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matt cardin skip to content home books newsletter about contact toggle website search search this website press escape to close the search panel menu close home books newsletter about contact toggle website search search this website waking dreams and the daemon muse my undercraft interview post published july 24 2026 post category creativity interviews and awards reading time 2 mins read screenwriter and usc screenwriting professor sean hood whose credits include halloween resurrection cube 2 hypercube and conan the barbarian 2011 has just published an interview with me for his newly launched substack newsletter undercraft this publication is devoted to what sean calls the creative practice of the waking dream referring to the cultivation of states in which the imagination takes on a life and agency of its own as part of his research for a book on the subject sean invited me to talk with him about the daemon muse horror as a mode of metaphysical disclosure writing into the dark imaginal figures resistance nonduality and the strange collaboration that can unfold between the conscious mind and whatever seems to speak from beyond it at one point i put the heart of the matter this way the egoic mind on its own is condemned to recreate the past in some form novelty has to come from beyond the ego either from the world outside or from the beyond within that idea also stands near the center of my books a course in demonic creativity and writing at the wellspring sean s questions were unusually searching and the resulting conversation went to some deep and unexpected places i m grateful to him for the invitation and delighted to be part of the beginning of undercraft you can read the full undercraft interview here interview with matt cardin of the living dark creativity daemonology and horror george carlin ai outrage and the purity test post published july 17 2026 post category creativity reading and commentary reading time 6 mins read a thought about ai outrage and about the increasingly dogmatic tendency to turn generative ai into a test of moral purity among writers this is a live issue among many of my friends acquaintances and colleagues back in 1994 and 1995 george carlin had a short lived sitcom on the fox network titled the george carlin show i remember it as enjoyable though ratings were low and it was canceled after two seasons i also distinctly remember reading an interview with carlin that he gave when the show debuted at one point the interviewer asked him what he would say to readers who might wonder how carlin given his well established career and reputation as an anti establishment voice who criticized things like consumerism and mass media idiocy could justify becoming involved with a network television show wasn t he just selling out carlin replied by proposing an analogy with the use of a common technology that was prevalent throughout society both then and today here s the relevant passage speaking of those turbulent 60s isn t there something a bit askew about a dissident voice like carlin s joining the often bland sitcom chorus no he says glad to have the chance to tackle the question he recalls being accused by a friend back then of selling out for associating with some long forgotten group i was in his house and i said is that your telephone and he said yeah i said well you ve sold out you have made an accommodation to the system you re doing business with the biggest monopoly in the country at t life carlin continues is not an either or situation that s not the way life is somewhere in between you make accommodations that you are able to deal with i need to do this now i need to show i can act i need to do something that is intelligent and funny from carlin does prime time the roanoke times january 15 1994 side note years later in a 2007 interview for the archive of american television carlin said that when fox first contacted him to discuss possibilities for a show he thought you know i m 55 and maybe before i completely put that shit in the toilet that acting shit maybe i should see if there s a chance here for me to have a sitcom and to pay the mortgage off on this house and set myself up a little if you want to hear it for yourself see the 30 second mark in this clip from the interview if i may be permitted to unpack a bit more deeply what i think is carlin s deeper philosophical meaning he was saying the point isn t to try to achieve total innocence or purity by refusing to support the system or whatever with one s actions because that s impossible the system is all encompassing you can t opt out of it without opting out of any societal presence or contact at all so the point instead is to try to do something worthwhile within the system making the most intelligent wise reasonable moral and helpful use of its tools as you can i realize i m extending carlin s point somewhat or maybe not if so i do think it s a valid extension one in line with his expressed attitude back to ai and applying all of the above to it we gain little by adopting the logic of fundamentalism and taking an absolute uncompromising intransigent one sided all or nothing good versus evil stand of rejection toward this technology nor is anything gained by declaring that any writer or any person who experiments with ai automatically counts as a sellout a collaborator with evil or a traitor to writers artists and creative work that s the mirror image absurdity of heedlessly rushing to embrace ai and becoming an ardent and unthinking proselytizer for it on the matter of copyright outrage which is so prominent in many writer s judgments of the situation my own books appear on published lists of works that have been used to train the big ai models so i have skin in the game that fact doesn t settle the copyright question of course but it does mean i m not speaking about it from some safe position outside the controversy on the matter of all the ecological concerns surrounding ai the titanic water and energy inputs that attend it and all that those concerns are real and deserve serious attention but if you re so up in arms about ai that you re prepared to condemn anyone who uses it then it s fair to ask why you re drawing the moral boundary precisely there you re reading these words on this platform via the internet using the device your fingers are touching right now supported by the electricity and manufacturing infrastructures that consumed raw resources and fossil fuels to manufacture that device and then ship it to you none of this absolves ai of whatever harms it may cause but it does show that none of us occupies a position of technological economic or ecological purity there s also the fact that this phase of consumer generative ai is such a recent development that we really don t know yet how these concerns ecological economic creative psychological or otherwise are going to play out in the long term we re not even four years into the public chatgpt era we ve seen journalism and academic work published from widely varying perspectives but the overall picture remains cloudy and yet some of us are already prepared to make absolute moral judgments about both the technology and our fellow human beings if i had to boil down my current response to all this to a single pithy expression it would be just hold on the dogmatists on both sides are speaking prematurely we don t even know what we re dealing with yet let alone what this technology will become or what it will make of us our work and the world prudence begins by recognizing that we re still in the earliest stages of understanding what generative artificial intelligence actually is this means among other things that the question of whether writers can use it without losing their soul is still an open one writing was already a technology before ai post published july 13 2026 post category creativity reading and commentary reading time 2 mins read artificial intelligence may be the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself which as we do well to remember was called into question by plato in the phaedrus through his myth of thamus the king who rejected writing when the god theuth brought it as a gift to humankind thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised but a bane because it would allow people to offload their rightful task of thinking knowing and remembering onto an external crutch thereby encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom as neil postman pointed out when discussing this myth while it s true that every technology involves some kind of trade off most of us would probably disagree with thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a profound net benefit for the human race today with the advent of large language models we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our interactions with communications technologies and we are once again called upon to make a judgment with serious consequences writing is already a technology the real question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing makes possible as a writer can you use ai without losing your soul post published july 6 2026 post category creativity reading time 2 mins read i ve published a new essay at the living dark titled can a serious writer use ai without losing his soul it s an attempt to think through the question of whether writers can use artificial intelligence without surrendering the deeper source of their work the essay begins with my recent foreword to youri hermes s the art of unwriting then moves through the questions of unwriting the daemon muse creative flow ai as a machine muse and the difference between assistance and abdication it also touches on my own changing relationship to ai including the way my thinking has been shaped by writing teaching and my current work in higher education my provisional answer is yes a serious writer can use ai without losing his soul but only if ai assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work the essay isn t a manifesto against ai and it s certainly not an endorsement of the flood of machine generated slop now filling the internet it s an attempt to think carefully about the line between using ai as a tool and allowing it to replace the living inward act by which real writing happens you can read the full essay at the living dark here can a serious writer use ai without losing his soul the living dark reader no 2 is now available post published june 15 2026 post category newsletter the living dark reading time 1 min read the second issue of the living dark reader is now available at my living dark newsletter this issue clocks in at nearly 100 pages and gathers essays reflections fragments and related materials for slower quieter reading away from the restless currents of the live online world its themes include longing selfhood anomalous experience language writing and artificial intelligence the anchor essay is the autumn longing an extended meditation on the transcendent longing of sehnsucht that has been nearly two decades in the making other essays explore the self that remains beyond our worldviews the witness behind the stories we inhabit sleep paralysis and the boundaries between science and the supernatural and the alchemical power of words in the age of ai the issue is available as a pdf for paid subscribers to the living dark you can read the announcement and find the download link here the living dark reader no 2 1 2 3 4 12 go to the next page read my books about the author i m a world fantasy award nominated author and editor working at the crossroads of religion horror creativity consciousness and culture learn more subscribe to my newsletter an ongoing journal of creative and spiritual inquiry recent posts waking dreams and the daemon muse my undercraft interview george carlin ai outrage and the purity test writing was already a technology before ai as a writer can you use ai without losing your soul the living dark reader no 2 is now available more about me my bio books i ve written my newsletter copyright matt cardin 2024