my promise to you.
Not long ago, I found an interesting outpost while staggering down the information superhighway. Its caretaker had some things to say that aligned with my own feelings about what the online world was once and what it could be again. There was a longing for small communities fuelled by meaning and vulnerability that made me nod with recognition.
I was getting ready to type up an email when I felt a funny tickle in the back of my brain. Something about the way the posts were put together gave me pause. Then it clicked.
I've poked at ChatGPT enough to recognize its tone and the way it structures sentences and starts to repeat itself in a very specific way after a while. This was that. And there was no effort being made to disguise it.
There's some pretty incredible irony in allowing a neural network to speak in your stead about how much you miss the days when the Internet felt more human. A different kind of person would have laughed at that discovery. I felt betrayed. I thought I'd found a kindred spirit when all I'd walked into was an especially cruel optical illusion.
I'm not going to pretend I've never messed around with an AI image generator to create pictures of squirrels perched on the shoulders of my favourite musicians or had a ridiculous late-night conversation with the hilariously inept and poorly-named Cleverbot. I can understand people using Claude for coding assistance. What I can't wrap my head around is someone willingly surrendering their own voice and allowing a bunch of artificial neurons to be their brain. But this is the world we live in now.
Today we have actors and writers and entire bands that are inventions of technology gone wrong. They don't exist. They were stitched together by machines from data sets and statistical probabilities. And almost no one can tell the difference between the synthetic ghosts and the real thing anymore.
There are places I've stopped visiting because all the worthwhile content has been replaced by AI slop. The general attitude seems to be, "AI is coming for everything, so you might as well embrace it if you don't want to get left behind."
I would rather stand alone at the side of the road choking on dust.
AI might be able to write you a catchy tune. It won't give you the sound of untrimmed fingernails clipping piano keys. Or a singer who swears mid-song after stubbing his toes on a mic stand. Or any of the all-important imperfections that make us more than just a mass of mindless automatons. It won't fall behind the beat or belch at the end of a ballad.
There are no accidents. Without accidents there can be no surprises. And if we're no longer interested in being surprised, why the fuck are we even here?
This is my promise to you: my words will always and only ever be my own. To prove it, here's something no software will ever say without being steered by human hands.
ZERBLOMY KERPLOW FLAMARSHLY.