ABOUT TJ

TJ Knowlton had a diverse upbringing, living in southern Arizona, upstate New York, California, and Mexico. Skipping a year of secondary school, he spent much of it traveling about Mexico in a classic ’68 red-and-white camper van with his parents and sister, from the States of Sonora to Oaxaca and back. They mostly stayed in a cabin tent on various beaches, an occasional hotel, and, for a couple of months, in a barely inhabitable rental attached to what once was a gold mill on Lake Chapala in Ajijic. The leftover mercury was fun to play with, but the fleas were not.

Upon returning to the U.S. to complete secondary school, TJ focused on studio art and, after graduation, was offered a full ride at a leading art institute in NYC. However, the offer arrived during the fourth week of Navy boot camp. Years later, with the Navy well behind, he earned an electrical engineering degree and worked defining or designing hardware-based industrial and semiconductor electronics products for various companies for the remainder of his career, picking up nine patents as primary or co-inventor.

TJ currently resides in the high grasslands of southern Arizona.

TJ... ABOUT ART

“The creation of visual art is something I enjoy dabbling in, but it’s best left at the hobby / amateur level. This was a conscious decision based on multiple factors, but two in particular bear mentioning: it was something I enjoyed—best not to risk ‘growing’ to dislike it, and, secondly, it re-piqued my interest in mathematics, leading to science, technology, and eventually to engineering. Making the latter my profession was a good choice in hindsight; mostly left-brain dominant, thus serving as a healthy counterbalance.

Aside from the infrequent times I’m successfully creating visual art using the surrealistic automatism method, show me a museum, gallery, art book, or something interesting created by another artist, and I’m a happy camper.”

TJ... ABOUT WRITING

“For me, the foundation of my writing is derived from the same method I focus on in creating visual art. Then, the outcomes are combined with storylines in some way related to my obsession with saguaros and entropy, which can take me in strange directions. The name of the game after that is revision… revision after revision after revision, to strive to make it a good read. I’ve promised myself to try to make it simpler going forward.

I try to follow good writing practice and typically utilize an old version of a popular word processing program. This program’s spell and grammar checker—a benchmark—is notably horrible for styling. For that, I use another software utility. I recall using an electric typewriter with a dictionary, thesaurus, and a style guide on hand long ago. Happily, those days are over in my world.

Though core software-based writing and styling tools have improved dramatically over the years, I’ve found the boundary between ‘traditional features’ most writers find handy and others provided by modern generative AI utilities or, in the case of writing—trained (some size) language models, is narrowing and even overlapping. In my opinion, some popular ones tend to want to overstep their boundaries and contribute to the creative process, almost as if saying, “Look at me! Look at me!”. I find it annoying that some try to sneak in, no matter how many ‘Advanced or Beta features’ are turned off. 

I’ve also observed specific programs seem to pitch a fit when one doesn’t use ‘nice’ or ‘socially proper’ words and phrases. One program even told me what I wrote was ‘inappropriate’ and would no longer provide help, though I couldn’t see how it came to the conclusion knowing the larger context of what I was working on. Sometimes, I find the attempts can be insidious and incessant. I even suspect that sometimes a live human steps in and passes moral judgment. I’ve also seen state-of-the-art programs fail to identify misspelled words that the old benchmark finds. However, I remain cautiously optimistic regardless of all what I view as negatives. 

As to generative AI / LLMs and the creative process, I know they’re here to stay and only in infancy and infants grow. I’m not clear on the growth challenges they must overcome to succeed in something like the creation of fiction, but I suspect the technology will someday be autonomously capable of writing good novels (movies, etc.) or even great ones. But is metacognition required? Is having a subconscious also essential? Or will the results be such an enormous compendium of comprehensive machine training that the output will be indistinguishable from what humans alone can create? Or even better?

I don’t know, but the possibilities seem endless. For example, perhaps in the future, there can be numerous variations of a single work, customized to a person’s likes, personality traits, or mood of the day while also meeting the desire for instant delivery. It’s easy to imagine one’s favorite book with different endings, scenes, times, or twists that still allow it to remain one’s favorite, but readable ‘every day’, and never get too repetitive or boring. Or, perhaps, once read, it simply vanishes, ‘never’ to re-manifest again. 

But I wonder if doing so would eventually cause us to become one-dimensional puppets of some unknown bias if books with words actually do survive through time. The books that have influenced me throughout my life have had an author (or authors) with personal history. Their works were a piece of themselves, a glimpse of their time laboriously spent on this planet that, metaphorically speaking, one can personally own. What does the future hold in store? Will there be loss?”