Lauren Crichton

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

― Henry David Thoreau

I’m going to write, I thought. For the first time in a long time I had a sense of ease in my mind, as though I’d been walking a long time on an unmarked, uneven path and now had reached a road to follow. By 11am I had finished a draft of an essay I’d been trying to write for six months. An essay that had been growing by a line or two a week for... See more

I write to figure things out for myself, it’s a mode of self-inquiry and revelation I can’t seem to access otherwise. Being unable to write, to put a sentence, then another sentence on the page and see where it leads me, makes me feel like I’ve abandoned myself when I need writing the most.

‘When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.’

The mainstream conversation about AI and taste is boring. Can machines even have taste? Will AI replace creativity? Is generative art real art? These are À rebours questions. Consumption and curation. They miss the point entirely.