scraped and finding our own words generated against us?

How do we keep the banks of our psychic flows from being turned into stone within the ubiquity of statistical texts? What and how do we write to unmathematise our brain? Can we turn the page into a battlefield on which to take on the invaders? What is home in writing, and is it defendible? How much courage, heartfulness, will it ask? How does one write with blood in ones veins? But before we fight, who is actually our enemy and their supporters, and what are their nightmares? The machines take many shapes, and are driven by other machines and mechanisms. Which one of them, if they could ever be disentangled, might we want to disassemble first?

What fruits grow (and what virusses proliferate) in the dreamed-of technotextual plantations of those that drank the kool-aid?

If the gap between our own words and those the machine spits out get smaller until they are inseparable, how will we process the loss that has unfolded? Reading has become a suspicious practice, we try to find patterns; the averaged observations, vague abstractions and libidinal inertia of the Machine. What makes you point and shout, wait, SOMEONE was here, someone with a healed heart, rested nights, and a wrinkled face, leaving smoke signals in the smoggy sky to let us know we are not alone. We will weep when the smoke mingles with the smog. And perhaps soon after, we will forget what writing was.

Or... perhaps you believe there is still a possibility for building a language model that is convivial as Ivan Illich imagined tools should be? A piece of open-source infrastructure owned and ran by writers, on their own terms. Perhaps a model that doesn't optimize anything, one that very clearly is a tool and designed to open up our writing instead of closing it. Is there a possibility that textual generation too is a pharmaka, and can still help somewhere with collective liberation? Can we turn it against its makers?

Before the word prompt got taken over by AI gurus, it was a starting block used in automatic writing excercises to get the momentum going. The goal was never to exhaust the prompt. It was there to take a point in the abyss of the blank page from which to move away. Chatbots have made the prompt into an axiom around which answers crystallize, the exact opposite of what a writing prompt should be doing.

It's time, i guess, as good a time as any, to reclaim the prompt, by prompting other writers who will answer, but then go their own way.

Join this letter chain, prompt circle, or whatever you want to call it -- I forbid the term human promptipede -- to discuss the relation between text-generation and writing. To sign up, send an email to sudonano@mailbox.org no later than 10 november with a short (±200 words) introduction of yourself and motivation to join. :)

The aim is to get 15 writers signed up. Each writer will sign themselves up for a specific week. The first week starts off with the open call as a prompt. Then, the second week will use the first week as a prompt, and so on. The last week, the first writer edits their contribution to respond in some way to the last writer, so that it becomes a closed chain. The meaning of this circular conversation? Not sure, it's just for fun --- or...? For the pieces themselves the writers have total creativity. For practical reasons, responses are limited to 2500 words. But it could be one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand words. It can contain images, music, movement, interactivity, everything as long as it can be accessed from the web. But no pressure to be maximalistically multimodal. An essay, a story, a poem; Simplicity sticks. Let's remind the machines that prompting belongs to us. ◙