Model Behavior: George Saunders
“Of course, if AI can cure cancer, bravo. I’m all for it. But even with cancer cured, death will still arrive somehow.”
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Substack promotes an interview with George Saunders as part of their Model Behavior series. The series explores how top writers and thinkers use and think about AI, and George Saunders shares his experiences as a working writer and professor. He discusses how AI informs his fiction and its impact on his teaching and writing practice.
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Model Behavior: George Saunders
“Of course, if AI can cure cancer, bravo. I’m all for it. But even with cancer cured, death will still arrive somehow.”
George Saunders and Arielle Swedback
READ IN APP
Over the summer, we kicked off Model Behavior, a series that asks top writers, thinkers, critics, and creators to tell us honestly how they think about and use AI. Next up we have George Saunders, a true literary titan. In addition to writing award-winning books and short stories, George teaches the craft of writing to graduate students in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University and to the many who read his advice, analysis, and reflections on storytelling in his Substack, Story Club with George Saunders.
Naturally, we were curious about George’s experiences with AI as a working writer and professor. But we also wondered how AI might inform his fiction. He often explores speculative near futures: pharmaceuticals that manipulate our most intimate emotions; virtual experiences that stand in for memory; human beings turned into consumer products.
We asked if AI inspires him creatively and whether it’s changed his teaching, writing practice, or thinking on the disclosures writers owe their readers. He opened the interview with a disclosure of his own: “I’m somewhat cranky and monotonous on this topic. Just, throughout, imagine me banging my cane on the floor.”
Here’s George Saunders on writing and teaching on AI’s frontier.
George’s desk, Corralitos, CA
Has your relationship to AI changed since it was first released as a widely accessible consumer product?
No. Very early on, I did that thing where I asked AI to generate some text in my voice, and the result was so dispiriting—so dull and literal—that I lost interest. I don’t have any AI products and don’t want any. I would, in fact, pay not to have them and would pay extra to stop them from sneakily titrating themselves into existing products, like, for example, probably, the likely forthcoming AI fork that assesses your angle of food-entry and tells you how efficiently you’re eating compared to others in your demographic and so on.
How does George Saunders—the person, not the writer—use AI day to day?
He tries to avoid it, although he sometimes screws up by forgetting to add “- ai” in his searches. I don’t consider myself qualified to talk about the use of AI in medicine or science or any of that. But in writing I find it completely unappealing.
Have you spent time trying to write or revise with AI? Is there an experiment that would be interesting enough to try?
I have not. Not for a second. To me, this whole idea of using AI to write is . . . anathema. A thing to be most radically avoided.
Writing is the most precious way one person can communicate their essence to another person. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get better at making myself present in my writing. Why would I want to sacrifice even one iota of that? Not even in an email and certainly not in a short story or novel.
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