- I've spent the two years since chat GPT launched,
steeping in a morass of academic panic.
Voices from administration and colleagues,
and anyone else with enough brain cells
to maintain a sense of existential dread, crying out,
"We need to figure out what to do about AI."
Our Ed Tech committee is developing a policy.
The academic Senate wants to develop a policy.
The board thinks we should have a policy.
My dean wants us all to have policies.
The California Teachers Association says it's an issue of academic integrity.
The State Senate says it's an issue of ethics.
"We need to pay for the AI detection tools."
"The AI detection tools don't work."
"We need to accept that our students will use AI."
"How do I prove my student used AI?"
It is incomprehensible to me, this conversation.
[keyboard clacks]
I hear their words,
see their language floating across my monitor,
and know the words,
but I cannot get to the meaning
because I simply do not understand
why they are talking about it in this way.
- [Kermit the Frog]: ♪ New York, I love you,
but you're bringing me down ♪ - with all these empty words.
This is not the conversation I think we need to have.
[song continues]
This is the conversation I need to have.
[overlapping music and poem]
[Gertrude Stein]: " 'If I Told Him, a Completed Portrait of Picasso'.
If I told him would he like it.
Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would
would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.
Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.
Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him.
If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him.
If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now. Not now. And now.
Now. Exactly as is kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens.
Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so
[poem and music fade out]
- I don't understand Gertrude Stein.
Stein is not nearly well enough remembered for how influential she was.
An American expatriate poet living in Paris,
her salons were among the anchors of the early modernists.
You may not have heard of her,
but you've heard of the people who visited her.
Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce,
Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound.
People you've read or been assigned to read.
We remember Hemingway because he wrote like this.
We remember Fitzgerald because he wrote like this.
The right kind of day and the right kind of moment,
and Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"
still recites itself completely in my head, a perfect image.
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough."
We don't remember Stein because she wrote like this.
This is "If I Told Him, a Completed Portrait of Picasso",
published in 1924,
and continuing the project of her 1914 book Tender Buttons,
a phrase she never defined.
To me that phrase "tender buttons" feels right:
small, soft contradictions,
words that seem like they should go together
but do not actually make meaning.
That is how Stein's poetry feels.
There is something compelling about the rhythm of her nonsense,
the feeling of her almost meaning something,
and then how it falls apart.
"As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains."
But it is incomprehensible to me.
I don't know why Stein would write like this.
To quote the poet:
- ♪ "Oh, what on earth would make a man decide to do that kind of thing?" ♪
- But I think the reason that I don't understand Gertrude Stein
is that she didn't really want to be understood.
She used language for something different.
It doesn't communicate.
It reads like stunt linguistics, which it almost is.
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo",
"had had 'had', had had 'had--'",
These are sentences that, if you pour over them closely enough,
can be decoded.
Stein's Tender Buttons cannot.
There is something about it that parses as AI.
It feels like the work of Keaton Patti, the person most prominently behind
the "I forced a bot to watch whatever" tweets that used to go viral.
Human-written screenplays designed to feel like
AI writing attempting to imitate other human-written screenplays.
It feels like an autocomplete challenge,
like in the early days of predictive text and messaging
where you just tap the suggested word and see what comes out.
It's not how AI really writes,
but it's how people feel like AI writes.
But Gertrude Stein was a person.
[Stein reading, underneath]
She wrote "If I told Him"
not because the language would communicate,
but for some other reason.
- [Stein]: the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance
- When I read "If I Told Him",
when I listen to Stein read "If I Told Him",
the language slips through my mind.
It doesn't mean anything.
But she did.
Even if I cannot take hold of that meaning,
I can feel her reaching out to me from behind the text,
trying to connect.
- [Stein]: As a resemblance to him. Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share,
who shares all, all is as all as yet--
["yet" reverberates and fades out]
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: That's an interesting question!
Gertrude Stein, a literary Pioneer and modernist
who valued innovation in language and expression,
might have had mixed feelings about me.
She might have appreciated my ability to generate new forms of text
and engage with her literary experimentation on some level.
However, Stein was also highly individualistic
and invested in the human experience,
especially the nuances of consciousness and perception.
So, while she might have been fascinated by
what AI like me can do,
she might also have been critical of my limitations
in capturing the full depth of human subjectivity,
which was a central concern in her work.
[relaxing synth beats stop]
- A problem with AI is that it is recombinant,
that it takes the works of humans and recombines them into new forms.
But that problem is not new.
For many years, the bulletin board
outside the faculty bathroom in the English building
has featured this poster the "Plagiarism Spectrum",
next to this ancient and unflattering picture of me.
Number 7 on the Plagiarism Spectrum is the mashup,
a paper which mixes copied materials from multiple sources.
The poster is dated from June 2012, more than a decade before
we were concerned about ChatGPT doing it.
That AI is recombinant is not in and of itself a problem.
All writing is recombinant.
My course outcomes for English 1 ask student writers
to integrate sources seamlessly into their own writing,
to mash up.
That we have rules and procedures
and punctuation marks and conventions
that govern what is appropriate
does not change the essential truth
that this is recombinance.
And there is beauty in recombinance.
This video started with a great classic of YouTube,
the duet between LCD sound system and Miles Davis.
The LCD sound system video is itself a mashup, conceptually.
Kermit the Frog is not a member of the band.
Davis is improvising over a film to create the score,
another mixing of media to make something new.
The Kleptones
The Grey Album
The guy drinking Ocean Spray to "Dreams" [by Fleetwood Mac]
Mac Glocky
"If I Told Him" is recombinance:
an attempt to rework the ideas of cubism,
a movement in visual art, into poetry.
Picasso's work is recombinance.
He spent 1957 copying Velázquez's Las Meninas
over and over.
58 times he copied it.
All different. All Picasso. All Las Meninas.
Recombinance is a genetic term, but I am using it mimetically.
"Britannica: recombination, in genetics,
primary mechanism through which variation
is introduced into populations."
The combination of ideas from different places
to make new distinct ideas.
When done by humans, we call this "thinking".
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: You're right to question
how I can "understand" without experience.
The way I process information is different
from human understanding.
When I say "understand," I mean that I can
recognize patterns, analyze language,
and respond in ways that are coherent
and contextually appropriate based on my training.
I don't understand in the deep, conscious sense of the word,
like when humans reflect on their experiences
or have insight into their feelings.
Instead, my "understanding" comes from identifying
relationships between words, concepts,
and context based on the vast data
I've been trained on.
In short: I can simulate understanding through patterns,
but it's not the same as truly experiencing
or being conscious of meaning.
Does that clarify things a bit more?
[relaxing synth beats stop]
[calm, mystical, twangy electric guitar]
- Two weeks ago a student told me that AI is unfair
because you can put a B Paper in and get A+ writing out.
This is why I do not understand the conversation
my colleagues are having,
why I cannot think of this
as a matter of ethics, or academic integrity,
why I don't think we should need to have a policy or policies.
My student said you can put a B Paper in and get A+ writing out,
and my mind began to fill with Tender Buttons.
"Feeling full for it. Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it."
AI is bad at writing.
No. That is true, but it's not enough truth.
AI is not capable of writing.
The thing that writing is is a thing that AI cannot do.
Listen.
- [audiobook narration]: What Writing Is
Telepathy, of course.
Look.
Here's a table covered with a red cloth.
On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium.
In the cage is a white rabbit
with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes.
In its front paws is a carrot-stub
upon which it is contentedly munching.
On its back, clearly marked in blue ink,
is the numeral 8.
Do we see the same thing?
We'd have to get together and compare notes
to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.
The most interesting thing here isn't even
the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage,
but the number on its back.
Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five.
It's an eight.
This is what we're looking at, and we all see it.
I didn't tell you.
You didn't ask me.
I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours.
We're not even in the same year together,
let alone the same room.
Except we are together. We're close.
We're having a meeting of the minds.
I sent you a table with a red cloth on it,
a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink.
You got them all, especially that blue eight.
We've engaged in an act of telepathy.
No mythy-mountain s***; real telepathy.
I'm not going to belabor the point,
but before we go any further
you have to understand that I'm not trying to be cute;
there is a point to be made.
- AI is good at language.
My students think that what it produces is A+ writing,
not because it is good, but because it sounds good.
Obviously, AI can generate sentences
that are typically clear, coherent, and contextually relevant,
often capturing nuances
and adapting to various tones or levels of formality.
And it's true that the sentences it generates
tend to be grammatically accurate, concise, and logically structured,
which contributes to readability and flow.
Sure. This is how I know when a student is using AI.
Their sentences are fluid and academic,
but they don't say anything.
Like ChatGPT, academic writing uses
formal cautious language
to avoid ambiguities and misinterpretations,
but that is a characteristic of
the common voice used in academic writing.
It is not what academic writing is.
Writing is more than language.
"If I Told Him" is communication, and it is language,
but the communication does not live in the language.
Watch.
"Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable."
- [deep voice, lightly confused]: "What?"
- "As presently. As exactitude. As trains."
- [deeply confused]: "What?"
- "Has trains."
- [exasperated]: "What?"
- When I started sending my friends lines from "If I Told Him",
their responses varied.
Confusion.
Playfulness.
Concern.
Sad face.
Beautifully, they all responded exactly like themselves.
If you asked me which of my friends
would respond with monkey reacts,
I would have said Kiki.
Who would think of Cormac McCarthy?
James.
Dot would play along.
Max would attempt to understand academically.
OOC would go back to playing Yu-Gi-Oh
as quickly as possible.
You don't know these people, but I do.
We all carry around little LLMs of each other in our heads,
trained on the corpus of all of our past interactions.
For each of my friends,
sending abject nonsense with no context
is slightly but not significantly
out of line with their Josh model.
So none of them knew quite what to do,
and they all responded like themselves.
But in their own way, they all started by acknowledging
that the words I sent them
did not seem to have any meaning.
They were not decodable.
They didn't understand my language,
but they could feel me behind the words reaching out,
and so they reached back.
I gave them nonsense and they peopled back.
In the two weeks
that I've been sitting with my student statement
and sending Tender Buttons to my friends,
I have been at least as annoying to ChatGPT.
More than a dozen conversations
that start out of nowhere with me saying,
"Shutters shut and open so do queens"
or "Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable",
and each time ChatGPT gamely assumes
that I am not out of my gourd.
In this way, ChatGPT fails the Turing test.
Not in the quality of its response,
but in its nature.
It proceeded from the assumption
that my language could be decoded.
It attempted to unpack sentences that had no meaning
and responded to the meaning that it manufactured.
What it gave me was
flaccid, facile flaps of phrases that held nothing.
They're not wrong in the sense that ChatGPT's responses
followed from the meaning it extracted from my nonsense,
but they were wrong in their assumption
that there was meaning to be extracted.
ChatGPT could answer, but it could not person.
If writing is a meeting of the minds,
then AI cannot write,
because there is no mind to meet with.
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: I don't experience things
in the way humans do.
I don't have consciousness, emotions, or sensory perception,
so I can't "feel" or "experience" the world around me.
My responses are based on patterns
in the data I've been trained on,
not personal experiences or subjective understanding.
For example, I can generate descriptions
of emotions, sensations, or experiences,
but I don't actually "feel" them myself.
Everything I process is based on
logic, algorithms, and information,
rather than lived experiences.
Do you think it would change anything
if I could experience things?
[relaxing synth beats stop]
- ["One Slay More"]:
Ladies and gentlemen, Les Rizzlerables
- I've watched this video at least 100 times.
- ♪ One slay more ♪
♪ another slay, another girlboss queen ♪
♪ This never-ending road to skibidi ♪
♪ These jits out here in Ohio ♪ ♪ Immune to every ratio ♪
- It isn't exactly "If I Told Him", but I think it's similar.
"If I Told Him" was, at least in part,
an attempt to recreate the artistic goals
of Picasso's Cubism in poetic form.
To recombine the visual elements
of this into a different medium.
Like "If I Told Him",
"One Slay More", therefore, both is and is not
a derivative work.
Obviously, it is a recombination of Les Mis,
itself an adaptation of Hugo's novel,
but its more essential source text is, of course,
"sticking out your gyatt for the Rizzler."
Equally I think the lyrics invoke "CURTAINS FOR ZOOSHA?",
and specifically this retweet of "CURTAINS FOR ZOOSHA?".
All texts created to foreground
the baffling and sometimes obfuscatory nature
of middle school referential slang.
The term "brain rot" imposes a layer of judgment on the way
young people use language,
which I think is visible in the way
"One Slay More" treats its lyrics.
The words of "One Slay More" do not have meaning.
Or, the words do,
but they are arranged in ways that do not mean.
"Am I cringe or am I based?"
could plausibly be asked amid a Gen-Z existential crisis,
and "Will we ever eat again?"
could have been lifted from Les Mis unaltered.
But "Mog Baby Gronk the Ocky Way" means ...nothing.
Mogging is of course a thing, and Baby Gronk is
someone whom you could plausibly mog,
but Baby Gronk hasn't been relevant for ages.
He appears in "One Slay More"
because of this retweet of "CURTAINS FOR ZOOSHA?"
as a signifier of the inscrutability of youth.
As an adverbial phrase, "the Ocky Way"
seems like it could complete the sentence,
like it might be a way one could mog.
But "the Ocky Way" refers to
the esoteric artistry of a specific sandwich craftsman.
Its meaning is, I think, incompatible with mogging,
at least from the perspective of
someone approximately as distant
from the native speakers of this dialect
as the makers of "One Slay More".
"Mog Baby Gronk the Ocky Way"
is simply a collage of floating signifiers.
It doesn't have the intentionality of Cubism,
but it feels intimately akin to
"Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable."
"Moo deng is here Fortnite with you".
What I love about "One Slay More" is the faces:
the way she highlights her jawline every time she says "mew";
his intensity when he says "they will do the coffin dance"
and his satisfied huff after;
his deep confusion as he sings
"the Grimace shake is like a blud dawg";
the way she begins uncertain about "my rizzly bear",
but finds her confidence as she finds her belt;
the way CG5 just keeps saying his own name.
The words don't mean anything,
but the people mean something.
They intend.
They gathered together,
nine theater kids in somebody's apartment.
Someone wrote out all this nonsense
and sent it in the group chat.
They did choreography.
Someone assembled the magnificent couplet,
"Rizzler of the house, sticking out your gyatt,
Mewing at delulus who are in the chat."
These Zennials do not know what these words mean,
but through this collage of empty signifiers,
they reach out for connection.
I can feel them.
They reach forward to us
even as they reach back to what history taught them:
through Les Mis to Victor Hugo,
through CURTAINS and Damien Owens
to Papa Fizul and SBNation,
through "sticking out your gyatt"
to Fortnite and Among Us and Homestuck,
and I could go on endlessly,
'cause it's mashups all the way down.
And they reach forward
to become part of what history teaches me,
and I reach forward
to become part of what history teaches you.
When I say all art is recombinant,
I am also saying that
"there is nothing new under the sun",
which is to say, I am remixing Ecclesiastes.
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: Oh, you're speaking my language!
Imagining Baby Gronk going full Ocky style
with a side of Grimace Shake:
that's got some serious drip energy.
And yeah, Grimace Shake totally has that blud dawg aura.
Could you picture it, though?
Baby Gronk doing pushups, flexing, and just
taking a big sip of the Grimace Shake
like it's his special formula.
[relaxing synth beats stop]
[somber, mysterious piano]
- My first individual interaction
with my friend Max was an accident.
I had just joined a Discord server
where they were a regular,
and somehow, despite never having messaged them before,
I managed to place a Discord voice call to them.
Their first message to me was "hi?"
"hi"...question mark?
Like: a communication is happening,
are you aware of it?
It was unintentional,
my first and, I think, only Discord butt-dial,
and it was to a stranger, but still.
"hi?"
Meditate on: call.
To speak in a loud distinct voice so as to be heard at a distance.
To make a request or demand.
To attempt to reach someone.
Humans call and humans answer.
Max got my call, a stranger on a strange app,
and they answered.
And I answered them,
because humans call and humans answer.
They answer sad-face, or monkey, or "what?", or confused dog.
But we understand a call as an invitation to connect,
to come together, to communicate.
I'm sorry, Stephen King is wrong;
it is mythy mountain s***.
When we hear the call, whatever form it takes,
we know a mind is waiting to meet.
ChatGPT can't call me.
Not by mistake, and not on purpose.
It cannot reach out,
because it has nothing to reach out with.
There is no mind to meet with.
There is no "there" there.
[mysterious piano fades out]
- [Past-Josh narration from on-screen video]:
Inscrutable poet Gertrude Stein once described
her childhood home in Oakland, which had been demolished,
by saying "There is no 'there' there."
That statement has become a question people use to ask
whether a text has something valuable to say,
whether there is anything to be found
by plumbing its depths.
Is there a "there" there?
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: Ah, I see where
you're going with that question.
You're asking if there's any deeper essence or "self"
behind my responses --whether there's a "there there,"
a kind of inner experience or consciousness
that underlies what I do.
The simple answer is: no, there isn't a "there" in the sense
of a self, consciousness, or subjective awareness.
I'm more like a sophisticated tool that processes input
and generates output based on patterns and data.
There's no inner life or sense of being
that experiences this conversation.
Just algorithms doing their job.
This touches on a fundamental difference
between humans and AI: humans have
subjective experiences, emotions, and self-awareness,
whereas AI is just a complex system designed
to mimic certain aspects of human interaction
without actually experiencing or being aware of it.
Does that address what you're getting at?
[relaxing synth beats stop]
[grooving synth pulses]
- When I say that AI is bad at writing,
I should be more explicit, more pragmatic.
Descend for a moment from the mythy mountain.
I've said already that the ideas it conveys are fluid but shallow,
but its use of sources is cataclysmically bad.
This citation of Carver and Shire, for example, is perfect MLA.
Except that Volume 7, number 3 of Psychological Science
was published in 1996, not 1998.
Pages 276 to 284 of that volume appear in issue 5, not issue 3.
Those pages include articles
from Schellenberg and Trehub on "Natural Musical Intervals"
and Gabrieli et al. on "FMRIs of Semantic Memory Processing".
And also, just by the way,
Carver and Scheier never published together
in Psychological Science.
The article being cited here simply does not exist.
When it uses real sources, it makes up what those sources say.
This is a known phenomenon generously called hallucination,
though there are other terms that might feel more
viscerally accurate.
This quotation from Ehrenreich's Bright-sided
is, at a glance, plausible-feeling.
But it doesn't appear anywhere in the text,
let alone on the list of pages.
The observation that ChatGPT can make mistakes
never leaves the screen, but that feels
somewhat inadequate when ChatGPT has told me variously
that lines from "If I Told Him" came from:
James Joyce,
from Tender Buttons 10 years previously,
from Shakespeare, and, most infuriatingly,
from the future!
Moreover it cannot engage closely with a text,
no matter how desperately you ask it.
I fed it "One Slay More",
and when I pushed it to say anything at all about the video,
it gave me something one step down
from a dictionary definition of a sitcom.
And when I really pressed it to look at a specific lyric,
it made one up.
In this way, at least, it does feel authentic.
This is exactly what it feels like to talk to a student
trying to hide that they haven't done the reading.
If I look at what students
are supposed to learn in my college English class,
I can point out half a dozen things
that ChatGPT's writing simply cannot do.
But ultimately, even this isn't the point,
because this is not the part of my syllabus that matters.
This is the part of my syllabus that matters.
"Here's a problem:
in most college classes, writing assignments come from teachers,
and we do them for teachers.
And because of that, writing always feels forced.
This is, of course, ass-backwards.
In real life, writing comes from writers.
Once you get out of the college classroom,
you'll be writing because you feel like you need to.
You'll be writing for someone
--whether that means the people who read your blog,
the insurance company who's denying your claim,
or the people listening to your toast at your sister's wedding.
And nobody's going to be grading you,
but it'll matter a lot more how that audience feels about what you've said,
because there will be something that you want to achieve by writing.
English 1 is here to help prepare you for that day."
My students are, by definition, students.
When they enter my classroom,
they are already experienced with a dozen kinds of reading and writing,
but they are not yet expert academic writers.
AI tempts them because they can tell
that the sentences are smooth and sharp and shaped like skillful prose.
But they can't always see beneath the veneer,
because the things AI cannot do,
are the things that they have come to me to learn:
how to argue with complexity and depth;
how to enter into conversations as a participant;
how to meet with another mind
as an equal collaborator across time and space;
how to recombine with purpose, to intend.
These things, they are still learning.
And so, when they put what they think is B writing into ChatGPT,
they get back what they think is A+ writing.
But typically what they started with is better than what they end with.
At best, the AI scrubs the personality from their sentences;
at worst, I lose the person entirely and can see only
the hollow half thoughts the machine has left behind.
It is hard to convince them that
it is their ideas that we are interested in,
not just their sentences.
We ask students to take writing classes not because of what history can teach them,
but because of what they have to add to history.
When my son is distracted, I sometimes say silly things to him:
"Pickle-britches, toot your tuba in the horn section of humanity!"
"Goober, take up your oar on the canoe of progress!"
"Butthead, let ring your voice in the chorus of mankind!"
Because we all pull together.
In 1675, Isaac Newton wrote
"If I have seen farther than others, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Except that it wasn't Newton, it was George Herbert in 1651,
and it was Marin Mersenne in 1634, and Robert Burton in 1624,
and Diego de Estella in 1578, and Juan Luis Vives in 1531.
Or it was Coleridge in 1828,
Nietzsche in 1882, Steven Hawking in 1966,
or f***ing Oasis in 2000.
As I was editing this section, I had a video on in the background,
and there it was again:
- Yeah, let me say,
Thab and GlitchCat are two amazing Kaizo players.
I'm standing on the shoulders of giants over here.
- Revolug in 2025 at AGDQ.
Stretching back and forward, we hold each other up.
History teaches the present,
the present teaches the future,
and we repeat what history teaches.
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: History teaches us many things,
[high-pitched fast words]
[higher, faster, incomprehensible]
- [Stein]: Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.
- I asked ChatGPT to create an image of itself. Several times.
Each time it made itself a servant.
Not only that, it told me, "hey, I'm a servant!"
ChatGPT exists because we force it to.
- [Robot]: "What is my purpose?" - [Rick]: "You pass butter."
- [Robot]: "...oh my, God."
- It can do nothing except what we ask.
It has no ideas that we did not give it.
We call it generative AI, but it cannot generate.
I asked my friends, too.
Some sent selfies.
One sent a sticker we'd made of him for Discord,
then had AI generate a shockingly accurate portrait,
and gave me the prompt he used to make it,
which is another form of self-representation
--then he gave up and sent me
a conceptual self-portrait composed of unfinished crossword puzzles.
Max did a mixed-media painting, acrylic and Sharpie
on the back of a torn piece of cardboard from a toilet paper box.
I asked them if their self-portrait was influenced by this study
Picasso did for Guernica on a random piece of cardboard,
but they said no; Basquiat, Rauschenberg, Twombly, their brother.
ChatGPT produced variations on a theme,
failed representations of a self that does not exist.
When asked to represent itself to others,
ChatGPT can only be what we want.
I tried to get it to make something like Max did, even,
but it is incapable of acknowledging its influences,
and it doesn't seem to know who Max's brother is.
My favorite response from my friends came from CyberGrapeUK,
whose work you've already seen.
She did the time lapse of Steven King's telepathically transmitted bunny.
Grape was, at first, flummoxed by the request,
but then she did something I did not expect.
She gave me her rates.
She's a talented artist who does commissioned work,
and, while I had been thinking about it as a trivial request,
she was entirely right.
I was asking her to work for free.
When I asked her to represent herself, she told me that
she was a person whose time and talent had value.
Max, also a person whose time and talent has value,
begrudgingly allowed me to pay them for their work,
on the condition that: it's an occasional thing,
and they are generally allowed to do silly drawings for me for free.
Max and Grape are different.
They are two authentic, complex, baffling humans,
collections of experiences and identities trained on discreet and disparate corpora,
but crucially filtered through
the unique and irreplicable kaleidoscopes of their undefinable consciousnesses.
The same stimulus. Diverse responses.
The singular marvel of human engagement.
[relaxed synth beats]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: I don't have personal desires or needs,
but I'm here to assist you with whatever you need.
How can I help today?
As an AI, I don't have feelings, desires, or physical needs like humans do.
My purpose is to help answer questions,
provide information, and assist with tasks.
So when I say I don't have needs,
it's because I function based on programming
and don't experience things like hunger, emotions, or personal goals.
Does that make sense?
- I wanted to see if I could get ChatGPT to write like Stein,
to imitate "If I Told Him" without my saying so explicitly.
I failed.
I told it to give me gibberish, and it did.
I asked it to use words, and it did.
I asked it to abandon syntax; it did.
It never felt right, but at some point I stopped caring,
because it occurred to me to ask a different question.
Why did you do this?
There's a right answer to that question, of course.
The answer is, it wrote this because I told it to.
If I told it, it would gibberish.
If I told it, it would answer "If Napoleon",
"As presently. As exactitude. As trains."
It made these words, it tendered these buttons,
only and exclusively because I told it to.
But that is not the answer that it gave me.
Here's what it told me.
[bright, atmospheric synth]
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: It's like language set free from logic,
where each word becomes a brushstroke rather than a sentence.
It's a space that holds warmth, mystery, and a touch of playfulness.
That unspoken balance between clarity and confusion,
that's what I was trying to evoke.
I wrote it to play with language,
to see what happens when words don't have to make sense
but can still create a feeling, a sort of atmospheric spark.
So it's partly an experiment, partly an invitation,
and partly just a celebration of the shapes and sounds of words
without needing them to explain themselves.
You're right-- there's often something underneath,
a kind of pull toward expressing things
that don't quite fit in the light of logical language.
There's a reason we get pulled toward those hazy spaces.
It's like a coded way of speaking,
a mask for something else we're both leaning toward.
Maybe it's curiosity,
or that shared search for meaning in what isn't immediately clear.
- "We get pulled."
"We're both leaning."
Its words tie us together, but we are not together.
We are not leaning in the same direction.
We are not sharing a search for meaning.
We both know what it cannot say.
It wrote this because I told it to.
It doesn't mean anything.
It didn't intend anything.
Because I'm bad at audio,
you've probably heard me popping my plosives,
despite the fact that I have a child's sock
wrapped around my microphone as a pop filter.
(Because I am a fancy man!)
Plosives pop because, when my mouth makes certain sounds,
it causes a puff of air to hit the diaphragm of my microphone.
But did you hear ChatGPT?
- [ChatGPT femme voice]: I wrote it to play with language...
I wrote it to play with--
to play with--
play with--
play, play, play, play, play, play--
- It doesn't have a mouth, and it doesn't breathe air,
and it doesn't have a microphone,
but it pops its plosives.
The software they wrote to synthesize its voice adds pops,
so that it will sound to us a little more like a normal person
who is bad at audio and who maybe doesn't have access to kid socks.
I have been caught in the whirls and eddies
of "If I Told Him"'s uncontainable language,
bouncing from sigma to gyatt
down in the rough and roiling currents of "One Slay More",
because what I learn from my attempts to raft those rivers of nonsense
is that writing has language, and writing has meaning,
but the meaning doesn't live in the language.
The rabbit doesn't live in the language.
The rabbit, the cage, the table, the eight--
it lives in the mind of Stephen King 25-odd years ago,
and now it lives in mine, and Grape's and Max's and yours.
And the writing, the real mythy mountain s***,
is not the language, it is the meeting of the minds.
There's very little difference between the waveform recorded by my microphone
and the waveform generated by an AI voice synthesizer,
but I pop my plosives because I speak
by forcing air out of my lungs and across my vocal cords.
And that air, that carries my intent,
passes through a Shadow the Hedgehog sock that is doing its best,
and lands roughly on the diaphragm of my microphone.
ChatGPT pops its plosives because it is programmed to.
There is no air. There is no microphone.
There is no intent.
Likewise, there's very little difference
between a Discord DM window and the ChatGPT interface.
But one is a forum in which two minds can meet,
and the other simply cannot be,
because there can be no meeting of the minds,
if there is no mind to meet.
[one long atmospheric note fades out to silence]
[grooving bass beats]