We’re not to play with matches, but we’re all commanded to “play with AI.”

We’re all trying to figure out how we really feel about artificial intelligence.

Actually, I’m not.

But if you are, I think I’ve found a way for you to differentiate between the “gee whiz” feeling you get when you see ChatGPT return a coherent paragraph or a plausible short story on command—and when you see AI applied to something a little closer to your soul. I call it the AI Gut Check.®

Here’s what ya do:

Take your very favorite singer. Not the hottest singer of the moment or the latest singer you’re into, but the one you’ve loved, God help you, since you were a kid. The one whose sound and aura you will never get over on the inside, no matter how mature and sophisticated you become on the outside. The one who got in you, who made you feel understood for the first time, the one you felt you understood, uniquely, no matter how absurd or adolescent the reason.

For me, as regular Writing Boots readers know, that singer is Jim Morrison, who taught me nothing less than male sexuality itself when I was a 14 year old boy.

Well, in one of the many Morrison/Doors-related Facebook groups I discouragingly belong to now at age 54, someone posted an AI-generated voice of Morrison singing a song by one Lana Del Rey, called “Born to Die.” Here it is.

Here’s what you think about it: Wow, it sounds like Morrison! Cool! And the song’s not half bad!

Here’s what I think about it: Wow, it sounds like Morrison! Except, so the fuck what? It has absolutely nothing to do with Morrison. Not a song he did sing, not a song he would sing.

He’d be rolling over in his Paris grave, if he wasn’t still passed out.

Now: Is there some song out there that would have made such utterly perfect sense for Jim Morrison to sing that hearing an AI version would make me feel “overwhelmed,” as one of my fellow “Doorsians” (gadzooks) called the Del Ray tune? If there is, then the connection would have nothing to do with Morrison, but rather between me, and the human being who thought of the connection. Alas, I think it’d be a pretty thin connection at that.

In any case, ChatGPT denied my own temptation, because it apparently doesn’t take song requests.

Thank God.

But that’s the AI Gut Check®: Take your own dear soul-singer and see if you want to listen to an AI version of them, singing something else by someone else. If you do—and if you then find it a pleasure to listen to the synthetic robot tune over and over again—then you’re officially, genuinely, AI Sanguine. And we can discuss the implications of that at a later time.

But if you don’t—if that idea offends and vaguely upsets you—then you ought to reconsider your enthusiasm for having AI sully or replace or even cast its inhuman influence on other human expressions that you don’t happen to personally deeply care about. Because what if someone else does?

And just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost my sense of humor completely during my recent episode of rearrested Doorsian development—well, I didn’t have to close this post by sharing with you Jimmy Fallon’s version of Mr. Mojo singing children’s stories.

For three decades I’ve been listening to complaints from speechwriters and other corporate writers who don’t believe they receive the deference they deserve, from their bosses or even from their peers.

“Everyone thinks they’re a writer,” the slumped-over speechwriter says.

I grow weary of my part in this play, as the Sympathetic Solemn Nodder.

No, motherfuckers, we’re going to do something about this!

You know why you respect engineers and lawyers and doctors? Because you have to: They speak a language you don’t understand.

I mean, if an engineer just showed up at the big meeting and explained the plan for the bridge in layman’s terms, the county government would pay less for its installation, wouldn’t it? “I mean, he said it himself, it’s a simple matter of balancing the flat part on two big blocks in the middle!”

A lawyer doesn’t work for you for free, she works for you pro bono. And she doesn’t do that very frequently, does she? Fuck no, because she makes sure you to know that not just any jamoke can file an “amicus brief,” request a “declaratory judgment” (and not a “deficiency judgment”). And if you think she will say “house” if she can say “domicile,” then you don’t know exculpatory evidence from inculpatory evidence.

Doctors are the worst—I mean, the best. When was the last time a doctor said, “We’re gonna take and get us a laser, see? And we’re gonna drive it up your cornhole and fry off anything that doesn’t look like a sphincter!” If you ever heard anything like that, you’d sit on a bottle of Drano and save yourself a lot of trouble.

So why do corporate writers think it’s their holy obligation to avoid using technical jargon in communicating with people who wield power over their words? Just because you take pride in your crystal-clear prose—that doesn’t mean it pays to be perfectly understood in negotiations with your colleagues.

One time, I’d like to hear a speechwriter wrap up a client meeting, “All right folks, here’s how we’ll do it. We’ll open with a nice fat Howdahell KAS. We’ll follow Monroe’s Motivated Sequence and wrap this bad boy up with a modified Lehrman Landing. If we can avoid a Pencil Fucking, we might just might get this out before the Kairos expires.”

And put on a hat and walk out the door.

***

Glossary

Howdahell: A term for a little local knowledge casually sprinkled into a speech, usually near the beginning. A commencement speaker can bring the crowd to its feet simply by making reference to having had a beer at the local college watering hole. “Howdahell does Condoleeza Rice know about Suds on State?!”

Kairos: Often forgotten as an element as important as logos, pathos and ethos, kairos refers to the timeliness of an argument, or more broadly to the “moment” in which any communication occurs. The Gettysburg Address would not have gone over big at a supermarket opening in 1975.

KAS: That stands for Kavanagh Acknowledgment Sandwich, coined at last week’s Speechwriting School online by a participant named James Kavanagh, who agreed it can be good to break up the opening acknowledgments with some meaty material in between.

The Lehrman Landing: This is a term we’re trying to popularize ourselves—a renaming of the “Four Part Close,” a type of elaborate and effective speech conclusion that speechwriter Robert Lehrman has been teaching since he learned it himself, under the tutelage of Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa in about 1967. Don’t you think Bob deserves to have it named after him?

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is an all-purpose speech structure codified in the 1950s by a Purdue University engineer geek named Alan Monroe. Or, if you want to mesmerize a gullible marketing executive, you could say the structure is inspired by the breathy oratorical style of Marilyn Monroe.

Pencil Fucking. This is what non-communicator busybodies do to speeches and all other forms of writing, because they feel so strongly about the importance of precise words. (These same people are excited about the possibilities of ChatGPT, because it’s the humanity they’ve been trying to edit out of corporate prose all this time.)

From 10 years ago, when my daughter Scout was nine:

On Division Street, I’m running, Scout is biking. She initiates a huffing/puffing conversation by asking why she is disliked by a certain third-grade contemporary, we’ll call her Olivia.

Resisting the temptation to quote Scout’s late grandmother’s stock line in such situations, “Fuck her if she can’t take a joke,” I remind her that 99 people out of a hundred like her.

Why do people like her? she wants to know.

“I can think of a hundred reasons,” I say.

She waits.

“You’re warm, you’re smart, you’re polite, you’re loving, you care about other people’s feelings and you’re funny.”

“That’s not a hundred.”

“No, but I could come up with a hundred, easy.”

“How about 30?”

“Okay, 30. But not while I’m trying to run, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And as for Olivia? Fuck her if she can’t take a joke.”

I already long for a simpler time ….

Postscript: To this day, when Scout experiences rejection of any kind, all I have to say is, “Well, you know what your grandmother would say.”

And we nod, and smile.