I’m going to start by mentioning a fact I think we all know: AI is everywhere now. Seemingly out of nowhere, it has become a household name, corporate golden calf, helper, therapist, friend, or one of a million other things to millions of people. Sadly, it’s also become a blunt instrument in the creation of content; blog posts, ads, and yes, books and art.

Needless to say, I’m not a fan in this regard. I’ve tried reading a few obviously AI-generated books, and even when the Chat-isms get toned down, there’s this feeling that comes from it; something weird, something dry, and altogether not compelling. AI art is the same way. It can look cool for a minute in the way the cheap samurai sword and novelty shop at the mall does, then you realize it’s… well, gaudy and uninteresting.

Clearly I don’t speak for everyone. But if this resonates, let me yap a bit about what’s going on here. Because I think I’ve coined a new term for it. You see, ‘je ne sais quoi’ is a fun French phrase. It translates near literally to “I don’t know what." It’s that unidentifiable something that drives and delights us as humans. A certain quality that can’t be described, measured, or defined, but it’s there. And wow, it’s neat.

But for the AI era I feel like we need something a little more on the nose. And what I thought of was ‘Le grain d’âme,’ which basically is ‘a touch of soul.’ But you see, it’s more than that:

It’s the texture of soul. Grain as in the grain of wood, of leather, of a voice, the physical fiber. Soul made detectable, the immaterial thing given a surface you can feel.

It’s a trace of soul. A touch, a hint, a dash (un grain de folie, a touch of madness). It’s the speck of humanity that gives content actual meaning.

And my favorite, it’s the flaws of the soul. True to its nature as a word meaning “a bit,” pharmacists in the 1700s coined ‘avoir un grain,’ meaning ‘a little cracked.’ Like the inclusions in a gemstone.

Like the Japanese art of wabi-sabi, an anathema to modern perfectionism. You’ve probably seen it before, even if you don’t know what it is. It’s the broken vase, bowl, or other object repaired with gold. It’s an appreciate of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” And that’s something that is absolutely missing in AI-generation. It’s something uniquely human, not despite our flaws, but because of them.

I’m not talking about em dashes, groups of three, and sentences starting with “Not” or “Something.” Hells, I use those all over my book, because I was trained on the same prose that AI was. What I’m talking about is our qualities of whimsy, of reciprocity… and even of laziness.

The whimsy part I’m sure is self explanatory. Reciprocity may not make as much sense right off the bat. It’s the practice of exchanging things, whatever they may be, for mutual benefit. Writing a book, painting a picture, these are things that “give and take.” It’s a contract of sorts, to any reader or observer in the future, that my texture, my thoughts, my flaws all went into the work. You can read this, knowing I wrote it of me, for you. Machines, for all their ability to extrapolate written text from mathematical equations in multi-dimensional vector space, don’t participate in that exchange the way humans do. And it matters.

Laziness, I’ll leave to a colleague—err, actually he’s my boss—to explain. Bryan Cantrill is a well known technologist who also has a penchant for the written word. He recently wrote about laziness, and to be honest it's the most clarifying thing I've read about writing in a year.

He starts with Larry Wall, who once named the three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. The joke inside laziness is that it takes enormous work to be lazy well. The genuinely lazy programmer turns a problem over and over until it collapses into an abstraction so clean it does the labor for everyone who comes after. Laziness, properly understood, is the discipline of refusing to write the clumsy version. It is a relentless drive toward less.

Here's the part that really got me thinking. He argues that the machines we've built to write for us cannot possess this virtue, because work costs them nothing. It will happily pour out more and more, a parfait of plausibility, optimizing for volume because volume is free. And so our human laziness turns out to be precious precisely because we are finite. We don’t have time to just dump out paragraphs of nonsense and then refactor it over and over. We have to think our words (or brush strokes) through. Else they be meaningless or go unfinished.

He has a phrase for this alternative, the assessment of work by sheer output, that I found directly relevant to this facet of my life: “literature by the pound."

I write heists. In Kings of Copper, the city of Azoria has made a legal spectacle of sanctioned theft, and after three books of plotting them I can tell you that a heist is this entire argument in narrative form.

The elegant con is the lazy one, and I mean that as the highest praise. It is the plan with the fewest moving parts, where every element is load-bearing, where the beauty is in everything the reader doesn't see until it comes to a (spectacular) close. The overstuffed heist, with a gadget for every problem and a contingency for every contingency, is the layercake of garbage. It collapses under its own cleverness. “The best laid plans of mice and men” and all that.

And the grain d'âme of a heist… well, it's the flaw in the perfect plan. The thief's tell. The one variable the crew couldn't abstract away because it was human. A grudge, a hesitation, maybe a loyalty that shouldn't have survived. The flawless plan is the machine. And the crack in it is the person. Drama is what happens at le grain d’âme.

The machine can give you literature by the pound. It cannot give you that one meaningful thing. That part's still ours.

Oh yeah, by the way, Thiefcatcher is out on audiobook. If you appreciate a real human’s voice, you have to listen to Luke Daniels do his thing.