Fourth graders are not well-equipped to face even fleeting moments of mortality, much less a sustained sense of impending doom.
My mind and heart had been racing for hours while I was cornered at the top of a precipitous ditch with a jagged culvert at the bottom where the two bullies had pulled their bikes in front of mine in the weeds and refused to let me pass.
Any escape plan I could imagine ended in failure. There were no rocks within reach to throw at them, no handy threats to dissuade them, and my bike was too small in comparison to push my way through. I was a fast runner, but my banana-seat, high rise handlebar Schwinn was my most treasured possession, and I didn’t want to leave it behind to get busted up or stolen.
I was a mere block from home, which ought to have been of some comfort. But knowing the safety of my backyard was so close, yet inaccessible, scrambled my innocent sense of safety from that day forward. Looking at the menacing faces of my captors it was as though every dissonant, screechy violin technique ever devised for horror movie soundtracks was playing at the same time. I was sure I would not survive this.
“Go ahead, call for your mommy,” the larger of the two boys taunted. “I’ll punch you right in the face.”
It was the early 1970s when kids roamed neighborhoods freely after school and on weekends. My friends and I would routinely disappear for better parts of the day without our parents worrying or wondering what we were up to. In their minds we weren’t doing anything other than romping on couches in each other’s basements, scaling trees in the woods, devouring crustless peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches in each other’s kitchens, and carrying on. Ordinarily, that was so.
In other words, no one was about to come looking for me.
But in that extraordinarily unneighborly moment there was an impassioned cry for help lodged in my lungs, pressing up on the gate of my constricted larynx with the force of a firehouse. If I let it out, I’d feel the hammer of a 7th grader’s fist upside my head, but the urge to raise my voice didn’t abate.
So instead, I stared at the ground.
I was ashamed of my helplessness; that I couldn’t rise up somehow to save myself. I was a trapped animal at the hands of my tormentors who were relishing every minute of my cornered desperation. I became very familiar with the sand and gravel at our feet in my fervent search there for a solution.
Our home lives were right there in our shoes.
My runners were black Keds. I could picture my mother lacing them right to the top, the plastic aglets in good enough shape to easily re-lace if they came loose. My hostage takers, on the other hand, were wearing the high-top Converse sneakers reserved for the cool kids. The laces were frayed, tattered, and trailing—loose enough that the sneaker tongues lolled out like an exhausted dog. The white soles were scuffed and gray.
My staring went on like this for hours. Nothing happened on the surface other than my captors smirking and chatting. Within me, however, an inner war waged where I debated raising my voice, calling out, yet decided silence was my only option.
Eventually the juvies got bored, knocked my bike over, and rode away.
The gravel ripped a small hole in my banana seat, but my failure to use my voice to speak up, call out, talk back, say something—tore a hole in my self-esteem and confidence.
That’s when I remembered where I am now.
I emerged from this memory cloud to find myself sitting here at my keyboard, this piece of personal history having spontaneously surfaced after being asked to provide feedback on the draft of an author’s essay.
It’s publicly known that I run a writing community, so I’m often asked to review drafts of articles. I started my group for authors because self-expression thrills my spirit. I’m obsessed by the challenge of authentic human communication, but readily celebrate its appearance from any source. I say yes to beta reading, even sometimes for non-community members, because I’m always hoping to stumble on expressions of self-honesty, bravery and courage.
An hour ago I’d pulled my chair with brisk enthusiasm—ready to tuck into the review like it was apple pie. I gave my full attention to the author’s words, intent on supplying a genuine response to their effort. I was uplifted by the first few paragraphs, feeling as though I was being ushered into the writer’s world by a confident, clear voice.
Then it got . . .
Too good.
Too smooth.
Overrun by meaning.
Stiffly lyrical.
Like too much cologne on a salesman, or too many accomplishments on a resume.
I found myself backing away emotionally, and getting angry as I realized I was being asked to polish the sterile surface of an LLM. Ok, angry is probably not the right word. Enraged, is more like it. A whole story sprouted in my head about the writer’s lack of integrity, and the toxicity of AI. Then I felt judgmental about my own reaction. Why the righteous inner fireworks?
“What’s really at stake here?” I wondered.
But I quickly recovered from the self-reflection, restored my umbrage, and went back to criticizing the author and their use of AI. I started a whole article about it—excoriating their dependence on linguistic machinery, rising to the defense of human words. A self-observing mirror, however, kept finding me. The inner force of my righteousness was a clear tell that there was more at play. I forced myself to sit quietly for a minute and queried again.
“Why does AI writing upset me so much?”
That’s when the memory of being bullied into silence burst into recall.
Before the memory, the force of my desire to save my own voice, to use it at all costs, to protect and defend its truth and existence was operating unconsciously. It wasn’t enough to save my own voice. If I could save all voices, perhaps I could erase the betrayal of my own.
My lock-kneed superiority began to weaken. Beneath my rage about AI assisted writing was despair, grief, and resistance—fear of living in a world of suppressed song. Dread that it might become fashionable to outsource the effort of one’s thinking. Alarm that access to more data would become an acceptable proxy for truth.
I didn’t feel ready to live in a world where others are bullied into silence by a techno culture that characterizes our singular voices as inferior to all voices at once. Once we’re seduced into silence, we have nothing left but the words of others.
It’s a common disabling narrative for authors who hesitate to share their own stories and ideas.
Everyone is a better writer than me.
I should keep quiet.
I have nothing new to say.
I’ll let others speak for me.
I’ll listen to gurus and quote them.
I’ll study the classics and cite them.
I’ll follow politicians and fund them.
I’ll prompt machines and converse with them.
In the fervor of my righteousness, I wrote:
Using AI we feed the remaining fragments of our authenticity to the maw of prompted sameness. We donate the unique colors of our palette to a virtual vat, where language is meted out as a tired mass of factory sentiments.
Each act of acquiescence to the demolition of voice helps to enrich developers to pave over the last patches of human dignity; to raze the glory of stutters, misspellings, and awkward pauses to the ground; to erect high rises of perfect, sterling railed, empty prose, with floor to ceiling manufactured views.
Woe, woe, woe to us all if we surrender our voice without a fight.
Where shall we find refuge if not in our refusal to pull into the drive thru for a cup of convenient conversation and 7-Eleven chat?
If you have a heartbeat, you have a few true words that are your own.By all means, read, study, converse, research, experiment, explore every corner of the world of knowledge—but then stand on your own and speak.
We don’t need you to be prolific.
We don’t need an essay to believe in you.
We just need one true sentence that vulnerably rolls over at our feet, exposes its belly, and shows its heart.
Please.
Please.
Without having reflected on the origins of my stump speech, I would have launched my essay into the world feeling superior, righteous, and justifiably dismissive of anyone who uses AI to communicate.
Now, I just see the trembling, spirit-broken kid inside of me who is trying to heal, desperate to reclaim his voice by projecting the need for all humans to rise in radical rebellion against any and all repressive forces in their path.
Incomplete in my own reclamation of voice, I require a bully to spar with, to redeem myself in practice. In AI I have fashioned one. With great difficulty I entertain the possibility that AI is not everyone’s bully. Perhaps it might even be utilized by some as a guide, ally, or friend.
I don’t see myself personally using AI to write. I’m grateful that my life experiences have brought necessity to the practice of personal expression in a way that I don’t seek to a way to shortcut.
But I also realize that in a mysterious, diverse, evolving world, whether anyone else uses AI is their business. Each will have their own reasons for embracing or rejecting or blending its presence into their lives. We’ve all arrived here at this moment from inimitable directions, sent forth on a unique wave of history, requiring singular paths for each of our brightest futures.
But I can sense that I’m not the only one who resonates with the haunting quote from the gnostic gospels.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas
This, I feel, is the driving motivation behind so many writers.
But you don’t have to be obsessed with the writing life to believe that bullying others into silence with the hope that they will eventually abandon their voice is not the way forward.
Nor is tricking them into thinking that a machine can call forth what lies in the deepest reaches of their heart and soul.
Both paths are seeds of dehumanizing regimes that I pray we’ll hold a sincere and brave intention to rise above.