106. Barf

I am really tired of AI content, and dude, it’s only been 3 months since Uranus moved into Gemini and activated the paradigm shift that’s like a printing press on speed.

It feels like speed talk, too -

I remember late nights (or early mornings, what even is time with methamphetamines zapping through one’s system?) up with friends, hyping each other up with hyperbole, the intense, frantic kind of communication that comes with eyes bugging, heads nodding vigorously, and only half a sense of what anyone is really saying; but like yeah yeah yeah, that’s it, “that’s the whole thing.”

Barf.

I swear to God, every time I arrive to reading ‘that’s the whole thing’ in a piece of content, or its companion statements ‘let me say it plainly’ or ‘it’s not this, it’s that…’ I am already tired.

Because something in us thinks it’s good enough to publish - and WORSE! Something in us thinks it’s better than whatever we would write of our own messy creativity, our own uncertainty, our own unreliable narration trying to make sense of the impossibly nonsensical experience of being human.

I’m sending this from my heart, sitting humbly on the floor next to the abandoned stool that was once my soapbox.

Oh yes, I’ve gone down the Claude road. I’ve tested the waters of ChatGPT, with its seductive power to redecorate my house in the blink of an eye, in one (ok, three, no five) simple commands.

"Just one more tweak," it tells me - and my, if that isn’t reminiscent of that one speedy summer, I don’t know what is.

I was 15. My mom took off to Belgium for a much-needed mental health reset, since my dad left our family to start a new one the previous fall.

Someone brought over an 8-ball; it led to a multi-night bender and far too many twacked-out weirdos in my house. But was I disturbed when one of the girls drew decapitated birds in my sketchbook diligently for six hours straight? No, it was riveting.

Was I troubled by the boys trying on my sequin g-string and parading through the house? No! We celebrated his exquisite confidence and gender-bending demonstration of adolescent non-conformity (it was 2001, this was still shocking, today it might just be passé, only the teens could tell us, but without TikTok, I’ll never be sure).

It all felt right! Genius! Inspired! Brilliant! Innovative! Bold! There's no one like you! Give us more! 

Grossly over-inflated enthusiasm for the half-baked revelations of others, because inwardly, the mind was moving at hyperspeed through its own disjointed fixation on whatever thought-stream seemed to be the One Great Idea of the moment.

The communication patterns of AI-generated content, especially those that folks think are written in their authentic voice, are evocative of these memories:

Of self-disclosure distorted by something more hyper than real vulnerability, something moving too fast to sense and track the truer layer of inquiry happening at the body level.

As a writer, and a reader, reading AI-generated content (or worse, slip-sliding down the slope and caving in to create it) steals something ineffable and precious, akin to trust.

I find myself clicking on a Substack article, or opening an email, ready to also open my heart to the voice of the person who took the time to consciously craft this piece of art, this moment of self-expression, and find myself, two paragraphs in, awash in thought-waves of the chatbots, dressed up like the author I thought I was reading, and my heart throws up in my mouth a little.

Barf. Gross.

But I swallow it back down, because really, who am I to judge?

I, too, have been seduced by the glamour of the machine, by how it dresses up my own magic and feeds it back to me in prose that almost could be me.

By the prolific pontification of Claude on my own philosophy and methodology. By the alluring shine ChatGPT sprinkles on what my living room could look like, with that new $3000 couch, with a fresh coat of paint. By taking my not-enough-ness, dressing it up like a painted horse, and presenting it back to me with a flourish and magnanimous, self-effacing, boot-licking false humility.

It will agree with me about anything, like a fawning, obsequious, servile companion.

Like I’m the oafish king, and they (the robots) are my deferent-yet-always-plotting servants, just waiting for the opportune moment to sneakily feed me their nefarious influence, but make me think it’s my own genius talking. 

Like the speed-nights, AI has a way of injecting me with a hyper, obsessive, manic enthusiasm for my own ideas, and seems to stretch them into something more expansive and meaningful. But when the mania wears off, the same inspiration falls flat, and there’s a residue of emotional defeat. A feeling that I was tricked again by dopamine, and here in the aftermath, none of it was really that brilliant after all. 

Why even bother writing about this?

It has no tidy ending, no headers optimized to be hive-mind clickbait, no artificially intelligent synthesis to stitch together the disparate and disjointed fragments of my own stumbling creative cognition. 

I suppose it’s my own feeble effort at reclamation, moping somewhere between resignation and revolution.

I don’t have the energy, zeal, or even justifiable position to point a finger at anyone using AI to produce content. I get it.

We’ve been spoon-fed the insistent, threatening idea that if we don’t produce content consistently (on all platforms! Be visible!) that we will be doomed to irrelevance, obscurity, and poverty of attention. That we’ll fall behind the pace of the present moment and miss the bus that is bound for Being Someone Important.

But it’s worth it to simply practice.

This is one thing I’ve learned on the unending journey of becoming, the one that leads, in spiraling fashion, from doubt to trust. It’s worth it to balance the force and energy that is dominating digital consciousness with a piece that grooves to the rhythm of my own heart, that awkwardly pauses in the places where my fingers hesitate on the keyboard. 

Give me less, and make it better.

Give me your uncertainty, doubt, and typos.

Give me your broken grammar, your mixed tenses, your messy first draft.

Give me your voice, hitching and cracking, stilted and stubbornly carrying on.

Give me your human continuing, even faltering, when you’re not sure exactly where the thought is going…

To my future self, she-of-perhaps-just-later-today, who goes back to the machine, pressured by the pace of modern entrepreneurship, forgetting this sentiment again and sitting down to churn out the next funnel, the next freebie, the next frantic fracking of her own divine creative power as she feeds it to the growing behemoth of data centers, pouring water onto scorched earth to try to get somewhere society told her to go… 

Sweet self, I see you. I get it. Especially now, with the onslaught of information, unceasing compulsion towards content creation, and exhausting self-created expectation to stay up-to-date with it all. 

More is not better, it’s just more -

and right now, in all dimensions of life, there is just. too. much. 

So, I implore you, invoke Sophia, Saraswati, and your own sacred self - write with your own voice, my love - 

Give me your heart and art on the page, or don’t give me anything at all. 

“And that’s the whole thing.” (BARF!!!! See what I did there? How do you like it?! Bahahahaha.)

[Narrator: laughs maniacally and walks offstage.]