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Poor James is getting absolutely roasted on Twitter.

I wish I was the kind of person who didn’t join in but I did.

In this case though James is kinda getting what he asked for. Calling it Sudowrite…just the cherry on top.

James has a bigger problem than this public relations disaster though. Software systems to “help you write” have existed for a long time. I don’t believe they’ve ever lead to anyone writing anything anyone would want to read.

Although now I’m thinking about Brandon Sanderson and suspecting…maybe…

But humour aside, writing is an unforgiving profession. Because your one job as a writer is to, over and over again, not write that mediocre sentence, not write that mediocre beat, not write that mediocre chapter. To write something that is not just an amalgalm of all that has already been written.

Doing that means connecting with a part of yourself that exists beyond your waking mind. Beyond the algorithmic processes that get you through the daily grind. The part of yourself that dreams, that feels and that creates. Call it the imagination, the unconscious, the superconscious, the creative intelligence. Call it god, which was the traditional name.

The real problem for these writing software things is they place yet another layer of rules, systems and algorithms between you and your inner world. They make the real task of writing harder not easier, and replace it…here the irony of the name kicks in…with a pseudo-writing that never touches the imagination, and just bumbles around in the waking mind instead.

The people who make the AI, in my experience, do not believe in the imagination. They think the human mind is just an algorithm we don’t fully understand yet but will replicate in machines. Perhaps they’ll be proven right one day if their machines ever produce stories that inspire wonder and awe.

But so far they are doing the opposite. They’ve mastered auto-generating the bland and mediocre writing that it’s the one job of the human writer to escape. And now James and friends have made an app that makes escaping it that little bit harder.