To the Editor:
Re “The ‘Shy Girl’ Fiasco Shows How Readers Can Lose Faith in Writers,” by Andrea Bartz (Opinion guest essay, March 26):
Over 40 years ago, my mother traveled from the United States to visit me and her new grandson in a top-notch Victorian-era hospital in London. Impressed with the general tranquillity on the maternity ward, run for the most part by nurses and midwives, she further observed, “And there’s no canned music in the elevator.”
A.I. has come to be the canned music in the elevator, colorless content thrust upon us whether we like it or not. Long, bland synopses of email threads I have previously read, absorbed and, by some miracle, remember, intrude, uninvited at the head of an email. Also included are recommendations for short, bland responses that sound like someone who is not me.
I choose the words I use with great care, and I know how to spell them. For whatever they’re worth, they will at least have come from someone with a beating heart and soul. Words can’t come from the heart if the writer doesn’t have one. They can only mimic heartfelt.
Margaret McGirr Greenwich, Conn.
To the Editor:
At Pushcart Press, we annually receive thousands of poems, essays and stories for our Pushcart Prize. We can usually tell on first reading if the words are generated by a nuts-and-bolts player or a human being with love, wonder, heart and soul. As backup, we inform senders that we will charge them with fraud if discovered to be fake people.
Decades ago, when all of this tech takeover started, we noticed that some gear heads proclaimed that their mission, somehow universally intended, was to replace mere carbon-based sorts like us.
And here we are on the verge of A.I. doing just that for a huge profit for a handful of the power-mad. The legal option, for publishers at least, is to take them to court for intentional fraud.
Bill Henderson Wainscott, N.Y. The writer founded Pushcart Press and has written several books.
To the Editor:
I read “A.I. Is Fooling Book Publishers” (Arts, March 21) with trepidation. I’ve reactivated my fiction writing after several years and am diligently working on my craft by taking classes and workshops and writing every day.
This will take some time. Ray Bradbury said he wrote stories for 10 years before he finally produced what he considered a good one with “The Lake.”
Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of my writing will be worthy of a reader’s time, but now I feel I’m in a race with the machines. That’s one I can’t win.
And how do I prove to prospective publishers that I did not use A.I.? To me, asking A.I. to write for you is like sending someone else to a party in your place. Where’s the fun in that?
I’ll keep writing the old-fashioned way and hope my humanity shines through, and is valued, when I send it out into the world. Not rewritten with A.I.
Bruce Fagerstrom Darien, Conn.
Calling All Teens: Are you a teenager with something to say? The New York Times’s Learning Network invites you to write a public-facing letter about an issue that matters to you. The Open Letters Contest runs until Wednesday, April 8.
A Degraded Civic Culture: How Do We Rebuild?
To the Editor:
“We Have Reached End-Stage Polarization,” by David French (column, March 17), is one of the clearest and most courageous explanations yet of the central crisis in American public life: a civic culture so degraded that a profoundly unfit leader could twice rise to the presidency.
His argument — that Donald Trump’s omnipresence is not an accident but a symptom of a deeper national breakdown — echoes the final years of McCarthyism, when the country was finally forced to confront the damage done to its institutions and its moral imagination.
The Pew data that Mr. French cites, showing Americans uniquely convinced of one another’s immorality, reveals a nation that has lost the ability to see political opponents as fellow citizens.
Into that vacuum stepped a president whose political identity is built on division, grievance and the erosion of constitutional norms. As Mr. French warns, when such a figure pushes the presidency beyond its limits, the danger is not only his conduct but also the culture that enables it.
The urgent question now is how we rebuild: how to restore a Congress willing to exercise its constitutional responsibilities and how to revive a civic ethic in which disagreement does not become dehumanization.
Mr. French’s column names the problem. The work of repair must begin now.
Harvey Olin Parkland, Fla.
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