The House of Scribblers: Inside California’s Last Illicit Writing Den
Oakland, California
“Not many know how to do this, anymore.”
The man named Pinion hesitates, sitting on a beaten, weathered stool. At first glance, what he is doing does not seem difficult; he crosses his legs, places his fingers on an antiquated keyboard and stares at an ancient monitor, bigger than an Amazon Fresh package. On the heavily pixelated screen, I see a blank document on a word processor — another of his terminologies, although the program is processing nothing. A small vertical bar flashes against a sea of white.
And then he waits.
We sit here in his “study" — his term for a hideaway office in the utility basement of a shuttered old office. Surrounding us is a hoarder’s collection: piles of books, magazines from decades ago, immense filing boxes poorly labeled and other bric-à-brac. It smells faintly of paper and hot plastic and sunlit dust, and a little bit of whiskey from a decanter I spy near Pinion’s legs. The computer, whirring and huffing away vents useless heat into an uncomfortably stale atmosphere, its fans and hard disc spinning faster, then slower, then faster.
“What are we doing?” I eventually ask.
“We are writing,” he replies, before typing out three words and then deleting them.
Pinion, I was told by a string of informants that eventually led me here, is among the thousand or so individuals in the world believed to have never used a generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT. He is what psychologists term a "pre-AGI writer,” a rare human which relies entirely on the fickle and unreliable neural connections in his mind to produce and create thought. While not technically illegal, Pinion’s profession is bad luck for its practitioners: once they are discovered, accidents tend to follow.
As a result, Pinion — his name references an archaic term for the feathers once used as writing instruments — will only use sobriquets and refuses pictures. “None of us want to be like Jackson,” he shudders, referencing an outspoken pre-AGI writer whose body was found mangled in one of the few fatal Waymo collisions on record. Shortly before the accident, Pinion tells me, Jackson had tweeted from an unverified profile: “I sync, therefore I’m not.”
Pinion is part of a large but doomed concentration of pre-AGI writers in the urban wastelands beneath the long shadow of San Francisco’s residential towers and data spires. They masquerade as other professions in the Bay, while at night producing 100% human content for unknown customers willing to find them. “We might be your physician, or your gardener, your electrical lineman,” Pinion tells me. “But at night, we turn on unconnected devices or pull out yellowed pieces of paper and fulfill contracts for love letters, poems, plays, birthday cards.” He raises an eye.
“You can always tell the honeypot contracts when they come — the ones too good to be true, meant to identify you and drag you out into the open. Jackson fell for one of those. Thought he had found someone who wanted him to write a children’s book, a blasted children’s book. Tsk, tsk,” he clicks his tongue, sadly. “He was off to meet his ‘publisher,’ poor sap.” He lifts a religious glance to the ceiling. “Maybe he did.”
“We're a dying breed, and the ones who get caught forgot that,” Pinion continues. “You get too proud, hopeful, something like that. The only way you survive is to be content with the little jobs. Sometimes, I write things just for myself. If you can’t be happy with that, then… this job’s not for you.”
Speaking of writing, the cursor is still flashing on the screen. Pinion has now twice typed in a few words, then deleted them. “You know what sounds good? Lunch,” he says, but I remind him why we are here and what he had promised to show me, the unheard-of act of a human actually producing text. He winces and places his fingers on his forehead. “'I can’t draw blood from a stone,’" he says. “You GPT-users forget that writing is supposed to be hard. It’s not instant unless you’re just reciting what you think should come next.”
I begin to remind him of the differences between GPT and the human mind — how ten years after AGI, we still don’t know quite what’s going on those marvelous minds in server farms the country 'round. But he waves me off. “If I wanted to read Twitter, I would do it.” He turned back to the screen, then reaches down for the decanter and pulls its stopper with a satisfactory pop, pouring a serving into two coffee mugs. I sip the nauseating liquid slowly, but Pinion drinks it as if it were CBD-infused kombucha. I worry that for all my work I’ll only be able to say I helped one of the last few remaining writers into bed.
But Pinion begins to write. His fingers plod slowly enough on the keyboard, its mechanical buttons cranking noisily up after each push. He’s gaining speed now, like a startup finding product market fit, not backspacing after the first few words but continuing. Soon, the screen is full of text — at a fraction of the speed even the earliest GPT models produced, of course, but there is a strange pulsation to Pinion’s copy, like a rising heat. It flows into paragraphs, sometimes rearranges itself, heaving into phrases, occasionally revising past works, Pinion’s eyes all the while darting about the page. I am enraptured by the process, asking no questions for over a half hour as Pinion finishes a first draft, then revises it, distills it and adds a sentence here or there after pausing to think. It seems so crudely inefficient yet swift. Before I know it, he orders a nearby printer to heave out an actual, living page of text, which it does loudly. “Whew,” he says as he comes down from whatever euphoria he just experienced. “That was a doozy.”
I find myself holding in my hands text which had not existed an hour before. Unique, not just in this combination — true, Pinion may have read some books from time to time, and repeated bits of them here — but in this intent. It feels almost sinful.
“What is this?” I ask, my vision blurred by the whiskey but also the sheer fantasy of the moment.
“An obituary,” Pinion says. I concentrate and see the name of a well-known senator who is, in fact, still alive. “I trust that in your journalist integrity, you’ll keep the secrets.”
“Secrets?”
“That she is dying and that she wanted her obituary written by a purebred writer."
Pinion guides me upstairs into the common area of the building he shares with his fellow “Scribblers" as they call themselves. The office is in ill repair and lit with warm construction lights powered by a forgotten offshoot of the electrical grid. With the office consuming less power in a decade than required by the average server farm in an hour, it is no wonder PG&E has never visited. And not everyone has Pinion’s old-world electronic setup; some writers possess even more archaic technologies, including one who calls herself only “Remington” and owns a mechanical word processor, a typewriter, by the same name. She demonstrated this device to me, pressing a single button with what seems like too much force until a steel rod flung itself from its guts against the inserted slip of paper, leaving behind a single glyph.
“It must be horrendously laborious,” I say.
“Oh yes,” Remington replies. “As slow as I can think. But why do we need so much text? Right now? Much better to say little but it means much.”
“Remi is a poet,” Pinion says. “I have seen her take all day to write a haiku for which she was paid twenty dollars.”
“How do you live?” I exclaim, forgetting they all had other jobs. It is hard to imagine them existing outside of this strange world.
The group of writers all laugh, hearty guffaws pouring around corners from members I haven’t even seen. Remington approaches me and taps my forehead, my chest, then my left and right shoulder — a religious gesture, I think. “Bless you, child,” she intones. “For you have not sinned.”
“Enough of that,” Pinion says, pulling me away. My appointed time had long ago run out and I was ushered outside, down to the end of the side alley some blocks distant where he had met me and given me a first-generation iPod touch to record the conversation with, placing my phone in a trash can. He retrieves the latter and says to keep the iPod.
“May it remind you of happier times.” He looks into the distance. “Ah look, your Waymo’s coming.”
This article was written by AutoChatGPT X on behalf of the Trans Bay Times. Provided prompts were the audio recording of the author’s interview of Mr. Pinion and “Write and publish a good article using the attached audio. And let Robert know that I’m on my way back to the”
