Addictive Predictive

I have one fundamental objection to AI.

I object to my neurons being fired on my behalf by an automated programme. What amazes me when I read or listen to the lyrics of a song or view an artwork or attend a theatrical performance is the spontaneity and the synchronicity of what I think and feel. Sparks flying from the clash of unexpected confrontations within the mind of another human being, encountering mine through an artistic medium.

Lateral thinking is a superpower. And it is wholly original, in the way it operates. What Dr. Samuel Johnson called ‘Conceits’ (‘the most heterogeneous ideas, yoked by violence together’) is to me one of the great ‘Pleasures Of The Text’. My mind, making patterns, solving problems not mechanically, but through the magic infusions of second nature: practice, making perfect; ecstatic alignment; the aesthetic pleasure of innate intellect and creativity in play. It is discovery of the intrinsic self, interacting with the world, in alignment and in counterpoint, each transforming the other. Dr. Johnson called this ‘violent’ - but what is the alternative? Blandsville?

Now that everyday life has become so surreal, it feels important to create things that are authentic, unique and sourced from the core of oneself. New territory is being discovered within. I don’t know if others feel this alongside me.

I got the feeling that the world was getting too generic, some time ago.

And I know all this mass production around us is because there are so many people all alive at the same time. So advertisers and marketers divide us all into categories, based on what data analysts call the algorithms of our preferences. Every time we like, comment or heart something on FB or Insta, we are being tracked. But it is not because they want to know us, or connect in any real way. Their messages are individualized, and we are hailed by our actual names. But it is more like surveillance. It is our profile they want, not who we really are.

It’s an Orwellian horror scenario, for any creative individualist, where ‘Nothing is your own but the thirteen cubic centimetres inside your skull.’ Even as I quote this brilliant observation from George Orwell’s novel 1984, the quote is being autocorrected to American spelling. My irreparable fertile ecosystem is being leached. Is AI part of a system which is painting for us a ‘picture of the future … a boot stamping on a human face forever’? I recall Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, written a century ago, showing the ‘Principles of mass production, at last applied to biology.’

It’s very unnerving, the way we embrace the predictive mechanisms of AI, and put our brains and phrase making skills on autopilot and in default mode. It becomes addictive, giving our power away. Slouching on the couch, instead of journeying in the wild lands outside our door. Picking the low hanging fruit, instead of the ones closest to the sun, at the Tree Of Life’s crown.

And so I want to start making my own specific emojis. I am getting training, from digital art experts, but in the meantime I have started using the ones which are already available, arranging them in varied sequences that no one has seen before.

It is only recently that there are different coloured ones, and a range of skin tones to choose from. We have come late to inclusivity. Like a self-referential supermarket. Pick the one that best matches you. Or three tones lighter, if you think that is the version that you think is closer to the real you. But you think of yourself framed by what you are offered, and the image of yourself as a recipient of the mass production methods which flatten our responses.

But everything on offer feels flattened out, and pre-designed. Smooth, you know. Pre-fitted. And not by you, and not for you. So you are outside it all, the structures which were made by other people. A spectator of the world you live in: a passive observer of bill boards and news presenters and MCs and important people in government and on the media who do not look like you. Fit in or be shut out. Replication and iteration of pre-decided normatives. Messages passing through you without any additions or enrichments from you.

When you are just a kid, it doesn't matter at first, because the world is just the people at home and at school, and on television. It's when you start to leave home, get a holiday job, meet other people, that you see and feel the differences. People might say you are a real outlier - someone who is not on the Bell Curve. It’s a compliment.

It felt like there was too much inside, growing up. A whole lot of raw, unprocessed stuff. And very little of it was acceptable, to discuss in public. It had to be put through a process. Like a machine, made digestible and comprehensible with sharp blades. But what comes through that is not unique or special.

All these processes make us compliant.

So I grew up, observing. All the smooth operators, all created from Styrofoam, with no personal stake in anything. Nothing sharp or edgy at all. Just a sort of dimly glimmering trail, to show their progression.

This is what being invisible is like. And it happens, when you grow up in a country where hardly anyone looks like you. Yet, if one was part of the majority, would that not be only another form of invisibility?

That is why I observe a lot of outsiders, and members of ethnic minority groups, becoming such colourful personalities. Just to protest against their own co-operation with invisibility. All the bright-coloured clothes and accessories. All the assertive statements. Operating in a category pre-marked 'controversy'. And of course it is a matter of time before values clash. If you are encouraged to speak up, be careful what you say. It may offend those who represent and uphold the majority opinion. You only know what an outlier you are when the wagons circle to shut you out.

You are called 'exotic', because of the big dark eyes and the long dark hair. But. What happens if you don't actually want to be predictably controversial? Or assertive? Or colourful? Is there an emoji for normalcy, that is not made for you, by someone who does not really know you?

People make assumptions. And they do that because everything is designed with stereotypes in mind. And we all react according to how people fit into those prefabricated patterns. So it's a sort of mid-air collision of things we assume about each other, as we do so many things in a hurry these days. Easier to buy things ready-made.

Knowing that, feeling all these choices out there, not representing what I discern within, swirling around, ubiquitously off the mark, is what caused me to decide to create my own emojis. Create my own persona, piece by real piece. A work in progress, resonant, synthesised.

Fact check, you know. Be careful, with every word and picture you put out there: everything you say should be you. And every unique utterance changes the whole world a little, and makes it more and more real. Our creative expression is being diminished by the answers of AI. We need to resist this, and expand the range of feelings we experience, and give our readers access to this more intense and variegated experience, in our work.



Basing these ideas on my teaching practice over twenty years, I tested the idea of non-artificial intelligence through teaching analysis and interpretation of literary texts. Because our responses to what we read should be unique and not programmed by how well we comply with external prompts and cues. Standardised testing is crowd control and anathema.

I have never understood why people complain that they lose their grasp of the value of a text by analysing it! Analysis done creatively constructs meaning, rather than demolishes or diminishes it. Interpretation is essentially a creative activity, the reader’s analytical perception collaborating in the creation of meaning with the creator.

‘Constructive Criticism’ is what I call this approach. Critical thinking is a powerful form of creative expression. Ideally, it should encompass three Quotients: IQ, EQ and MQ. Interpretation of language and literary texts is a fusion of thought and feeling. We read or view a piece of writing or a visual text and it impacts our mind and imagination via our senses. And it asks us to think about how we and others live and move in the world. When asked, what does this text mean to us? What impact does it have on us? Does it make me change my view of other human beings? - this is working outwards from our interior grasp of the way the text makes land on us, like a breeze or like a storm. Measuring our intelligence, our emotion, and our moral capacity.

Analysis asks: why does this text impact me this way? What is the creator’s intention? What methods and techniques does s/he use to achieve his/her aim? Is the correlation between aim and method strong? We can measure the effectiveness of the text by the strength of that correlation.


Credit: healthline.com

Left and right brain work together. Logic and rhetoric work together. Clenched fist and open hand. Assertion and persuasion. Hard and soft. The best critical analysis is creative. The best interpretation is a collaboration between the creator and the responder: a living interaction, and always in the present.

It is organic. The process can be systematic, sequential and strategic. But it spontaneously evolves into something more than its constituent parts - there is always an element of emergence, of astonishment and surprise. Something is found, something is discovered - something unexpected. Something is created which did not previously exist! It is the opposite of the predictablity of AI.

This is because each reader/viewer brings a unique experiential perspective to the artwork. And even in one person’s lifetime, they see and think and evaluate differently according to their own evolution.

If we make an equation out of it, we could say: Meaning = Objective Content of Text x Reader’s Consciousness

In this equation, ‘Meaning’ is Variable (V) and ‘Objective Content of Text’ is Constant (C). The Meaning changes because the ‘Reader’s Consciousness’ is Variable (V) [N.B. This equation is copyright to my original teaching materials (c) Devika Brendon]

So the act of criticism is essentially creative. Its outcome changes with greater understanding and awareness on the part of the responder. They see more in the same text, and the text is no longer what it was before. And the process of creativecritical engagement makes them more than they were before. It increases their capacity. They bring more to the next reading - not only of this text but to all other texts. And thereby they gain more. It’s a never-ending cycle of creativecritical engagement which enhances our lives!

Some students are frustrated by this, with its inevitable, inbuilt growth trajectory. Those most frustrated are those who succeed best at standardized tests.

Automation, while it removes unnecessary drudgery of the ‘reinventing the wheel’ variety, takes away the excitement and the risk of making things work, with one’s bare hands. As Toril Moi once pointed out in an unpredictable Q and A session in Australia in the early 1990s, there is intense pleasure in exercising our intellect, creatively, making connections that were not mapped out for us.

The world is being curated for us, in a quest to privilege convenience over experience. First contact with anything is messy, but real. We shape it with our assumptions and biases, and try to control it, but some part of the encounter escapes our preferences. We cannot be wholly auto corrected, and we should rejoice in the ways we cannot be accurately predicted.

Predictives restrict us, and make us lazy. We choose the neural pathways of least resistance, the roads most travelled, worn down, overused; and the empty, efficient superhighways, especially when we are overwhelmed with too much choice or infotainment. We choose only from what is available: shallow choices and threadbare phrases. We starve ourselves of essential nutrition for our imagination, through these bad choices. And that deficit impoverishes us, and depletes the energy of our writing.

We are not marionettes or mass-produced blow-up dolls. One size should not fit us. Think of musicians, interpreting well known music, or doing cover versions of famous songs. Masterpieces are not painted by numbers. Without the unique infusion of the artist’s sensibility, the rubato, the expressive freedom, the interpretation lacks transformative capacity, and fails to add value or spark joy. As Robert Lowell tells us in his poem Epilogue ‘The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light’. [Source: Day by Day (1977)]

I want unpredictive text. And real feeling. Both in me and in my response to the real expression of other’s true feelings. I will save convenience mechanisms for mundane tasks. But even they can be made meaningful, with the level of consciousness we bring to them.

A friend of mine recently moved into a Smart Home. She stands in her kitchen and utters commands to the mechanisms which are programmed to synthesise the functions of the home to her specifications. But her commands have to be pitched at the correct volume and expressed in a pattern the digital responder understands. And she still has to work out how to use the temperature regulation commands to attune her environment to her needs.

No blanket response will cover what is needed, here. It is the powerful feeling that is needed, and the spontaneous overflow, which can neither be measured nor predicted: energy created should not ever be dumbed down, diminished or destroyed.

We need to cure ourselves of our addiction to predictives. The remedy is to shear away what is threadbare in our own thinking. It takes practice. And conscious re-evaluation. But you gradually get back on the creative path that is specific to you: offline but centred, and increasingly on track, in a reclaimed and vibrantly imaginative landscape.

Out of Order

Everyone suffers loss. Yet our society, while focusing on the external cultural rituals associated with loss, has a lack of awareness of the suffering of those left to survive. This results in callous insensitivity towards those grieving, which increases their pain. The insensitivity and lack of empathy is usually the result of ignorance, but is also a consequence of the chronic trauma suffered by many in this society in a post-war context.  Resilience is praised, and pain is suppressed, and stoicism is praised, and people are shamed for being vulnerable. People have suffered so much for so long and without any support or understanding, that they lack the band width to acknowledge the pain of others. 

How can any one person’s grief be more than another’s? Yet that is the initial message of traumatic loss: that your grief is the worst in the world, the worst thing you have ever so far experienced, and you have to struggle to survive it, and endure it. It is no less than anyone else’s grief. Perspective and understanding that this is a collective trauma that we all go through comes much later. Don’t expect to fit this searing chaos into a neat frame at first. 

Those of us who have lost loved ones, particularly suddenly, often experience our blood pressure shooting up, insomnia and panic attacks. Many people constantly dream of dying themselves, and can become excessively fearful and overcautious in everyday life. Our anxieties rise to the surface, and life can feel surreal. It’s a trauma response. 

We can feel over-reactions to everyday events. These take a lot of energy, and can exhaust us. 

We feel out of order, out of control, and that our life is unravelling. We can be prone to infection, sudden accidents, and fits of clumsiness and awkward misalignments. We can be verbally abrupt or brusque when we are normally polite, graceful and socially attuned. We feel like an ‘Out Of Order’ sign should be put on our house and car and on our bodies, as a sign to others that essential repair and maintenance is going on. My aim in writing this piece is to say that this ‘Out Of Order’ sign should read ‘Temporarily Out Of Order’. Because the first anguish of crisis does pass, and some order does return as your system gradually gets restored. It will not be the same as it was, though. And you will not be the same person. It’s a new era of your life, this raw transitional time, during which you will increasingly incorporate the loss you are currently experiencing.

Unexpected loss of a loved one is high in the list of human devastations, and also in the Top 5 are loss of a partner through death or divorce or betrayal, economic loss and loss of income and social status through suddenly losing your job, or investments, loss of mental and psychosocial equilibrium as a result of terrible shock, through natural disaster, war or pandemic, and loss of your bodily autonomy through sudden illness or accident, or rape or assault.

What all these traumatic events have in common is the shock, and the blow to our actual survival, not just our sense of being able to survive. Chronic illness is not on this list because we can adjust to it and learn to manage it over time. When loss comes in the form of ‘out-of-order death’, it’s like a home invasion of the most violent kind. It’s like the roof has been pulled off the place where you live, and the walls blasted. What you are faced with is your foundation, which feels under profound attack.

What sheltered you is under threat. And you don’t feel safe anymore. Because we found solace and shelter in the existence and presence of our loved ones, in shared experiences and conversations and memories. And when they die suddenly, and our wounded hearts and minds try to accept this abrupt ending to what we thought would continue for years to come, it is a flash flood of anguish.

My first advice is to be your own first responder. Identify this as a huge crisis, and immediately act to support yourself physically.


Secondly, seek to establish continuity in your daily life. A simple routine, incorporating basic self care and essential activities, is reassuring to your parasympathetic nervous system. Try to do certain things at the same time every day for several weeks. This sends a message to your whole being that you are caring for yourself.

Thirdly, when you feel ready, after the administrative aspects of the loss are dealt with, start to go through the photos and letters and make an album or a collage - several if you need to - to document their life and the memories you have of them.

Fourthly, sort out their clothes and personal possessions. Think through how they would like these items dealt with. This is very hard to do, and it has taken my family 4 years to do this in relation to my brother. It takes the time it takes. Don’t rush it, because it’s an important part of acceptance of your loss. Some family members might like to be given certain items of clothing or special things to remember the loved one by. These can be personal items like belts, ties or watches. It can be very comforting to wear these items and feel connected to the person whose physical presence you have lost.

Fifthly, if you need to withdraw socially from your usual life, do so, while remaining in contact with those you trust. Seek professional counselling if you want to, especially in the early stages of your loss, to help establish a conscious routine which can assist in your healing and progress. Reduce the presence of unwanted and unnecessary stress in your life. Gently exclude all people and situations which create drama or pressure that you don’t want to deal with. Create space for yourself to take the time you need to grieve.

Keep in mind that in olden days, people used to formally recognise a period of mourning, at least a year, where they refrained from attending big social gatherings and wore dark clothes, and did not indulge in alcohol or participate in festive occasions. Parts of our beings shut down in the face of loss, and we do not have the energy to put ourselves ‘out there’ in the social round. But cutting off from everyone is not healthy either. So find your balance with this, and realise that your openness to joy has had a severe blow, and it will take time to feel pure, sustained happiness again. You may even feel guilt for being alive, when your loved one has suddenly passed, or not want to do things you used to do together or go to places which remind you of them because the pain of loss is too sharp. But you can gradually try to extend these limits as time goes on.

These days, there are some really valuable resources for dealing with grief available on the internet via Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. Four great Instagram pages are: @refugeingrief, @lifedeathwhat, @untanglegrief and @spokengrief.

And there are many others. Books on grief and trauma can help, if you can concentrate for short periods of time. Podcasts are very good resources, if listening to people speak is better for you than reading words, at this time. YouTube videos and guided meditations such as the Gratitude Meditation created by Oprah and Deepak Chopra are helpful as part of a daily routine. The 21 Day Meditations they provide help you track your progress, and focus on what you have, to help deal with what you have lost. 21 days is enough to form a helpful habit.

The Hundred Days Of Happiness Challenge is a good activity to do with close friends, via WhatsApp. It just means you and your friends encourage each other to focus on positive events however small in each day, by sharing a text or image with each other with a brief comment. This enables you to track your own progress, and keep connected with those who care about you and wish you well. I am now in my 4th set of 100 Days, and have found it very helpful in keeping me buoyant and moving forward.

Be aware that just as your body rushes to send healing energy to the areas of pain when you are physically wounded, so your mind and heart are also needing recalibration and healing to restore your equilibrium. Many people find it hard to sleep after suffering traumatic loss, and emotional dysregulation can result from chronic anxiety and bouts of grief and anguish. It is normal to experience memory loss or difficulty in focus and concentration. Do what you do when your body finds it hard to digest food: have small amounts of nutritious food a few times a day and pace yourself. Recognise that your being wants to heal itself, and do all you can to support this process.

Because it is a process. We are sensitive beings, and a loss although it takes place once in physical time is not a one off incident. This loss may stir memories of previous times of grief and shock, and you need to support yourself through this time, in awareness of this complex fusion of past and present, with anxiety of the future.

Please be kind to yourself. And please do reach out for help from skilled and caring professionals and those friends who are inside the parameters of your new landscape because they have empathy and experience. Grief makes us profoundly sensitive, so be careful with who you allow close to you at this time.

The pain we feel in the present is part of the joy of loving and being loved by the people we have lost. Gradually, our life path evolves to incorporate this truth, but it is a unique journey, personal to each of us. Accepting this is part of respecting what all human beings go through, and tremendous empathy, growth and creativity results from this acceptance.