So, I found myself in a restaurant with my wife, two friends, and one friend’s first cousin whom I had not previously met. After drinks and appetizers, the cousin, a well-educated, intelligent, funny, and charming lawyer and real estate investor, learned that I had recently published a novel and was in the process of editing a second for publication. After hearing that each novel had taken me about ten years to write, edit and find a publisher, he proposed that, to produce more in a shorter period of time, I upload my writings into an AI program, so the program could imitate my writing style and produce a third novel for me. When I said that his suggestion held no interest for me, he asked, “Aren’t you the least bit curious to see what it would produce?” When I told him that I wasn’t, he seemed befuddled and disbelieving in my lack of interest. “Not even one iota of interest?” I again said no, and tried to explain, but nevertheless, he persisted (apologies to Mitch McConnell). He tried to explain that using AI would produce more product in less time, and that it had helped him to more efficiently produce legal documents for his clients.

I tried to explain that the most important things for me were not how much time it took to write a book or even to produce a product. My interest, rather, was in creating art—that the creative process gave me joy and fulfillment, no matter how long it took or how much was produced, and that, even if AI could produce a quality “product,” I would be deprived of the serenity and the satisfaction that would come from creating it. The end product is only valuable to me because of my experience in creating it.

Even if AI could reproduce my “style,” whatever that means, it could not reproduce my unconscious, my history, my lived experience, my memories, my random associations to what I see and hear, the things that strike me as funny one moment or brings me to tears the next, or elicit a memory or a feeling that stops me in my tracks by unexpectedly and unpredictably hitting me with grief or longing or regret.

I thought of my short story, Pelican, about a father, estranged from his son, who had a habit of uttering the most crude and embarrassing remarks at the most inopportune times. These cringe-worthy moments were manufactured from memories of my own father and, although embarrassing incidents can be written about by anyone (and, perhaps, any “intelligent” software),  the emotions stirred up in me fueled the narrative with an energy and an urgency that were mine and mine alone.

And then there were the dream-like associations that I had in reaction to one of my therapy patient’s confessions of unexpected behavior that propelled me to write a novel about a psychologist who does things I would never do. Although I had the plot generally mapped out when I started writing, associations from my graduate training and impressions of colleagues, as well as reflections of my own self-doubt and feelings of vulnerability unexpectedly arose during the process and altered the course of my to-be-published novel.

The general trajectory of a short story, novel or essay might be set, but during the course of creation I am bombarded with distractions, like bits of overheard conversation, daydreams, interesting sights, even artwork. I take pictures of things that I find visually interesting, just as I write down thoughts and phrases that come to mind, so that I can hold onto them in case I might find a way to include them in future pieces. AI cannot know what random thing might strike me as interesting on any given day and will end up in a story weeks, months or years later. Like the photograph I saw in an art museum of police in Ferguson, Mo. during the disturbance after the killing of Michael Brown, that inspired part of the riot scene in my novel, Splintered River. Or the photograph of a luminescent tree at the end of a snow-covered path, that inspired a vision of one of the characters at the end of the same novel. There was a quote I heard on the radio years ago: “At some point, they were going to have to replace all the windows,” that struck me as odd for some reason, and which I felt compelled to write down, that made it into the beginning of a novel I have in progress. And why these things strike my interest, or resonate with me emotionally, or mean something more to me than they do to others, have to do with unconscious forces that I cannot completely understand, but which I welcome as the well-spring of creative energy. I don’t believe that AI systems have an unconscious and, even if they did, they wouldn’t have my unconscious.

There have been moments so sublime that they fill me with wonder and gratitude when I recall them. I was driving to another state to attend a family gathering one weekend when an item on the news made me think of young people trapped in a life in a small Southern town. A story started coming into my head quickly and, since I was driving, I could not write anything down, Fortunately, I had my cell phone connected to the car and, every minute or so I dictated a text to myself as ideas came to me. When I got to my hotel, I checked my text and wrote the first draft of Letting Go, which was eventually published. I had almost completed work on Splintered River, and I was struggling with how to end it, but kept drawing a blank. I had an MRI scheduled for my shoulder and, in the MRI tube, a visual of the ending just came to me. The ending was in the voice of a relatively minor character, a different voice than the one that dominated the bulk of the novel. I don’t know if an AI program could have come up with that inconsistency, but I would not trade that moment for anything a computer program could offer.

So, the cousin, undeterred, said that AI might be good at generating new stories, saving me the effort of always having to come up with new material. I responded that every moment is a potential story, if one is sufficiently curious and if one pays attention. An AI program cannot have my particular curiosity and cannot mimic what will be the focus of my attention at any given moment, and how that attention and curiosity will be determined by my alertness, fatigue, mood and, yes, unconscious If you train yourself to be continuously curious and to attend to the world around you, the stories will come. If you read broadly and deeply, the stories will come, and no AI program will know what works of literature I have read, which works have stayed with me, which have imprinted themselves on me emotionally, which have awed me by their style or plot twists or characterizations, and even which ones I remember. If you rely on AI to do the work for you, you are allowing your curiosity and your attention, like any unused muscle, to atrophy with disuse.

I don’t know if I convinced this cousin of anything, and he might consider the entire conversation to have been a waste of time, judging from his frustration at not convincing me of anything either (I know how skilled lawyers are at oral argument and how much they like to win). But, despite our standstill, I am extremely grateful for the interchange. Like a good lawyer, the cousin was articulate, resourceful, persistent and intelligent, forcing me to reflect on my craft and my art in terms that I had not previously been conscious of, or had not articulated to myself so clearly. And that chance encounter, which led me to produce this essay, and possibly get it published, could not have been foreseen by AI.

E.H. Jacobs is a New England-based psychologist and writer. His debut novel, Splintered River—a literary political drama—was published this fall. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a PhD in Psychology from Temple University. His work (short stories, poetry, memoir) has appeared in Hippocampus, Penstricken, The Writers’ Journal, Libre, Glacial Hills Review, Best of Choeofpleirn Press, Streetlight Magazine 2019 and 2021 Anthologies, Abandoned Mine, Coneflower Café, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, Bryant Literary Review, The Bluebird Word, and Smoky Quartz. He has participated in fiction and poetry workshops with the Kenyon Review, Carve Magazine, and Tupelo Press. He has published two books on parenting, professional papers in psychology, and articles for the general public on psychological topics, and he has been a contributing book review editor for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. He has served on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was a finalist in the Derick Burleson Poetry and the Phil Heldrich Nonfiction Contests and was a nominee for the Nina Riggs Poetry Award. His work can be seen at www.ehjacobsauthor.com.