Ginger Solidarity

TLE2:

I thought I’d have a lot of commentary on this one, but I think I mostly said everything I wanted to say, which is probably why I like it so much.

One thing I will say is that I had this chapter planned from the very beginning — George Evans was always going to die in a car crash — but shortly before I sat down to draft it, my family suffered a very sudden and unexpected death. Upon reread I can definitely see the ways that experience infiltrated the prose. I like the chapter better for it, but woof, it was a doozy for me.

The actual writing experience was different from other chapters, in that I did most of it in one frenetic writing session — through which I sobbed the entire time — and once finished, I posted it to AO3 and then laid down on the floor for a good thirty minutes. It was a brutal but cathartic experience.

I amused myself by unearthing this text from August 12, 2023:

A few passages just for fun:

This paragraph always makes me very emotional. Something something the grief of growing up something something.

No real comment, I just love writing flashbacks in which James and Sirius suck :)

Reason #2842 I really need to properly learn how to draw: Snape in a flower crown. It’s important to me.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.

Course I moaned 24/7 and one of my mates (tech bro) said I should just get chat gpt to do it? Like no??? I can do it myself.