Have you ever wondered what makes your story—your memories, your feelings, your life—truly yours? In a world where machines can write poetry in seconds, where does that leave us as human creators?
Welcome to FreeAstroScience, where we believe that the sleep of reason breeds monsters. Today, we're exploring one of the most fascinating frontiers of our time: the collision between artificial intelligence and human creativity. This isn't just about technology. It's about what makes us human. Grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's walk through this together. By the end, you might see your own memories—and your own stories—in a completely new light.
The Strange Question Alan Turing Asked in 1950
The Turing Test: Where Poetry Meets Machine
Here's something that might surprise you. When Alan Turing—the brilliant mathematician who helped crack Nazi codes during World War II—designed his famous test in 1950, he didn't just ask machines to solve math problems. He asked them to write poetry.
In his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," published in the journal Mind, Turing posed this question to his hypothetical machine: "Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge" .
The machine in his thought experiment dodged the question. It replied: "Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry".
Turing wasn't suggesting machines couldn't write verse. He was making a clever point about what ordinary people in the 1950s would say. Back then, regular folks didn't write sonnets. So a smart machine, pretending to be human, should know that too.
Fast forward to 2026. Any large language model—ChatGPT, Claude, pick your favorite—can spit out 14 lines on the Forth Bridge in seconds. Complete with proper scansion and the occasional abbreviated word like "mathemat'cal" to make the meter work.
But here's the question that haunts us: Is that thinking? Or just very sophisticated mimicry?
Why Sir Geoffrey Jefferson Drew a Line in the Sand
A year before Turing's paper, neuroscientist Sir Geoffrey Jefferson of the Royal Society made a bold claim. He said that machines couldn't truly create art until they could write "because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols" .
That phrase—"the chance fall of symbols"—cuts deep. Because isn't that exactly what today's AI does? It calculates probability. It predicts the next most likely word. It assembles language like Lego blocks, snapping pieces together based on patterns it has seen billions of times before.
Jefferson added one more requirement: the machine must "not only write it but know that it had written it" .
That's the kicker. Self-awareness. The knowledge that you've created something. That lingering feeling when you finish a piece of writing and think, "I made this. This came from me."
Can an algorithm feel that?
Why AI Becomes a Cliché Machine
Let's be honest with each other. Most human writing isn't great either. We fall into the same traps as the machines we've built.
Richard Beard, in his essay for Aeon, puts it bluntly: "LLMs are cliché machines, trained on a resilient human weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort" .
Ouch. But he's right.
Think about it. When we don't know what to write, we reach for familiar phrases. Safe combinations. The verbal equivalent of comfort food. AI does the same thing—except it does it faster, without shame, and without ever getting tired.
The Bestseller Prediction That Should Worry Us
In June 2025, a headline in The Bookseller magazine announced: "AI 'Likely' to Produce Bestseller by 2030" .
Philip Stone of Nielsen—the company that tracks UK book sales—made this prediction. And he's probably right. Because AI will come for genre fiction first. Police procedurals. Spy thrillers. Romance novels. These genres follow recognizable formulas with proven appeal .
AI can churn out derivative product without embarrassment. It doesn't get writer's block. It doesn't need coffee breaks. It just keeps going.
But here's the silver lining—and it's a big one. As Beard notes, AI's endless capacity for cliché has an "unexpected benefit: AI is the tool that will prove not all writing has the same value" .
Ada Lovelace Saw This Coming in 1842
Nearly two centuries ago, a woman named Ada Lovelace looked at one of the world's first computers—Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine—and made an observation that still rings true.
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything," she wrote. "It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform".
Notice her italics. She emphasized the word "whatever" for a reason. Machines do what we tell them. Nothing more, nothing less. They can't surprise us in the way that truly original art does.
The Missing Link Problem
The artist Marcel Duchamp called art "this missing link, not the links which exist".
Read that again. Art isn't about connecting things that are already connected. It's about finding connections no one else has seen. It's the electric spark between two ideas that had no business meeting.
AI, stuck in its feedback loops, can only repeat existing sequences. It can remix. It can recombine. But it can't leap.
As a Marianne Moore poem puts it:
"these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful"
Originality isn't just pretty. It's useful. It moves us forward—as individuals, as a species, as a civilization trying to figure out what it all means.
Memoir: The Last Fortress of Human Creativity
So where do humans still have the upper hand? Where can machines not follow?
The answer, according to Beard, is memoir.
When Turing was deep in thought—scratching his side-parted hair and making a squelching noise with his mouth (yes, really)—he imagined all the things a computer would never be able to do. A computer would never be "kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly." It wouldn't "have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream" .
Every single one of those things comes from lived experience. From memory. From the irreducible fact of having existed as a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.
Your Memories Are Yours Alone
Here's what AI can't do: remember your first heartbreak. Feel the specific weight of loss when someone you loved walked out the door. Recall the exact shade of light falling through your grandmother's kitchen window on a summer afternoon in 1997.
These aren't just data points. They're the raw material of being human. And no algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, has access to your inner storehouse of experience.
"What anyone remembers is theirs alone," Beard writes, "an undigitised storehouse of authentic human experience" .
That phrase—"undigitised storehouse"—gives me hope. Your memories haven't been scraped from the internet. They haven't been fed into a training dataset. They exist only in the wetware of your brain, shaped by neurons that no one else possesses.
The Georges Perec Magic Trick
Let me tell you about a book that proves why human creativity can't be replicated.
In 1969, French writer Georges Perec published La Disparition (translated as A Void). It's an entire novel written without using the letter "e" .
Now, an AI could do that technical trick in seconds. Just tell it to write 50,000 words avoiding one letter. Done.
But here's what the AI would miss entirely.
The Hidden Meaning Only a Human Could Create
In French, the letter "e" sounds like "eux"—which means "them" .
Perec's father died fighting in World War II. His mother was deported from Paris to Auschwitz by the Nazis. They were taken from him. They disappeared.
By removing the letter that sounds like "them," Perec wasn't just playing word games. He was expressing the distorting absence at the center of his life. The missing letter becomes a memorial. The constraint becomes a cry of grief.
No algorithm would think to do that. Because no algorithm lost its parents to the Holocaust.
Writing as Telepathy: What AI Can't Fake
Here's something Turing wrote that surprises most people. Near the end of his famous paper, he mentioned telepathy.
"The statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming," he wrote. "If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up".
Whether or not you believe in psychic phenomena, Turing was onto something. The connection between writer and reader—artist and audience—is the closest we come to transmitting information directly between minds.
When you read a great memoir, you don't just learn facts. You feel what the author felt. Their grief becomes your grief. Their joy becomes your joy. Something passes between you that can't be measured in tokens or parameters.
Greg Baxter, in his memoir A Preparation for Death (2010), wrote: "If literature is a street brawl between the courageous and the banal, I bring the toughest gang I know: the pure killers, the insane".
His literary gangsters don't kneel before the most likely next word. They swing wild. They take risks. They might fail spectacularly—but they might also land a punch that changes everything.
A New Project Fighting Back
Richard Beard recently launched something called the Universal Turing Machine. It's an online grid—8 x 8 squares, like a chessboard—where writers fill each square with 1,000 words of memory.
Readers can move randomly between memories and voices. Twice a year, new grids tile onto existing ones, building a collective experimental memoir. "A subjective encyclopaedia of true-to-life experience," Beard calls it.
The format encourages writing as a mode of thinking. A memory that knows it's being remembered—that's some of the hardest, cleverest work the human mind can do.
And it's work that AI, for all its speed and processing power, simply can't perform.
The Y Who Wins
Turing's original Imitation Game had two hidden players: X, who tried to deceive, and Y, who tried to tell the truth.
AI plays the role of X. It pretends. It mimics. It calculates the most convincing lie.
But when we write memoir—when we dig into our memories and shape them into words—we become Y. We tell the truth. We don't seek to mislead.
"A knowledge of self remains now as always an assertion of cognitive sovereignty," Beard writes. "In writing the self, Y becomes convincingly human. Y wins" .
The boundary between human and machine thinking stays intact. Our memories—our stories—can't be outsourced.
Conclusion: Your Story Is the One Thing AI Can't Steal
We've covered a lot of ground today. From Turing's 1950 thought experiment to Ada Lovelace's 1842 insight. From Nielsen's 2030 bestseller prediction to Georges Perec's haunted novel without the letter "e."
The thread running through all of it? Originality matters. Memory matters. Your unique experience of being alive in this world matters.
AI can assemble words. It can mimic styles. It can produce content at scales we've never seen before. But it can't remember your first kiss. It can't feel the weight of your father's hand on your shoulder. It can't capture the exact quality of light in the room where you learned someone you loved had died.
Those are yours. They've always been yours. And no matter how sophisticated the algorithms become, they'll stay yours.
Here at FreeAstroScience.com, we believe in keeping your mind active. Because when reason sleeps, monsters emerge. Stay curious. Stay awake. Keep asking the questions that machines can't answer.
And maybe—just maybe—write down one of your memories today. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be true.
Come back soon. We'll be here, exploring the universe together.
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