On not caring to read AI generated text

I recently read Wind, Sand and Stars (🇫🇷: Terre des hommes) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is best known for writing the utterly wonderful The Little Prince.

Wind, Sand and Stars is a memoir of Saint-Exupéry’s experiences as a pioneering airmail pilot in the 1920s and 1930s flying routes across Europe, the Sahara desert and Andes mountains. Not only did he fly the routes, he established them, flying over unknown and inhospitable terrain with minimal instrumentation in aircraft built just fifteen years after Wright Brothers’ first ever powered flight.

He recounts stories of a fellow pilot surviving an impossible crash in the mountains, of his experience being stranded in the desert without water, food or hope of rescue, and of his negotiating the release of his colleagues from the Saharan tribes who took them hostage when they crashed. In his era of aviation he risked death with every flight, and he knew the grief of his fellow aviators dying in accidents that were an expected reality of his profession.

The book is written in a beautiful poetic style. Take this passage:

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon in its shade.

For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

Words like these offer me the precious echoes of what he felt, and I know that the tears they bring to my eyes were hard-earned—just not by me. When I feel my heart ache as I reflect on the harsh truth that I can’t make new old friends, and that I will one day witness my friends dying as I grow old myself, I want to know that at the very least I’m not alone in that condition.

While an AI may conceivably be able to reproduce the words themselves, it’s not the words that speak to me, but the resonance I feel with the place the words came from, in this case a man who died when his plane fell into the Mediterranean some 43 years before I was born.

In an era where AI-generated text is proliferating, I find myself immediately losing interest in reading something the moment I realise that it’s synthetic. The work of the human is to bring forth a pearl from the deep places the AI cannot tread. Not information, but soul. And I do not want to put my attention on anything that masquerades as soul.