Gen AI a tremendous threat not just to writers, but to entire planet - author Aaron Kreuter

Aaron Kreuter on the gen AI threat to writers and the planet

Aaron Kreuter is a novelist, poet, and academic. His two most recent books are the novel Lake Burntshore, and the short story collection Rubble Children. His other books include: the academic monograph, Leaving Other People Alone: Diaspora, Zionism, and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction; the poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Vine Awards for Jewish Literature; the poetry collection Arguments For Lawn Chairs; and the short story collection, You and Me, Belonging.

Canadian author Aaron Kreuter

Aaron's academic work explores Jewish North American fiction, diaspora, settler colonialism, ecology, and Israel/Palestine, and has won numerous awards. Aaron is currently an assistant professor of English Literature at Trent University. He occasionally substacks at No More Abysses, No More Walls. In this Q&A, Aaron Kreuter notes the gen AI threat to writers, and why he believes it will benefit only a few excessively wealthy individuals, and he reveals how feeling a bit on the outside, memory, and music have shaped his writing. Follow Aaron on X and/or Instagram.

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style? Growing up in the suburbs.

AK: Being Jewish. Smoking cannabis. Watching other people smoke cannabis. Reading. Playing guitar. Listening to music. Being a teenager. Being a heterosexual male. Being a heterosexual male teenager who always felt at least a little bit on the outside. Growing up in a community where the Holocaust was ever present, and where Israel was seen as the epitome of Jewish peoplehood. Meeting Palestinians. Reading Palestinian and Jewish history. Becoming an anarchist. Studying fiction as an academic and not just as a writer. Teaching. Spending time wandering the Anishinaabe lands as an unwanted guest.

OCW: Are you a plotter or a pantser?

AK: I’ve been known to both plot and pants, depending on the circumstances. Often times, I’ll plot just enough to have a sense where I’m going, but with a lot of space for seat-of-my-pants improvisation. Short stories often arise in my mind with some sort of shape to them, and in trying to capture that shape on the page there's usually some plotting, often some pantsing. For Lake Burntshore, my novel, the main thing I knew was that it was going to take place over one summer and be almost entirely set in one location (the eponymous lake). From those bounded circumstances, I followed the currents of the narrative wherever they took me.

'Be obsessed with sentences'

OCW: What advice/guidence would you give to writers?

AK: If you want to write, write. Think of the first draft as a place to collect ideas, sentences, characters, images, everything and anything. Don’t worry about quality. Once you have enough material gathered, once you’ve conquered the blank page, then you can start organizing, rewriting, sculpting. As much as you are able, try to open up that writing pocket every day. Even ten, twenty minutes can keep a project alive. But, on the other hand, it really doesn’t matter if you don’t write for a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade. Condition your writing self to get out of your own way when writing. Build and maintain the connections between your conscious mind, your unconscious mind, and the page. Be obsessed with sentences.

Gen AI beneficial for only billionaire tech gods who want to kill creativity

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a benefit or a threat to writers?

AK: I see generative AI as a tremendous threat not just to writers, but to the entire planet. The only human beings generative AI is beneficial for are the Silicon Valley billionaires who want to kill creativity, feed their data centres, and become cosmic gods—and even for them, in the end, there will be no benefit, because they will have lost the very thing that made them: their humanity.

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

AK: Over the years I’ve developed a pretty loose writing process that fits the various genres I write in (fiction, poetry, essays, scholarship). The first, or rough draft, is just where I throw everything I can on the page, to create some material to then use to craft the piece. From there, I start thinking about shape, sentences, paragraphs; this could be called editing, I suppose. At this point, I usually print it out and go to town on it with a pen (definitely editing). From that point—call it the third draft—until the piece is as good as I can get it, it’s a process of just going through it again and again, improving, cutting, moving, adding, taking some time away, being incredibly frustrated, being struck with a brilliant idea, and so on. Which, I suppose, is a pretty long way of saying I edit as I write, though I tend to leave the smaller editing (aka proofing) til much later in the drafting process.