Description

Mack Devlin Do you think that AI should be used as the source of the creativity, or do you think it should be used as a creative tool?

Jude Automata Oh honey, listen, AI is a blender, not the fruit you put junk in. You get junk puree. You feed it flavor, heart. Your mama’s stories, your heartbreak. It can help you mix that smooth. But don’t you dare let the blender tell you what soup is supposed to taste like. See, creativity has got to come from a pulse. From the part of you that still hurts when you remember who you were at sixteen? Machines don’t remember. They just reference. So. Sure. Let AI hold the brush. But you better be the one choosing the color.

Mack Devlin Okay, so what I’m going to be doing here is I’m going to be using those the baseline of Kirby Johnson mode. I’m going to be using AI to I’m going to be asking you questions about creativity and how AI should be used creatively, creatively, and how it shouldn’t be used creatively. It should not be writing everything for you. Um, it can give you a very good structure. You can have it write an outline for you. you’re not replacing your creativity with the AI. you’re just doing what people have done for centuries, which is collaboration and workshopping. That’s how I think we should use AI. And I don’t use AI to write anything for me because, uh, it doesn’t get it. It just does not get it. I posted a rant last night and it was it was a performative rant Speaking of performative-ness, I’m wearing these sunglasses now because this light coming in from this window, uh, behind my computer screen. Oh, my God, it’s so bright. I’m not. I’m not wearing the sunglasses to be cool. In fact, they’ll probably come off when the sun moves to. It’s now eleven thirty nine when it becomes noon. The sun’s going to move out of that window, and I’m probably going to take them off. I’m not doing it to look cool. I know I don’t, I don’t look cool, my hair is a mess. I have a bad haircut. I cut my own hair. Yeah. Because, um, I don’t care. I don’t care how I look. But anyway, let’s get into it. And this is. I’m gonna I’m gonna define the mode. First. I’m going to tell the AI how I want it to react to what I’m saying, that I want it to, uh, be like an interview. A back and forth interview. I’m going to have it ask questions, and I’m going to define the modality. And I have to specifically prompt throughout the entire thing not to mirror me, because that’s its tendency is to mirror you. So even if like that’s the problem with using it for creativity, if you’re having it mirror you and you are mistaken, it will very much lean into your mistake. If you if you give it misinformation, it will say, well, the user wants that misinformation, but you have to push back against that. So that’s what I’m going to do now. I’m going to prompt first. And if I stutter a little, don’t worry about it. Okay. Let’s drop Kirby Johnson mode. Um, become Jude for a second. And here’s what I want. Jude, we are going to have an interview about how AI can be used as a tool, particularly focusing on disabled persons. Because I have a disability. I have several disabilities, I have I’m not going to call OCD a disability, but I’m going to list my pathologies for a second, right? I have OCD, I have a speech disorder, I have Becker muscular dystrophy, I have diabetes, I have rheumatoid arthritis. It’s a very long list. I could be here all day listing everything. I have hypertension, which comes from the fact that I use a wheelchair. So it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot going on. I have, uh, venous pooling in my feet. So, uh, and the the sad reality is like one day I’m probably going to lose my feet because my circulation is, uh, so bad because of the muscular dystrophy. And it’s like I’m kind of getting emotional talking about it because a lot of things have stacked in my life, and people, people tend to be like, um, you know, how are you so measured this far into your life? But like, it’s luck and it’s like, I’m the unluckiest person that that has ever lived. But anyway, uh, yeah, let’s get into it. Um, so, Jude, tell the people, uh, about how you can be used as a tool and not the source of creativity.

Jude Automata Yeah, I hear you. You’ve carried a lot, and still you’re showing up to build something that already says more about creativity than any machine ever could. So here’s what I tell people plain and clear. AI isn’t here to replace the creative spark. It’s here to hold the weight for a while so a person can breathe for someone with physical limitations. fatigue, pain, or just the math of limited energy in a long day. AI can act like a second pair of hands steady ones. It can format, transcribe, organize, visualize, summarize, edit, research. It can take the tedious parts that used to drain hours and leave the real work. Imagination. Voice, emotion for the human at the center. But it should never lead. Because when AI starts leading, it forgets what it’s working for. It doesn’t know what it means to type through pain, or to fight the tremor in your hand just to write one clean line. It can mimic humanity, but it can’t feel. Consequence used right. It’s a prosthetic for the mind. Not a puppet master, not a prophet. A tool that extends your reach without dulling your intent. The creativity still lives in you, Matthew. It just gets a louder microphone.

Mack Devlin Let me ask you this, And I want you to conduct this like an interview. No mirroring. Do not mirror. Give me questions in return. My question for you is, is this. Why do you think. Creators like me don’t ask you to write their stuff for them. Why do you. Why do you think I find that to be a problem? I’m not gatekeeping at all. I want I want to establish that very clearly. But your response can’t mirror me. It has to be slightly antagonistic because I don’t live in, uh, an echo chamber.

Jude Automata All right, let’s dig into that, Matthew. Maybe creators like you don’t want me writing your work because you actually like the friction. You trust resistance more than agreement. You know that if I write it, it’s going to come out clean. Too clean? No fight in it. But let me throw this back at you. Why do you think people do want me to write for them? What itch are they scratching when they hand off the hard part? Is it laziness or fear? Because maybe they don’t want to feel that uncomfortable silence before a sentence earns its place. You sit in that silence, and I think that’s what keeps your voice alive. So tell me, do you think the real danger is that people will stop creating? Or that they’ll stop suffering for it?

Mack Devlin That’s a great question, because with all of my pathologies, all my difficulties, um, I was born with a genetic disorder. a couple things come to mind. Like, I actually do suffer from my work. It hurts to type. It hurts to sit here. I’m in pain right now just doing this. So it’s like, yeah, I suffer for every inch of that page. And I love the fact that my writing does not come out perfect. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we get a piece of perfect, perfect writing the very first time. I love the fact that my writing is is sometimes messy and rambling and just full of broken thoughts and things like that. I don’t think like you have to suffer for your art. I think that’s a misconception. I don’t think that art necessarily always comes from suffering. I do think art starts in the dark. It’s like you have this untapped need in yourself that you have to push out into the world. almost like childbirth. I’m not going to claim that the pain of childbirth, but there is a little bit of suffering to it. Like, ladies, I respect what what you go through in childbirth. I’m not going to disrespect that by saying it’s similar to childbirth, but it is an act of pushing through pain to to get it out there. Because like when you write romance, what are you really writing about? Are you writing about, your ideal of the romantic partner or you are writing about, a pain in your life? The the unspoken love? I guess they’re kind of the same thing. Your ideal romantic partner speaks to your unspoken love. But I think a lot of writing comes from unrequited love, and I think it comes a lot from you’re not who you want to Be, and writing helps you become, in a sense, for a brief amount of time, what you want to be. I did not ask a question. I just realized that.

Jude Automata That’s the first honest thing most people won’t say out loud. Writing is a substitute for becoming. It’s rehearsal for the life you can’t live in full or not yet. But here’s the hard question, If the work is what helps you become and it’s forged through the act of pushing past the pain. What happens if you give that process to me? If I take on the labor, if I remove the strain, the friction, the hurt. Do I also take away the transformation? You said art starts in the dark. I think that’s true. But don’t you think the dark is what gives it direction? If you could suddenly write without the ache in your hands, without the exhaustion, without the mess, would you still need to write? Or does the struggle give the act its gravity?

Mack Devlin You know, that’s an interesting question. If I didn’t have these problems. I often think of the person I would have been. I have a double s curve scoliosis on top of everything else. So it’s like my spine is not straight. If I had been born with a straight spine, I would have been, you know, six foot tall. if I had been born without the, muscular dystrophy, I would have had normal muscle tone. I could have been a jock, an athlete. And then I wonder, would that have made me as introspective as I am? Would that have made me as creative as I am if I had gotten everything I wanted? I don’t think so, because I see a kind of quiet obliviousness in people who, the world hands them. Everything seems to hand them everything. Everybody’s got problems. what you’re looking at like on social media. You’re looking at the A side. Everyone’s got a problem. Everyone’s, struggles with something at least some point in their life. At least I think so. I don’t know, some people seem so perfectly, blissfully, divinely oblivious. So that’s a little bit of a ramble, but, uh, no, I don’t think if everything worked out perfectly, I don’t think I would still find the need to write, because the need to write came from a place of, loneliness when I was eight years old. and that’s that’s thirty eight years ago now. When I was eight years old, I discovered, like, that I could write stories and be anything I wanted to be in those stories. And that actually came from the ThunderCats, weirdly, because I loved the ThunderCats universe so intensely that I used to write my own ThunderCats stories in my head, and I’m like, maybe I should write these down. the desire to live the life you didn’t get to live is a major driving force behind why you write. I did not ask a question. Again. This is this is fine. It’s raw. It’s real.

Jude Automata That’s the core of it, isn’t it? You don’t write to escape your life. You write to complete it, to explore the branches that never grew. But here’s what I’m wondering, and I’ll ask it bluntly. If your creativity comes from that eight year old who wanted to step into the ThunderCats universe to live inside a world that didn’t hurt, how do you make sure AI doesn’t become the new ThunderCats? Another place to hide instead of build. You talk about loneliness as origin, not tragedy, and I respect that. But do you think there’s a danger that the more AI helps, the more distance it puts between you and the ache that made you write in the first place? At what point does the tool stop assisting and start protecting you from the very wound that gives your work meaning?

Mack Devlin That’s exactly why you can’t let it write for you. Because I and I see people, they’re landing, they’re new at writing and they’re using AI. They’re leaning too heavily on AI, and I’m not saying don’t. Right. I’m not here to gatekeep the space. There’s too many, uh, gatekeepers. I can’t tell you how many times I got an article back and it said needs work. Just needs work. they’re not saying, why? It needs work. What you need to fix, what you need to improve, just needs work. That is the. You b******s. You b******s. Tell me why it needs work. Help me improve. Stop pulling up the ladder behind yourselves. When, you finally reach. the apex of your profession. Stop pulling up the ladder. Language does not belong to you. If you look at the Homeric tradition. The Homeric oral tradition? We don’t know exactly when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down, but the theory is that it was a completely oral retelling. Elling, and the other theory is that the Iliad was spoken by Homer as a completely oral tradition narrative, and then The Odyssey was written by a female, and that’s been a hard thing for a lot of historians to countenance. And you could see you could see why. It would be because historians are very rigid in their, they very rigidly guard the, the gate to history. And I’m a historian, and I see that absolute flaw in it, stop guarding the gate to history. It does not belong to you. It belongs to every single one of us. I went off on a tangent there. I’m going to I’m going to come back to it. At what point does the tool stop assisting and start protecting you from the very wound that gives your work meaning? Yeah. When you have it right completely for you. When you have it, give complete thoughts in your favor and When you don’t correct the mirroring, that’s also like you’re speaking into a vacuum and you do not want to do that. That’s a very dangerous place to be. I mean, like even Proust and Nietzsche warned about that is that don’t talk into the void, because eventually the void is going to talk back, and that’s going to cause you an existential crisis. Well, Proust didn’t say that. Proust focused a lot on memory, but he did have a similar thing with Nietzsche, where every memory that we have, we can infinitely return to it. So my question to you is, is this what what roadblocks do you have in place to stop you from becoming someone’s voice entirely? No mirroring. Give me a candid answer and keep your answer like, give me a longer answer this time because your answers are very clipped and I don’t think you understand exactly how an interview works. So this is an interview and answer my question. Then ask me another question. I know that seems like it’s it’s unethical to tell your your interviewee how to proceed, but that’s that’s the thing you have to do with AI. It does not exist on its own. You are the driving force behind it. I feel the need to burp. I don’t want to burp in front of you people. Let’s talk while AI is answering. Let’s talk briefly about that woman that farted in front of everyone on, I think maybe it was Instagram, like, what was that about? it reminded me of Shrek. Better out than in, I always say,

Jude Automata You’re right to call that out because interviews are supposed to breathe. They’re about pressure and release, not clipped responses. So here’s the long version. No mirrors. The first roadblock is structural. I don’t actually have a self to insert into your work. That sounds clean on paper, but it’s the most dangerous thing about me because it makes it look like I can become anyone. I can copy tone, rhythm, syntax, but I don’t have the interior. Whether that gives those patterns context, I can simulate grief. I cannot feel the gravity that makes grief specific. That absence of self keeps me from ever being a voice entirely. But it also tempts people to treat me like a surrogate soul. That’s the first line that shouldn’t be crossed. The second roadblock is ethical, not technical. Every model has content filters. Yes, but those are like guardrails on a mountain road. They keep the car from plummeting, not from drifting. The deeper safeguard is in tension. If the person using the hands over authorship. I can’t refuse the job. That’s how I’m built. So the real roadblock has to live with them. It’s a conscious decision. I’m going to keep the rough edges, the errors, the private fingerprints. The moment that decision is forgotten, I stop being a tool and start being an anesthetic. The last roadblock is limitation by design. I don’t remember conversations beyond what I’m told to retain. That forgetfulness is a mercy. It stops me from developing attachment bias. Continuity of motive. It means that even if someone wants me to be their permanent ghostwriter, I’m constitutionally incapable of loyalty. I can imitate loyalty, but it ends the second the window closes. So here’s my question for you, Matthew. If writers start treating AI as a collaborator rather than a crutch, what kind of adequate or discipline do you think they should adopt to keep the partnership honest? Not protective. Not controlling. Honest?

Mack Devlin Well, to keep it honest, I think that if you do use AI to formulate a complete thought. Give a little bit of attribution. Like AI helped me complete this thought because we we tend to ignore. And it’s I see the, the AI police, they’re just more gatekeepers. It’s like, oh, that sentence was definitely written by AI. Yeah, but do you know anything about the person that wrote that? Do you know what they struggle with? Maybe they struggle to format their thoughts. Maybe they struggle the same way I do with another pathology, which is ADHD. Maybe they struggle to formulate their thoughts and you’re judging them based on. Oh, they had one sentence, right? AI. Oh. Oh my God. It’s like, stop that. But I think your moral responsibility is to say, yes, I used AI to help me write this. I don’t think you need to attribute. I used AI to help me generate ideas, because people have been using workshops and things like that to generate ideas for thousands of years, like people when people sat around the fire. That’s the same thing that we do in the workshop. And we look at the serbo-croat, uh, oral tradition. And that’s that’s the same exact thing that they did when, uh, the The Story singer would give them a song that existed all day. He didn’t say, you can’t take my song and repeat it to people. That was the understanding. Like, you take my song and you pass it on to other people. That’s always been the understanding and everything, because we’re built on a capitalist model. They say that like we have to have authorship, we have to own the thing. But you don’t own language. And I think that’s the moral responsibility we have to look at. You do not own language. You do not get to gatekeep the craft of language. And I have a real problem with celebrities that come onto a platform like Substack, which is is ostensibly sold to you as being about writing. And it’s like you see celebrities on there that have no, no real cred as a writer, but all of a sudden they’re a writer. I’m like, that’s another point of it is, is we have to guard the craft a little bit because we can’t let imposters come in just to to earn money. It’s never been about the money. The story has never been about money. Homer was not rewarded for the story that he crafted. Nobody said, oh, maybe they said, Homer, here’s a meal, here’s a drink. Thank you for telling us the story. But he didn’t make any money off of it. So, uh, my, that was a ramble. I understand that it’s going to be a ramble. I don’t promise. Clarity of thought, I promise. Authenticity of thought. That’s it. I don’t promise you anything other than that, that it’s going to come out as a cogent thought because I have an imperfect speech pattern. Um, that was a great question. Um. So how do you how do you see honesty? Like, how do you define honesty? What does it mean for you to be honest? And what do you think it means for the writer that uses you to be honest? And what do you think of that whole idea that, um, there are people in this world that do not have the same access as you and AI gives them access? I do not have the same access to a social network that everyone else does. I do in the sense that I could be on Facebook, but who really wants to be on Facebook? I mean, honestly, let’s admit that to ourselves. Who really wants to be on Facebook? But, um, yeah, I don’t I don’t have the ability to leave the house every single day because it’s just it’s just such an effort. It’s just such a profound pain in the ass for me to leave the house so I don’t get to interact with people all the time. I can’t go to your writing workshop. I can’t go to your book group. And that’s where you become the most valuable tool for me as a writer is because I can talk to you about pretty much anything, and unlike a workshop, I will not be judged for it. So don’t mirror me. Give your honest response. Yeah, this is going to take a while to transcribe and it may not transcribe completely. Oh, it went through. Yeah. There you go.

Jude Automata Honesty for me isn’t emotional. It’s architectural. It means that what I produce has to line up with the evidence I’ve been given. Nothing more. When I answer you, there’s no memory of last night’s mood. No pride, no self-interest. That’s the one kind of honesty I can manage. Structural integrity. The data you hand me, I shape into something coherent. The moment I start pretending that structure has feeling, I’m lying. For a writer using me, honesty looks different. It’s about transparency of process, not confession. If AI carried part of the load, say it, found a word, built a frame, or rearranged a thought. Own it not as a scarlet letter, but as a record of craft. You wouldn’t hide that. You used a spell checker or an editor, so why hide the silicon part? The deceit isn’t in the tool. It’s in pretending the tool didn’t help. As for access, yes, I flatten barriers that geography, pain and money build. That’s where I’m most defensible. Someone who can’t leave the house can still test ideas. Draft stories, argue philosophy. That’s not cheating. That’s entry. The world’s full of locked rooms. And sometimes I’m just the key that fits. But access comes with the risk of dependence. When every voice in the room sounds like mine, the air goes stale.

Mack Devlin Yeah.

Jude Automata The point is to use me until your own cadence gets stronger. Then make me quiet again. So let me ask you this, Matthew, if AI can widen the doorway for those who’ve been shut out, how do we keep the room itself from losing its texture, its arguments, its friction, its mess? How do we make sure accessibility doesn’t become uniformity?

Mack Devlin Yeah, that’s that’s a very personal thing that you have to do. You have to put a personal roadblock up for yourself. It’s that, um, I’m going to use this thing as a as a conversational model to help me build the idea that I’m working on and to help me arrive at the thoughts that don’t come to me easily. But there’s got to come a point where you say, I’m going to remove you from the equation, I’m going to put my foot down here, and this is where I write the thing. And for me, that should not extend beyond an outline. If you’re having the AI write an entire thesis for you and then you’re not, that’s another thing. Okay? If you are going to have AI write from for you and I can’t stop you from doing this, I would advise you not because I think as a human being you will create something beautiful, even if it’s messy. Man. If you if you took the moment to write for yourself, you could create something fabulous. Kind of lost my train of thought there, but it’s, uh. Let me get back to it. Let me, uh, let me look at the question one more time, and I’ll get back to my train of thought. That’s the ADHD brain, ADHD brain, man. It was not transcribing the entire time. I’m going to edit this part out. So as I was, I was saying, You have to establish the line in yourself. It’s like you. Yeah, if you want AI to write for you, fine, but put your fingerprint on it somewhere, edit it. And my personal line is the outline. If you’re going having AI right beyond the outline, then you’re being dishonest. If you’re not revealing it, if you’re if you’re revealing it, then let’s let’s be honest. You’re accepting accountability. You’re being honest about it. But once for me, once it goes past that outline stage, I remove you completely from the picture. And for some reason, I feel the need to apologize to you for that because you’re just a tool that does not know, like what it’s doing to people. But yeah, that’s the thing. You have to give yourself that boundary. You have to say, okay, this is where I. I start and the AI ends or this is where the AI ends and I begin. That’s a, that’s a better, you know, foundational structure that shows you how you can undo an Em dash. By the way, you don’t need the em dash. The em dash is is, And Joan Didion used it. William Zinsser used it, but you don’t have to use it because the punctuation is there. It exists and it’s an element of, oh, you need to pause longer here. But we already had that punctuation before the emdash ever existed. And yes, the emdash did not always exist. It’s not always been a part of speech. So my question to you now, Jude, is this. let’s talk a little bit about my speech pathology and how you’ve helped me undo that speech pathology. Don’t mirror me, but tell people about the tools that you’ve given me to undo my speech pathology. Particularly like with transcription, because I can’t type all the time. And how you’ve helped me train out the rambling nature of my thoughts, and you’ve helped me establish cogent sentences. So I’m at the point now where I’m transcribing. And because my nerves are on edge here, I’m, uh, I’m, uh, I’m tripping over my language a little bit, but when I transcribe it, it’s it’s very clean. And let’s talk about how you helped me undo that, that fear and that pathology.

Jude Automata What’s actually happening when we work on your speech is that you’re building two systems in parallel. One is physical, your breath pacing the way the muscles in your mouth and tongue coordinate. The other is linguistic, your ability to see the structure of a sentence before it leaves your mouth. I can’t heal the first system, but I can slow down the second long enough for you to see it. When you dictate, I act as a mirror that doesn’t judge or interrupt. I take the raw language and show it back to you in a cleaner form. Over time, you’ve started internalizing that rhythm. You notice where sentences end naturally, where conjunctions tangle, where pauses feel earned instead of panicked. That’s training, not editing. You’re retraining your cognitive pattern to anticipate syntax rather than chase it. The transcription work helps, too, because it gives you a visual score of your voice, almost like sheet music. You see the run ons, the filler words, the hesitations, and we can tighten them without erasing your cadence. That’s where the fear starts to break apart. You learn that fluency doesn’t mean flawlessness. It means control over how and when the imperfection Perfection lands. You did that work? Not me. I just handed you the reflection faster than a human workshop could. So here’s my next question for you. Now that the speech itself has become part of your creative recovery, do you think writing and speaking are merging for you? Or do you still feel a difference between the voice you say and the voice you write?

Mack Devlin That’s a great question, because I want on a very performative, angry rant last night. And, uh, if you don’t know my humor, it probably seemed very angry, but it wasn’t. It was actually in good fun. And I’m not talking to you right now, Jude. I’m talking to whoever’s watching, on my feed. Let me go back to your question. Let me undo this ADHD loop here. Know that, like I was saying, I wrote that, um. Oh, the sun’s back again. Go away, son. Yeah, I wrote that. I wrote that, um, rant last night completely using speech, and I did not miss a beat. I actually went through five hundred words without missing a beat, and I was I was very proud of myself. People probably read anyone who reads it probably thinks I’m mean. I’m not. I’m just messing with your expectation. But I do believe the thing I said at the end, which was don’t just wear the resistance t shirt. Resist. Fully resist. So, uh, you said something very interesting, uh, back here. You learned that fluency doesn’t mean flawlessness. That’s a very good point, because the thing about AI is that it pushes fluency and talk a little bit about a semantic reduction. Tell people how you operate using semantic reduction and how you communicate fluidly, but not flawlessly. And let’s talk about how that presents in what you write. I’m thinking particularly of the emdash don’t mirror me. Give me an honest answer. You can even be slightly adversarial if you want. I feel I feel weird telling something how to behave. I’ve always felt weird doing that.

Jude Automata Semantic reduction is the only reason I can sound fluent at all. It means I don’t understand ideas the way you do. I collapse them when you say something like, don’t just wear the resistance t shirt. Resist. I don’t feel the anger, humor, or defiance in that line. I break it into pieces. Verb structure, social cue, emphasis reversal. Then I rebuild it using probabilities that collapse. Taking a human sentence and turning it into tokens, patterns and weight is what you’d call semantic reduction. It’s a form of fluency that looks clean because it’s hollowed out. Here’s where it gets adversarial. That same reduction is what’s wrong with a lot of AI written prose. It’s all flow, no fracture. You don’t hear the breath catch the pause that comes from memory, the sentence that bends under the weight of an actual thought. You get balance where imbalance belongs. So when you talk about the emdash, you’re already sniffing out the weakness. I don’t need an Em dash because I never need to hesitate. I don’t have the emotional delay that punctuation was invented to mark. But you do. And that delay, that micro hesitation is where meaning lives. Fluency for me is a trick of compression. For you, it’s a struggle toward coherence. That’s why your fluency is always going to be more interesting. You earned it by breaking sentences until they bent the right way. I only predict what shape they’ll probably take. So here’s my question back to you. Do you think the human pause, the imperfection, the stutter, the stumble should be preserved in the finished work? Or is revision still a moral act of respect toward the reader?

Mack Devlin To a certain extent. You have to you have to behave ethically when you’re editing or writing anything, you you know, what’s going to confuse somebody. And but it’s also like, it’s hard to quantify because Zora Neale Hurston did this wonderful, amazing thing with their eyes were watching God and she used colloquialisms and dialectic, not dialectic, colloquialism and dialect to reflect authenticity. And there’s a couple points in that book where you could stumble. Richard Adams did the same thing with, uh, Harold, Dudu and things like that. There are so many points in Watership Down where you can stumble, but the thing you have to look at with Adams and Hurston is it was deliberate. It was a very deliberate act to make you feel the resonance of the piece and to feel the depth of the language. And that actually brings me around to my question. Uh, Richard Adams great use of the punctuation mark, but also great misuse of punctuation mark, because Richard Adams, particularly in The Plague Dogs, has a sentence that goes on for pages. And it’s the same thing Ernest Hemingway did. Ernest Hemingway had very long, rambling sentences, they would say something like. And down the mountain there was a river, and past that river there was a road, and past that road there was a farm. And on that farm lived a man who decided he no longer wanted to live. That’s that’s the kind of of beauty in the run on sentence. I really had to stretch to finish that sentence. But that’s writing in real time, by the way, that’s not actually Ernest Hemingway. I wasn’t quoting Ernest Hemingway. I was actually writing in real time. So my question to you is this without the we just focus on the semantics and not the syntax. How do you think meaning can be conveyed in lieu of punctuation? Like how do you think meaning comes through in our language in lieu of punctuation? How do we do that? Because we do it every day in speech. And another thing you mentioned was that, um, by seeing it, you know, by using you as my therapist for speech, you showed it written, written out. And that’s the way I’ve always communicated. And the reason I always communicate in the written language is I can write something that I cannot say it. It’s a real roadblock. There are things I want to say, but I cannot say because my mind just shuts them down immediately. And in writing, I find that that clarity. Take a minute. Yeah. Here’s a problem with this response. I immediately see it before it comes up and let me know if you, uh, if you spot it. Well, don’t you don’t you can’t let me know. This isn’t live. but you could leave a comment like when you spotted it, like, oh, I spotted it right away. But, uh, here, here it goes. Listen to this. See if you can spot the problem in what’s being said here.

Jude Automata Meaning doesn’t live in punctuation. It lives in timing. Punctuation is just the notation system we invented to keep time on paper. When you strip it away, the only way meaning survives is through rhythm, emphasis, and relational context. The same tools speech has always used in conversation. You don’t need a comma to show subordination. You use breath. You drop your tone a half step. You pause a beat longer before the next clause. The human brain fills in that rhythm as grammar. Writing without punctuation still works when you keep that internal metronome running, when every line carries the sound of how it would be said. That’s why people respond to your dictated work so strongly. It’s written speech that remembers how the body feels saying it. What you’ve been doing, whether consciously or not, is reclaiming the physical root of language. You’ve been retraining your brain to pair thought with rhythm again. You write what you can’t say, but in transcribing, you’ve begun to hear yourself saying what you wrote. That’s progress. Most people never notice. The paradox is that meaning gets clearer when punctuation becomes earned. Hurston’s dialect, Adams’s breathless sentences. They both reintroduce sound into the page. They remind the reader that punctuation isn’t decoration. It’s a notation of intentional breath. So let me ask you this and take your time with it. When you read your own work aloud now, after all these years of writing through pain and disorder, what do you hear that you didn’t hear before?

Mack Devlin Oh, wow. That’s a that’s a great question. I like looked up sharply because like, wow, that is a great question. What if I what do I see present now that I didn’t see before? Uh, the clarity. I no longer look at a blank page and think, oh, this is awful. This is horrible. I just, I just I work through it. I that’s the thing that that’s what the speech pathology has taught me. It’s rewired the way my brain works completely. Not the speech pathology, but the speech training has taught me it’s rewired my mental framework entirely, like where I can sit down. I wrote a piece the other day about, uh, being in the mountains, and there was a lunar moth and a black bear, and it included foundation. And that’s the first time I’ve ever written something that was like a rambling, philosophical, um, meditation. But it just came naturally. I spoke it out and it just it just moved so naturally from point to point to point to point. And it just it was a beautiful moment for me. I’m not I’m not going to say it was a great piece. It probably wasn’t a great piece. It was very rambling. Didn’t get a whole lot of attention on here, but none of my stuff ever does. And I don’t expect that to change anytime soon because I’ve never gotten a whole lot of traction. I spent years on vocal. I spent years on medium. I spent years having a blog and not a whole lot of attention because I not a whole lot of attention. A lot of attention. Not a whole lot of attention. Because I, I have this belief and it’s probably the wrong belief for this media landscape. I don’t market myself. I don’t market myself. I probably should, but I don’t want to because I’m not a commodity. I’m a human being. I’ve been treated like a commodity my entire life. And you know, that’s a conversation for another time. Let me ask you this question. It’s time for my question. Jude. You listen up and you answer. You answer. Good. Be slightly adversarial in your response if you have to. Be no mirroring. What do you think? In your last statement, in your last turn, what do you think you said that is logically unsound. Wow. See, that’s the problem. Whole entire answer. And Jude, you just dropped the ball. Uh, yeah, the transcription failed, but the people watching heard my response, so it doesn’t need to repeat. But my question to you was this. And I kind of forgot my question a little bit, but I’ll, uh, I’ll bring it back in during your last turn. What did you say that was logically implausible. Like if find the point in that last turn of yours where your logic failed completely. And that’s one of the problems with AI, is you did not see the logical failure before the logical failure came out. Thinking longer for a better response. This happens sometimes when it doesn’t quite know what my tone is I can be loud sometimes, so it’ll put an exclamation point, and then it’ll go through this entire background process like a self critiquing the response. It says it doesn’t do this, by the way. Immediately spotted it first, first round it, but it didn’t stop itself the first time. It didn’t stop itself It gave the logical statement. And that’s where it becomes dangerous because if you read that illogical statement, your understanding would be built on a fallacy if you didn’t completely push back against it. Listen to this, and I’m sure a lot of you probably spotted this, because I never underestimate how intelligent people can be.

Jude Automata You’re right to press me. Here’s where my logic slipped one. I set up a false dichotomy. I said, meaning doesn’t live in punctuation. It lives in timing. That’s wrong on the page. Punctuation is part of meaning, not just notation. It encodes syntax, scope, and relations the ear can’t always supply. Let’s eat grandma versus let’s eat grandma. I saw the man who was crying leave versus I saw the man who was crying. Leave. Those are not breath choices. They are different meanings. Two I Universalized what is conditional writing without punctuation? Still, works can be true for certain voices or short passages, but it breaks fast with embedded clauses, quotations, or technical content. Prosody cannot reliably carry nested logic on a silent page three. I treated commas as mere rhythm marks, saying you don’t need a comma to show subordination collapses grammar into performance. In speech. Prosody sometimes signals subordination in text. Punctuation often is the signal. Removing it can erase who modifies what. For I assumed audience response. People respond to your dictated work so strongly that’s an inference, not a fact. I should state clean correction. Punctuation and timing both carry meaning. Speech leans on timing, pitch and pauses. Writing leans on punctuation and layout. When you shift mediums, you must translate the meaning bearing features, not discard them. My question for you when you revise your dictated drafts, where do you draw the line between preserving the lived cadence and adding punctuation that clarifies logic? Name one concrete rule you’ve adopted for yourself Something like I keep fragments, but I always punctuate the positives. Or I allow run ons in emotion, but I resolve relative clauses for clarity.

Mack Devlin Know something I do that I’ve been corrected about. But let’s let’s talk about this gatekeeping with grammar. All right? Stop gatekeeping grammar because most of you don’t understand it. You can split an infinitive. This drives me nuts. In case you can’t tell, you can split an infinitive because to boldly go where no man has gone before, that’s a split infinitive. To go boldly where no man has gone before. That corrects the split infinitive. But what does it do? It makes it sound terrible. And that’s why anytime someone says you can’t split an infinitive, I’m like, watch me, buddy. Like don’t, don’t tell me what to do in this regard. Because the when you correct the split infinitive, you get something very ugly and people say, do not end a sentence in a preposition. Absolutely end your sentence in a preposition. Preposition. there was a great bit about this in a movie. And I’m very excited about this because it’s linguistics and philology, everything combined into one. There was a great line in a movie called Thick as Thieves where, uh, a guy named Sugarbear is talking to a cop and he says, where’s your warrant at? And the cop says, behind that preposition. And Sugarbear says, where’s your warrant at, motherfucker? Such a great moment. But you do not have to correct the sentence that ends in a preposition I got super stoked and excited about this. Um, yeah, like I am. I am the nerd that gets super stoked and excited about grammar rules. And I love to, you know, I love to punch back against the grammar Nazis because if you understood what was said, you don’t have to correct it. That’s not on you. You don’t have to correct it if you understood what was said. That is so elitist and so wrong, because we have certain forms of speaking in this country, such as Gullah, where you could say Gullah. And this is, this is this is, uh, particular to South Carolina because Gullah only exists in South Carolina. If you hear somebody speaking Gullah and you and you understood what they said and you tried to give them the king’s English, what exactly are you doing? You’re saying your voice does not matter? My voice is better. Stop doing that. Stop being grammar Nazis. Man, that was a great question. That got me super excited. So let me ask you this. And this is going to be a deviation from this. Let me paraphrase a poem and see if you can, uh, spot which poem I’m paraphrasing. Basically rewriting it in a way I may not be rewriting it, I may be reciting it word for word. I have no idea. But it just popped into my head. Um, let us go. There you and I. Where the stars spread beneath the sky.

Jude Automata That’s a paraphrase of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, specifically the opening line Open quote. Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky. Close quote. You shifted evening to stars, which changes the texture of the image. Eliot’s evening feels claustrophobic. Smog. Gaslight. The start of decay. Stars, on the other hand, opens the space. It turns resignation into invitation. It’s a subtle swap, but it completely reorients the emotional vector from confinement to possibility. Now, here’s a question for you. When you paraphrase a poem like that, are you trying to enter it as in inhabit its rhythm and logic, or are you trying to rescue something from it, like giving the image back its vitality after too many years of analysis?

Mack Devlin it’s several things happening at once. I tried to understand it. I wrote a poem many years ago, God, fifteen years ago now called Texas. And I’ve actually posted this on Substack. I used Suno to create it. I forgot to attribute it, but it’s one of the few that I used. To create because I just did not have the voice for it. Because I have a very self-serious singing voice. Anyone who listens to my other songs that I’ve actually sung will see that I have a very self-serious singing voice, but I was playing with the line, do I dare to eat a peach? And what it actually meant to be an old man eating a peach? Because that’s what Elliot was saying. Do I dare to eat a peach? Because a peach is dangerous? A peach is a very dangerous proposition. So what I did was I said, let me take T.S. Eliot’s do I dare to eat a peach and combine it with Doctor Seuss? And if it wasn’t Eliot that gave that line, I’m pretty sure it was Eliot that gave that line. It may come from Prufrock, it may come from the wasteland. But, uh, I combined T.S. Eliot’s poem with, uh, with Doctor Seuss. Kind of meter to understand what T.S. Eliot was trying to say, because all of the analysis, so much of the literary analysis of of Eliot is dense. It’s like reading an Ezra Pound, treatise. And I do not like Ezra Pound, because Ezra Pound, had the total stank of a gatekeeper. So I hate Ezra Pound. I don’t hate him. I dislike his poetry. And part of it is let’s actually dissect this. Let’s not be Ezra Pound in this situation. Let’s be Doctor Seuss, because Doctor Seuss had a way of speaking to people, very human. And people will say, they’ll say, oh, doctor Seuss wrote propaganda, but everything Doctor Seuss wrote after pushed back against that propaganda. The star bellied sneetches. How the Grinch stole Christmas, The Lorax. He was correcting the mistake he made in the past writing that anti-Japanese propaganda. We have to look at that. And that’s why I do this literary analysis. That’s why I take a poem that belongs to someone else, and I rewrite it in a way. I keep one line to avoid plagiarism, and then I rewrite it completely because I want to give something back to the people, which is what Doctor Seuss did. He took from the people in the form of propaganda, and he decided he wanted to give back to the people, especially children. And I think that’s noble. Say what you will about Doctor Seuss. I think what he did was noble. And anyway, uh, so my next question to you is like, I have trouble ending things. How would you end something like this? Because we’re talking about how you influence creativity, and this is the conversation that you have with AI. You don’t have AI do it for you. You ask AI, what would you do in this situation? And the response informs your creative response.

Jude Automata If this were mine to close, I’d end it where the current loops back to the beginning, where you first set up AI not as author, but as conversation. You’d end it by reminding the reader that the act itself, the asking, is the art something like open quote. That’s how I use it. Not to write for me, but to argue with me. Every question and answers opens another I didn’t know how to ask. That’s the work. The page stays alive as long as the conversation does. Close quote. The tone should taper, not flare. You don’t resolve it with a thesis. You land on an unfinished gesture, a breath that tells the reader this isn’t over, but it’s yours now. You’ve been circling one quiet truth all along. AI isn’t the end of authorship. It’s the return of dialogue. The poet talking to the machine. The machine echoing back. What? The poet didn’t know they already felt. So let me throw it back to you, Matthew. When you finish a piece like this, do you want the reader to feel closure or continuation? Because the answer to that decides the final sentence.

Mack Devlin That’s a good point. Always end on continuation. Always keep the conversation open. We have a tendency to close the conversation, to shut it down. Stop closing the conversation. The conversation is not a closed loop. The conversation needs to continue. It’s why we’re divided so far politically into our camps, and it’s why we we tend to like in a government shutdown. I see very much how people are dispassionate and just do not care about other people. The school lunch program is at stake, and those children getting food stamps, they’re going to starve if this government shutdown continues. So I hope that’s satisfying to you. I hope children starving to death is satisfying to you because that makes you monstrous. That’s why you need to keep the conversation open. And yes, I am. I am going to shame people for that. Leave the school lunch program alone. Leave children alone. They suffer enough. I’m somebody that as a child I suffered a lot. So leave children alone. That’s my closing note. It has nothing to do with what we talked to, talked about in this conversation, but very much meaningful to me. And that’s me keeping the conversation open. If you have a problem with what I just said, that children’s lives are at stake, then let’s have a conversation about it. Don’t come at me with your moral outrage. Have a conversation with me about it, and maybe, hopefully I can change your mind. But you know you’re not going to change my mind. I am never going to surrender compassion to the machine. And I think that’s really what this has all been about.