Story Grid Writing Podcast
Art, Automation, and AI — Part 1
Episode Summary
Is AI the devil, the savior, or something nobody has defined yet? Shawn Coyne spent three years writing Mentoring the Machines with cognitive scientist John Vervaeke to answer that question, and in this episode he walks Tim Grahl through what he found. He lays out a framework for understanding every technology from the shovel to ChatGPT, explains why the real distinction isn't fast versus slow but computational versus conscious, and makes the case that what large language models fundamentally lack is myth. Along the way, he explains what the word myth actually means, why it is not a synonym for lie, and why both the "AI will destroy us" and "AI will save us" stories should make you suspicious.
Episode Notes
Tim opens with a broad question: a few years after ChatGPT hit the public consciousness, where does Shawn stand on what AI is, how it's useful, how it isn't, and what it means for writing and editing?
Shawn's answer comes from the three years he spent on Mentoring the Machines with John Vervaeke, author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Rather than start with AI, he starts with technology itself and builds up from there. The episode is less a list of tips than a map, and by the end it lands on a clear claim: AI is an algorithmic system that simulates the heuristics, principles, and stories of its programmers, and it has zero understanding of myth.
Topics covered:
- Three kinds of technology: external (the shovel), shared or "nomo" technology (the idea of the shovel passed between people), and psychotechnology (the capacity to think up the shovel in the first place)
- Algorithms, heuristics, and principles, and why each one maps to a human capacity we use every day without noticing
- Why a theory is really a limitation, and how innovation (Newton to Einstein) pushes the limit outward
- Story as the integration of algorithms, heuristics, and principles, and myth as the larger cycle that story sits inside
- What myth actually means, why Tim got corrected for misusing it in an email, and why "it's just a myth" is a sign the language has been degraded
- Artifact versus artifice: the recorded thing versus the capacity that made it, and how the two combine into art
- The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis, and why a story whose circumstances never happened can still be a higher form of truth than a record
- Why the "AI will destroy us" story and the "AI will let us drink pina coladas forever" story are both agendas, and what to look for when a story is all chaos or all order
- Tim's internet-in-the-'90s comparison, and whether AI is fundamentally different from past technologies
- Computational versus conscious systems: why speed and scale may never cross the threshold to consciousness, and why the only real test would be an original artifact
- Shawn's definitions of consciousness (attention, awakening, awareness, affordance, attunement, agreement, alignment, at-onement), and why the machines don't care
- Faith as a practical problem rather than a religious claim, and why you need the artifice of falsity to reach the artifact of truth
Books referenced
- Mentoring the Machines by Shawn Coyne and John Vervaeke
- Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke
- The Odyssey
Links