On writing “weird” realities and the creative limitations of writing assistants
In conversation with Yohanca Delgado, writer and Stegner Fellow at Stanford
Yohanca Delgado is a writer and second-year Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University. Her writing occupies a delightful, strange, and magical space between literary and speculative fiction. “Our Language” engages with the Dominican folklore of La Ciaguapa in a new light, and in “The Rat,” Yohanca writes about a chilling confrontation between grief and mysticism. In one of her more recent works, Yohanca explores the potential harms of technology misused: “Save Changes,” co-authored with Janelle Monae, shares the lives of two sisters navigating early adulthood in a dystopian future Manhattan.
With all the noise in the generative AI landscape, it can be difficult to imagine how this technology might affect the day-to-day creative practices of particular disciplines like creative writing. We reached out to Yohanca to explore how she as a writer outside the AI ecosystem imagines this technology may or may not transform her work. In our conversation, we discuss her relationship to writing, the issue of writing assistants standardizing the most interesting parts of language, and how the rise of generative AI may make it difficult for new writers to gain visibility.
On the Act of Writing
Why do you write?
In the back of my mind, there's a list of existential questions: What does it mean to be alive in 2023? What does it mean to be a child of immigrants?
For me, writing is about finding unexpected connections and surprising myself. And it requires a lot of patience to be authentic on the page. The bad ideas always come first, the cliches, the things you've read before. That's also what AI does, right? It suggests the most probable outputs.
Why are you drawn to writing about the surreal?
Different writers have different ways of engaging with narrative, different modes that feel natural and true to them. When I write, I’m attracted to strangeness in every situation, the moments in which life feels the most surreal.
We're chatting in the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford. How, if at all, has being in the Bay Area influenced your writing?
I will say that my writing now has a bit of an inflection of panic in it. I find it interesting to think about the ways that we are using technology to accelerate, optimize, and replace functions of a “normal” human life.
Beyond that, being here has also reminded me of how fierce competition is for a reader's attention span. When I encounter a reader on the page (or, more often, on a website), I am more aware of the work I have to do to keep them interested. I can't do a TikTok dance.
On the Use of AI-Powered Writing Tools
Have you tried using AI-powered writing assistants in your writing?
I have yet to encounter one that suits my writing objectives. In the Stegner Fellowship, for example, we follow the workshop model of critiquing each other’s work. The pitch for some of these creative writing apps is that if you don’t have access to something like a workshop, AI can be a writing partner for you. It can offer you ideas and save you the time that you might have spent reading someone else’s writing for a workshop. But engaging directly with someone else’s work is super valuable. I probably learn more from reading other people's work than I do from having my own work critiqued, because there's a crucial distance between myself and the work that allows me to see the elements of craft more clearly. I’m forced to articulate why I think something is or isn’t working. I’m able to process concepts that I’m trying to work out in my own writing.
It sounds like you’re saying that using these apps as writing partners misses something inherently human about the process?
Right, so for analogy: there's this medical aesthetic treatment that’s supposed to give you perfect abs by doing a thousand crunches for you. I think you lay down on a table and they just cook your abs with this machine. It replicates the effort of many workouts all at once.
It saves time and energy, sure. I can see why it’s an appealing shortcut. But is exercising something we want to outsource? Isn’t there something beautiful about effort itself and the way we feel when we work hard at something? Not just the end result, but the effort?
What about using these tools for non-creative uses e.g. professionally or academically?
I used to teach first-year composition writing to students from other countries whose first language was not English. I had students who leaned really heavily on tools like Grammarly—which are on the much lighter side of AI-powered writing assistants. But those tools rephrase things that you've written to be more concise and more standardized. They cut down on your word count and fix grammar. Something organic about your individual writing gets lost in that shuffle because these tools aren’t necessarily designed to produce writing that sounds like you, they are designed to produce writing that sounds like something they’ve seen before.
When you talk about people using AI to write form cover letters or to tweak their resumes, I feel indifferent. Those are such specific genres that are less about writing as Art and more about a utilitarian exchange of information.
On the Macro Effects of AI on the Writing World
How do you think about AI’s effects on language?
Language is fluid and kind of unpinnable. There's a reason there's a word of the year—we introduce new words into our commonly-used language all the time. There’s so much innovation and vibrancy in the way we create slang and change the connotations of a word. Look at Twitter or listen to teenagers: any space where people are playing with language in real time. I don't think AI can ever fully catch up. There's something organic and constantly evolving about the spoken word.
Have you already begun to witness generative AI’s effects on the writing world?
Clarkesworld Magazine is a very sought-after publication venue for speculative fiction. A couple of months ago they had to shut down their submission portals because they were flooded with AI-generated content.
Imagine that you are a new writer who has been working on a story for two years and you finally get up the courage to send it to Clarkesworld. But your story gets lost in this sea of AI stories that have been doctored to varying degrees. If these trends continue, I worry that magazine editors will start looking only at work by people whose names they recognize. That would make it so difficult for new writers to “break in.” It’s already really hard for new writers.
Any closing thoughts?
Watching a human gymnast take a running leap is compelling because they are about to do something that’s physically difficult. They're about to push themselves and there is a risk of failure, of injury. The stakes are higher. The sense of anticipation is something that you, as an observer, feel in your body. You really don’t know what’s going to happen. But if you were watching a robot do the same thing, you’d know they were probably going to stick the landing. It’s the same with writing.
As a reader, I love that stories function as a communion between the reader and the writer. It’s such an intimate mode of engaging with another mind. I’m not sure where AI fits into that exchange.
As a writer, I benefit from withholding judgment and just taking note of what's interesting and weird. AI and large language models seem to be evolving so fast; there was a time when people were afraid of cars and conductor-less elevators. I’m so curious about it all.
For more of Yohanca’s work, check out her published works here. You can find her on social media @yodelnyc and subscribe to her newsletter for (infrequent) updates on publications and other writerly happenings.
Embeddings is an interview series exploring how generative AI is changing the way we create and consume culture. In conversation with AI researchers, media theorists, social scientists, poets, and painters, we’re investigating the long-term impacts of this technology.