Hi, I'm Chandler Klang Smith -- a friend alerted me to your essay in Typebar and the kind words you shared about me and my unlikeable characters there. I thought I'd try reaching out since I actually have a different take on the potential for AI in creative writing (although I also understand and respect your perspective).
As you probably noticed when reading my novel, I love for books to have a patchwork, collage-like feel, with different sections hewing to entirely different sets of formal and genre conventions. Although I don't do this as much in my own work, I also appreciate when sections of a book use language in markedly different ways, whether those are different third person POVs, different narrators, or different historical eras (thinking of Cloud Atlas especially with that last one). I don't relate to or particularly admire authors who turn to AI just to get the prose writing "out of the way" -- I'm also not sure that's yet possible? -- but I think there's totally potential to use AI-produced text as a raw material that one can shape to achieve different, purposeful effects, just as collage artists from Wangechi Mutu to Henry Darger employ scraps of other artists' imagery to assemble their own powerfully strange visual realms. Imo AI prose can also function as a surrealist or Oulipian jumping off point for writers who thrive on prompts or constraints.
Anyway, I'd be happy to continue the conversation, here on Substack or over email. My address is on my website :-)
Hi, I'm Chandler Klang Smith -- a friend alerted me to your essay in Typebar and the kind words you shared about me and my unlikeable characters there. I thought I'd try reaching out since I actually have a different take on the potential for AI in creative writing (although I also understand and respect your perspective).
As you probably noticed when reading my novel, I love for books to have a patchwork, collage-like feel, with different sections hewing to entirely different sets of formal and genre conventions. Although I don't do this as much in my own work, I also appreciate when sections of a book use language in markedly different ways, whether those are different third person POVs, different narrators, or different historical eras (thinking of Cloud Atlas especially with that last one). I don't relate to or particularly admire authors who turn to AI just to get the prose writing "out of the way" -- I'm also not sure that's yet possible? -- but I think there's totally potential to use AI-produced text as a raw material that one can shape to achieve different, purposeful effects, just as collage artists from Wangechi Mutu to Henry Darger employ scraps of other artists' imagery to assemble their own powerfully strange visual realms. Imo AI prose can also function as a surrealist or Oulipian jumping off point for writers who thrive on prompts or constraints.
Anyway, I'd be happy to continue the conversation, here on Substack or over email. My address is on my website :-)