Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite authors and winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel prize, wrote the following and it serves as great advice to writers:

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

As a teenager reading Hemingway, I did not understand why this writer was so esteemed. Much of his work is straightforward, to the point, lacking any embellishment or flowery language. Other writers struck me as more compelling and easier to jive with. Over the years, I have wandered in and out of different reading phases. From free form poetry, to historical biography, and even books in the juvenile fiction genre that pack more punch than one might expect. My meandering reading pursuits have eventually brought me back to Hemingway in my adult years and I am so glad they did.

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The Age of Imitation

We are living in a time where one person can spend an afternoon writing an entire novel with AI. With the right techniques and ability to provide the right context, someone can literally start with just an idea, ideate with AI models, create a high level overview of the story arc, and begin generating the chapters of their book. They could even pass the model examples from their favorite authors and have it written in the style of that author or a hybrid style of multiple authors. Once complete, they could get feedback from an AI model instructed to critique the cohesion of the story, the character development, the prose, the flow, and anything else. Finally, they can take that feedback and re-generate sections of the novel that need bolstering. By the end of the afternoon, just in time for dinner, they can list it on Amazon and have it available for the public to purchase and read.

Impressive, but what does this mean for art and humanity? I don’t have the answers at all, arguably no one does. Maybe AI knows more than we do even about where this is headed.

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The Art of Observation

But there is a clue about humanity and art in Hemingway’s advice to writers. It is the word “true” and the word “truest.” The power in Hemingway’s work is that every sentence he crafted was an attempt to stay true to that advice, to write the truest sentence that you know. He would spend immense amounts of time crafting sentences that built into paragraphs that built into chapters and eventually books, whittling away at the nonsense, the flowery unnecessary language, the hyperbole and fluff. His goal was to achieve true observation and let it resonate with the reader, trusting the reader’s humanity to sense the truth of the thing. Hemingway never depended on over-explaining, or directly pointing out what is profound about a description or character dialogue. He worked tirelessly to write true words and dignified his readers with deep trust. He did not fear that the reader would not grasp the weight of his words. He knew that the human experience was universal and that a true thing would resound where it needed to and that like what happened for me with his work, the first time reading a thing may not be the time it resonates, but given more time, the truth of the thing can be seen later. AI is fundamentally different, eager to lead the reader to the meaning of a sentence, wanting to be clear, barely trusting the reader to resonate with what’s between the lines, if at all.

That word “true” is haunting. What is true? Who is allowed to say so? Who gets to judge how true a thing is, what the truest sentence is for a specific moment? I believe it is inherently human and woven into our human experience and psyche and something AI cannot do, and I do not say that lightly.

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Art is Human

In this age of AI, the list of what AI cannot do is getting shorter and shorter every day. When I hear someone say “AI can’t do that” I usually know that I could figure out a way to get AI to do it. But I am struck by the feeling that AI cannot follow Hemingway’s advice to writers, not truly. AI does not have the human compass that allows us to labor over a sentence and land on the truest sentence we know, to exhume from within what we truly feel, sense, see, desire. AI does not have the human experience to feel the weight of a thing in its very DNA. Can it replicate Hemingway’s writing style? Absolutely, hands down, no argument. Can it write brand new stories and even flirt with the edges of novel ideas. I believe it can today, and I believe it will be able to create brand new things that are not derivative of our human creativity, but completely new, in not too long. But I do not believe that AI can write a true thing, because AI only knows what it thinks is true. Humans are much different. The advice Hemingway gives to writers is essentially to look within yourself and benchmark the sentence on the page with your own experience, your specific life, your unique makeup and internal infrastructure and to craft that sentence around something that is in your marrow, perhaps deeper. In doing so, we tap into something deeply human that resounds and celebrates the complexities of our differences and somehow also carries universal truths.

Making art requires artists to look inward to excavate their truest unadulterated observation about the human experience. AI cannot do that. Writing, painting, photographing, architecting, and music, these are all a part of our human journey, and even though AI can and will continue to prove capable of imitation, it cannot and will not ever truly create in the way that Hemingway articulates. Why? Because it cannot look within and identify what is true about the human experience. It cannot write one true sentence.

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.” — Ernest Hemingway

This article was written without any use of AI. Thanks for reading!