F**K ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. GIVE ME ANCESTRAL INTELLIGENCE

How It Begins

The voices of the ancestors drift
on the breeze, enter our dreams.
Synchronicity arises as effortlessly as breath.
Foraging in the thickets of our imagination,
we find nourishment.
Stalking an image deep into the forest,
we discover our courage.
Danger lurks in the shadows, and the clear lake too.
But still we follow the river, the slender trail,
the faint current that hints of discovery.
And there, in the holy place, we stand still.
Listen with skin, and heart, and eyes.
We taste and touch the world.
And through us
Earth speaks.

This is how writing always begins for me, with a prowling energy. A quality of attention that is whole bodied. Wondrously alive.

This isn’t a sure and safe route.  It’s full of dangers and quick turns. It can lead to dead ends. But it also holds surprises.

It is woven through with the musicality of birdsong and the crackle of branches in the wind. It knows, as our ancestors did, what it is to be thunderstruck with awe.

To enter this kind of creative process, you need to become still, listen with skin, and heart, and eyes.

You need to taste and touch the world.

In Artificial Intelligence, Earth and ancestors hold no place. AI steals from us every effort of expression or creative imagination—it demands little of us or our readers. It ignores that fact that true creativity is feral, somatic, and wildly unpredictable.

So let me be clear, my notion of creativity stands at odds with Artificial Intelligence. I don’t want my blank page, that open space of potentiality to be filled by the mechanical processes of a computer program. I don’t want to be married only to what the poet Jane Hirshfield describes as “available knowledge and syntax.”

AI does not recognize preliterate wisdom, when the natural world was the primary text and orality the only song. AI can only troll what has already been expressed, what is no longer animate and animistic.  

It’s the ultimate mining machine. Exploiting us all.

But oh, how seductive it is.

Creativity is crazy hard at times. We want easy answers and fast ones too. And we want to fit in, to be liked and appreciated. AI promises adequacy and speed.

Authentic creativity, on the other hand, moves at its own pace, which can be mercurial or meandering. You can’t control it.

Writes Martin Shaw in Courting the Wild Twin, “A girl will walk back from the forest speaking a language no one has ever heard.”

How long was she in the forest, I wonder? How long have I spent in mine?

In the early 2000s as I began writing Reclaiming the Wild Soul, I learned what language was mine to speak. It is, I discovered, rife with the Celtic soundings of my ancestors. It wasn’t intentional, I never sought to write in this way, I simply spent enough time in the wilds of my own imaginings to discover my own voice.  

So what becomes of us if we let AI steal our creativity, think for us, imagine for us? What kind of terrible entropy will we fall into if we betray the millions of years it has taken to produce the You that you are, who can speak a language never before heard?

Creativity isn’t about perfection. It’s about aliveness. What, then, is the purpose of humanity if we lose touch with our own creativity?

Some tell me that AI is animate too, a part of nature as surely as flocks of starlings or the fragrance of leaves after rain. But I don’t buy it. Give me what is real. And maddening. And hard. And heartbreaking. AI is not the answer. I don’t want to read books or admire artwork forged by algorithms. AI will lead us away from nature toward more and more abstraction, until nothing means anything. Until the symbol eventually detaches completely from the thing itself.

In her book of essays, Nine Gates, Jane Hirshfield quotes Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen: “When your understanding is shallow, you doubt the phrase, “Green mountains are walking.” When your learning is immature, you are shocked by the words “flowing mountains.”

I can think of no better way of distinguishing between the shallow language of AI and the depth of the creative who is fully embodied and present to the miracles of this world.

Ancestral Intelligence understands that sometimes, under certain conditions, mountains walk and flow.

Artificial Intelligence will likely state otherwise.