What is the value of human stories?
We’ve all heard the saying: It’s about the journey, not the destination. For over forty years, Clarion West has centered the writer’s journey — that is the process of human creativity from idea to draft — as a way to help writers build careers as professional storytellers. Now, emergent technology has forced us all to think hard about the value of human creativity and innovation in storytelling and why it matters to us.
Isn’t it weird for a speculative fiction workshop not to embrace new and emerging technologies?
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that as writers who dream up worlds set in myriad futures, in which super-powered personal assistants and almost-infinite databases are part of our everyday lives, we find ourselves questioning what these technologies mean for the future of human creativity in our field.
The ways in which speculative fiction gives voice to those exploring societal and technological change has always been a primary focus of Clarion West. That doesn’t mean giving in to the overwhelming corporate messaging that this variant of “AI” is the unambiguous future. Instead, we see this as a moment to examine the real world consequences of fast moving technology and its effects on the human experience.
What happens if GenAI gets good enough to “pass” for human?
AI submissions have begun to overwhelm already overworked editors and agents. Anthologies are cancelling rather than being lost in the swamp of trying to detect synthetic text from human stories.
AI detectors and the very things that writers once used for pacing and immersion — em dashes, sentence structure, metaphors — are held up as evidence of use of a language model, despite the fact that the models “learned” these techniques from the wholesale theft of human writing. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves many writers scared, angry, and exhausted, feeling under threat not only from the industry built on their work, but from potentially career-ending accusations of using GenAI in everything from cover art to copy edits.
Writing can be lonely work. One of the values at the heart of Clarion West has always been community, from the individual cohorts to our alumni network. Community is what strengthens our ability to persevere, especially in uncertain times.
They call it “the hero/ine’s journey” for a reason.
For Clarion West, the question is not how and when will AI generated stories “pass” for human writing, but how we can help writers who remain committed to developing their uniquely human process as storytellers to deepen their critical thinking skills and engage with issues facing creativity today as industry professionals.
Right now, we may be facing a dark moment of the soul. It’s tempting to collapse into the terror that all may be lost. But writers know there are many ways for stories to end — from bleak to triumphant. We also know that endings are a launch point for new stories. Better stories. Ones that are built on what we learned from those previously told. They may revisit something in a more nuanced fashion, or become the jumping off point for the leap to a fresh idea. It’s a virtuous cycle: The growth is in the telling and shaping of the story, is the learning which sparks the growth into new stories. A writing career is not a single piece of brilliant “gotcha!” fiction, but a body of work that tells the story of the writer’s journey. This is the work of a lifetime.
It’s the work that generative AI can’t be trained to value, because it can only focus on the destination.
Clarion West remains committed to the belief that the journey is the most important part of the work of being a writer. Our writers, instructors, and staff agree to work together in our six-week and novel writing workshops on the promise that the very human process of drafting stories from our own minds and hearts holds as much intrinsic value as the outcome. We are not interested in workshopping stories written wholly or in part by machines, because that prioritizes algorithm based outcomes rather than the learning that emerges from grappling with questions of narrative and storytelling. We will continue to be the place for writers who are here to do this sometimes messy, often imperfect work.
To experiment.
To fail bigger.
To work with their own ideas, using their craft, among peers — instructors and their cohort — who have committed to do the same.
Come write with us.
Rashida J. Smith
Program Director
(And you can pry the emdash from my cold, dead, very human fingers. Bet.)