Prosak

Get ready for linguistic anarchy

Every few weeks I receive a letter from a twelve-year old child I sponsor through an international aid organization. The letters are short and adorable, as is the author. Recently I got one that begins like this:

Dear sponsor, I hope this finds you well. I want to thank you sincerely for your unwavering support. It has meant so much to me.

The stodgy style of the next three paragraphs pointed to a worrisome outbreak of ChatGPT. But I wasn’t surprised. My teacher-husband has brought home essays this year full of the telltale signs: flawless spelling, interchangeable metaphors (“navigate the challenges” crops up a lot), and sentences that beg to be read in the voice of Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. 

So now folks, without the help of AI—no mirrors, no wires!—I will attempt a metaphor of my very own. 

In 1922, an American general named Owen Squier invented a way to transmit phonograph music over telephone wires. Squier patented and sold his new service as “Muzak”. This was a peppy name inspired by “Kodak,” the camera that had recently brought photography to the masses and would leave future generations puzzling over pictures of unidentified relatives. At first, Muzak gave its subscribers classical pieces recorded by well-known orchestras. But as free radio drew listeners away, the company changed its business model and became a supplier of tepid background tunes for public settings. 

And how profitable tepidity turned out to be! With music tinkling in their ears, workers made more widgets, customers bought more gadgets, and barflies ordered those second second drinks. LBJ even played Muzak in the White House, helping him navigate the challenges of the Cold War.

Muzak wasn’t meant to be listened to. It was meant to calm the nervous system. If people started listening, they might stop shopping or drinking or relaxing during a tooth extraction. And though recorded by talented musicians with stories of their own, Muzak told no stories and conveyed nothing particular about its origins. The impulses that fuel real music—love, heartache, the crazy need to dance—were ensorcelled to bland phrasing and anonymous instrumentation.  

You may have noticed that dentists don’t play bland music nowadays, though I recently listened to “Your Body is a Wonderland” while having my teeth scraped. Something happened to commercial music starting around 1950. White musicians in the South stole fell in love with Black blues. Meanwhile, Latin rhythms flowed over the border into nightclubs in Miami, New York, and beyond. At first, marketing the musical cocktail called “rock and roll” to an abstemious white audience required a Muzak-like watering-down of its most potent elements: emotional rawness, lyrical poignancy, and sex.  Record companies forced those early rock and roll artists to iron out the agony and tame the lust. And wear ties.

Then came the 1960’s. As individual freedom asserted itself through the anti-war and civil rights movements, rock music became ever more rebellious and iconoclastic. But it also became more personal, and a new power seemed to flow from its private intensity. At sprawling festivals like Woodstock and Glastonberry, tiny figures onstage brandished songs of human love and loss against the far-off killing machines of Vietnam. The lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” speak of the lost ideal of Eden. “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve to get ourselves / Back to the garden.” 

So what were the things they needed to get back from? Any hippie could tell you: war, ecological destruction, dehumanizing technology. Everything that divides and crushes individual human beings. After the sixties, Muzak didn’t die, exactly, but no one under thirty wanted to hear it anymore. It crawled off to an elevator and became a cultural joke. 

Could it be (call me a dreamer) that something similar might happen to formal written English? In recent centuries we have flattened written communication into strict limits of genre, style, grammar, and punctuation. The point of this is to help us communicate more smoothly and precisely, which is not a bad thing. But in making our communication more standard, we have made ourselves less present in it, less human. Yes, we have language ghettos where the poets and storytellers live, but Lord let them not pollute a business letter, or APA format.   

Losses to individuality are obviously greatest in academic, legal, and other formal writing, and you may ask why anyone should care. Such prose isn’t meant to be read, at least not more than once. It’s meant to stamp exchanges of thought with the authoritative voice, facilitating their transfer between necessary entities. ChatGPT has simply gone a step further, democratizing the authoritative voice, bringing the holy oil of boringness to the masses. A little girl can now write a fan letter to an Olympic heroine that sounds so predictable, so boringly perfect that the heroine will treat it as junk mail.  

Most of us accept that “realness” is important in our relationships with children, which is why Google’s Gemini commercial was so widely panned during the Olympic games. The Google incident reminded me of how after the 1976 Superbowl I wrote a condolence letter to my then-hero Roger Staubach. I received a very thoughtful reply from his wife. She said that the team was trying to get back on its feet following their disappointing loss to the Steelers. Roger wasn’t able to write me himself, but he had asked her to answer for him. 

What I remember most about that letter is the feeling of contact with a real person. I could picture her, a woman with a story of her own, maybe sitting in her kitchen, thinking about me, a kid. I remember nothing regarding her use of the semicolon. 

If genuine (as opposed to formal) human contact is so important in communication with children, why shouldn’t that be true in other kinds of human relationships? Could more individuality enhance communication in business, politics, and even academia? Could a little linguistic anarchy give us a better sense of the real people behind the neat and predictable characters on a computer screen?  

Maybe AI prose is just Prosak, the last stage of dehumanizing dullness before a revolution of human-centered, unpredictable creativity sweeps away the prose dullness we’ve been living in and reveals the genuine us: people who don’t perfectly navigate the challenges of adverbs. It’s Pat Boone singing “Tuttie Fruittie” in 1956. It’s Bing Crosby crooning “Little Drummer Boy” with David Bowie in 1977. The creators of artificial intelligence want to mimic and then bind and flatten our creativity in order to monetize it—and us. So maybe the answer is to value what’s real and original in ourselves, even if it’s not pretty.

Imagine there’s no comma
It’s easy if you try
Unless you want to use one
And then wherever you damn, well, want to pause
Is up to you

M. Elizabeth Carter is a counselor and writer living in Alabama.