Solve for work

There was a line I heard once. On a podcast, of which I was also a guest. We were talking about AI, specifically as it pertains to writers and our work. They argued passively, as the best advocate for the devils position, that it might just remain as a tool that solves the issue of annoying busywork no one wants to do. A machine that when carefully operated removes all the gates and barriers, and lets writers write. Write as a synonym for work, but work not as a word that derives from labour. A perfect, magic tool that removes the hustle and bustle of getting ideas down on paper, and the writer as the virtuous face of a noble profession that has suffered the sting of sweat for far too long.

I said nothing in the moment because our time was up, and the mics were turned off shortly after, but I haven’t stoped thinking about it. How easily a little bite from the apple is justified when labour becomes something people believe themselves better than. A writer's job, for some, is to have proof of having written. It is not a painful process of scrabbled thoughts, sourced ideas, hastily made notes, failed and then corrected spelling. It isn’t Reading. Processing. Failing. Staring at the wall. A writer's job is to be seen at the table of this noble profession, and lauded for their ability to produce words on paper. Soft hands, that know no cuts or bruises.

So it’s also true then that another line was spoken. Years before, in a parking lot in a Walmart on a Sunday afternoon in the early winter. I was there, standing with a legal sized notepad, staring at the entrance. Examining the new sets of automatic doors I had engineered and installed. An entranceway I had been working on for the last week, in overnight shifts, to not disrupt the delicate flow of commerce. Those nights bled into days and became endless. I worked most of the daylight hours, ate a quick dinner, and then drove to Walmart at 10 pm to work until 8 in the morning, at which point I would sleep in my truck for 20 or so terrible minutes. When I woke up again, My one simple trick was to drink enough coffee to revive a dormant heart, then work for a few more hours. I was exhausted in a way that burn out doesn’t begin to describe, and it was visible on my face. My tired pale skin, my eyes sunken into the dark recesses of their sockets like rats seeking shelter from the sun.

A man walked by, and saw me drafting notes on finishing plans for the new doorway. Sketching designs for aluminum flashing to beautify the exterior, noting still missing small parts, and making final clean up notes. I took extensive notes like this often, to remind myself of all the little details I would otherwise forget. He saw me writing, and staring at the doors to make sure my notes were completed, and laughed a little to himself as he saw the crumbling vision of me. “Need some help?” He asked, and I smiled politely at him without a word escaping me. “My advice? Should have graduated from high school.” Then he walked away from me, effortlessly through the doors I had installed, without a thought for what it had taken to make them open so perfectly.

This take on my lack of education was a common thread sewing the story of me together. I worked as a skilled tradesperson for a decade and a half, and in those years worse things have been said to me than anything written in a bad Goodreads review of my work. Even the one from the influencer who didn’t even read the whole goddamn book. The perception of me performing labour was that it was due to some clearly missing component. People would casually remark that the work I was doing was unimportant, and penance for a lack of education or the right family name. They said these things because they could see me doing the real work, that is to say the annoying parts of the process. They could see my tools, my failures, and setbacks. Witness my tired body and see it reveal the mirror masked by smoke. They needed my work because it could benefit them, and it’s just that my hands had to struggle to make it happen that an issue arose.

They needed the doors to operate. They needed broken windows repaired. They needed my sunken eyes. They would rather not have to witness my work. They didn’t want to know that making these things real means hard and unrewarding labour. It meant watching me struggle, and fail, and problem solve in real time so that I could solve a problem. They needed me to have worked for years, to have studied, to have learned from others. To have written emails. To have written notes. To study those notes. To draft plans by hand, and throw them away when they were faulty. They needed these things, but the work never had any value. The sole integer holding a place for the final product.

The annoying, laborious process is the work, and it’s the same with my job now. I no longer work as I once did, but I still perform labour. It isn’t manual, as anyone who has ever worked like I used to will tell you, but it’s work all the same, and it matters how we talk about it. It’s important that we consider the labour of writing, and all creative pursuits, important. It’s integral that we ascribe a true value to all the steps and setbacks. Not just monetary, but whatever spiritually means to you. This work requires the same exhaustive tasks. The emails and the notes. The gathering of details. The failures. The lessons learned in them. The exhaustion and the pushing past it. I believe this is how we get to the end and prove the truth of our labour. Deliver something from it people can see and benefit from. They don’t see the annoying tasks no one wants to do because we so often don’t want to believe they’re real. That the work is often more important than the product itself. So often when people want to use AI to be a writer, it’s because they believe that it’s the book that has power, and not the strokes of the pen that filled every page. As if all these words become bound together by divine decree for the people who are so uniquely skilled to create and conjure them.

I believe there are people who use AI as writers, and it is justified to their hearts by a need to be unburdened from the cruft of the form. They don’t want to perform their unbecoming labours, as the dirt of them that might irrevocably stain their skin. They want to be seen as writers because it sounds admirable on the tongue. How uniquely special it is to have turned an idea into something more. I have seen people say that they have great ideas deep within them, but they don’t have the time or patience or skill to get them out, to do the work no one wants to see. I have seen them argue that they deserve to be writers. As if there is work some people are owed by virtue of their desires. It reminds me of being told the work I performed was less than because I hadn’t tried hard enough to be someone better, who deserved more than my aching, dirty hands.

The idea has become the work for some, and the immaculate production of it their reward, and this is a doomed prospect. An idea is a nothing thing that has built and destroyed the world countless times over, and it matters how it is crafted and wielded into its final form. It should be done carefully, with great attention and rigorous commitment. We all have ideas, and plugging them into a sentient woodchopper that’s been force-fed everyone’s mostly read copies of Infinite Jest isn’t what makes them real.

The issue, at least partially, is a problem with how labour is perceived. A variable missing for the value placed upon the work. That all labour takes time, and people, and sweat and dirt on our hands. It takes doing all the annoying tedious shit that no one really wants to do. That’s what builds the skills, and determines the outcome. All our books and stories are that way because of all the burdensome tasks that build the path to the end. All the setbacks and failures, the skill building and small triumphs. The monotonous shit no one really wants to do, a keystone in the design of laborious process. There is no written word without a weary hand wielding the pen.