AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.
So why am I asking such a dumb question? Because in 2020, easily within living memory, a white woman, Jeanine Cummins, published American Dirt about a Mexican migrant family, and protests flew targeting the author’s identity and claiming cultural appropriation. The question was whether a white author, even this particular white woman author, could write about people whose identity she didn’t share. Well of course she could. And she did, earning a seven-figure advance, receiving Oprah’s imprimatur, and staying on the bestseller list for 36 weeks. This white woman not only could write about whatever she wanted; she made bank in the process.
But there is one thing that sets 1994 apart: It might be the last calendar year not really captured online. Netscape Navigator, what would become many people’s default browser, launched December 15, 1994. America Online wouldn’t hit a million users until 1995. The age where nearly all culture would get consumed—and critiqued—on the internet was still in the distance. My memories of 1994 exist as they are; no one can go back and look at tweets, IG stories, or Facebook posts to watch their friend’s Ace Ventura impression or to recall how people reacted when Cobain died.
Polonius once asked Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” To which the melancholy Dane answered, “Words, words, words.” Anne Curzan and I both love the English language, she being more accepting of the new, while I instinctively value established grammar and usage as bulwarks against confusion, not a set of fetters that bind us. We both agree that people’s use of English brings consequences, often unforeseen and unintended. All of us, then, need to choose our words wisely. But which ones? “That,” as Hamlet once also said, “is the question.”
But in her view, the best way for humans to save themselves long term isn’t necessarily to fend off planetary troubles. It’s to get out of here. All planets — alien or not, polluted or not — will someday be rendered uninhabitable: The stars they orbit will go out “in a hot blaze of glory,” boiling life out of existence, or they will slowly get dimmer and their worlds slowly colder. Though this won’t happen to Earth for billions of years, if you would prefer neither, Kaltenegger has a suggestion: “Let’s become wanderers of this amazing universe,” she writes. “It does not have to end in fire or ice.”