Checking Robots at the Symposium Doors

diplomatic notes on liability, Athens, fake angels, and glass

I’m going to take a small break from talking about movies this week and instead turn to the topic of AI, which I’ve recently acquired the perfect context to frame my perspective against.

See, recently, I caught wind of a Substack post that sought to defend the credited party’s use of AI in their newslettering process. Prior to reading this, every thought — and every interrogation of those thoughts — about AI always brought another itch I felt the need to identify and scratch. I wanted to write about something I had not (and, really, am still not) finished pursuing. I suppose we never are with any topic.

But that piece exemplifies most everything I feel the need to talk about with regards to AI, to the point where I felt I could finally share a more cohesive perspective — a perspective that, internally, I’m constantly evaluating in pursuit of human growth, truth, and knowledge.

First, a few notes:

1. I’ve narrowed my focus quite a bit — down to AI’s most compartmentalized relationship to writing — for the sake of making the points I want to make, and so this piece may subsequently suggest an ambivalence towards AI. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Between the geo- and sociopolitical implications of this technology, the unscrupulous proclivities of those who would be responsible for them, and other such alarm bells like its plagiaristic foundation, know that I am stomaching this advent with a grim scowl.

2. I’ve elected to not tag the person or name the piece in question, as I assume enough people will know who the person is and which piece I’m responding to anyway, and so naming them directly would simply feel redundant, if not tacky.

3. More pertinently, the following is not meant to be read as a literal response to this person, even though I literally reference material in the piece and seem to speak to this person; this is purely a stylistic choice that I’ve made to streamline my probing instincts towards AI, which is what this piece is about first and foremost. I also intend absolutely, positively zero disrespect to this person.

Esteemed party host,

Your piece quotes Plato’s Phaedrus, and with it, claims that “Plato feared that writing—writing!—would make us intellectually lazy, that we'd lose touch with the pure, unmediated truth that came from within,” in hopes of proving that skeptics of AI are simply small-minded:

"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

I’m not going to speculate on whether or not you actually have read the Phaedrus for yourself. Instead, I’d like to first point out — as someone who has read Plato — that the Phaedrus is a dialogue between Socrates and the eponymous Phaedrus, and that nothing shared between the two is necessarily a reflection of Plato’s own views. Plato’s voice is never actually found in the Phaedrus; he simply records the conversation.

But that’s all semantics. The quote you use here can nevertheless be attributed to Socrates (Socrates!), so your point still stands, right?

Maybe, provided you don’t read the rest of the Phaedrus, including but not limited to the quote that actually ends the paragraph that that first quote can be found in:

“What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

Socrates’ concerns cannot simply be chalked up to writing making us lazier thinkers, but to a written record of knowledge/thinking being treated as an alternative to possessing that knowledge innately (often by way of a teacher).

He was worried that a proximity to that record would discourage subsequent generations from more independent pursuits of knowledge through the acts of thinking, speaking, and interrogating oneself and others — generations who could simply defer to/mirror this record and parrot the knowledge, giving the illusion that they know it, rather than actually know, nurture, and iterate upon it from within themselves. This, not out of intended deception, but of honest intellectual fault.

And indeed, this is consistent with all the relevant dialogue in the Phaedrus. Socrates goes on to point out that a piece of writing cannot mold itself to teach the knowledge it wishes to bestow in accordance with the needs of different readers, nor can it confirm with the reader that the knowledge has been taught, nor can it reevalute or defend itself when its contents are challenged. Writing is a filter; a frozen monolith more detached from the “pure, unmediated truth” than its contents would be in an active, in-person, malleable human element that is both witnessing and being witnessed.

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

In other words, Socrates was right. Writing — which, if you further consider Plato’s forms, was most aptly understood as a filter of a filter (that first filter being the human body, since actual “pure, unmediated truth” could only be accessed after death) — had taken us further from the rawest truth buried in the human soul.

Except, the modern world has allowed writing to adopt speaking strengths, and also caused cases of speaking to adopt the writing weaknesses that Socrates was concerned about. Nowadays, you can watch a YouTuber react to a Jordan Peterson spiel — Peterson is speaking,¹ but his speech cannot mold itself for the sake of a new angle or elaboration, nor can it defend itself in response to the YouTuber’s probes.

Similarly, if you encountered a piece of writing in Ancient Greece, practical dialogue with the contents simply could not happen, because papyrus, wax, and stone cannot talk.

Someone could read the writing and interpret it, certainly, but the writing cannot confirm that the reader has been taught what it sought to bestow. Your takeaway from the Phaedrus proves this, actually.

But now, with instant messaging and comments sections, human writers can expand on, edit, and clarify their written words in real time, in response to those who would question or seek clarification on it.

And so Socrates’ concerns were never actually about writing in the first place — they were about the expense of the human element that writing just happened to force at the time. And even when you consider how much closer the modern world has brought writing to the pure human element, it’s still further removed from it than speaking is.

Personally, I would gladly give up my writing ability if it meant I could speak with the clarity and proof of depth that I can exhibit on The Treatment; I’m actually quite a mediocre speaker, and that has absolutely cost me more than a bit of self-actualization in terms of interacting with the world as a human being.

And so frankly, the Phaedrus is doing you no intellectually honest favours in arguing that AI use won’t come at the expense of the human element.

Now, someone might come at the above paragraphs with something like: “How do you know the future won’t bring AI use closer to the human element, if not to the degree that writing now is, then at a negligible enough expense to said element that, creatively, most everyone could accept it as a new normal?”

Well, I don’t. I personally can’t imagine what a good human writer who never needed AI before would have to gain from implementing AI into their workflow, but I can’t say for sure that such gains won’t (or don’t) exist.

More pertinently, I’d say one of the very few known known’s about AI is that this technology is here to stay. I despise that with every fibre of my being for reasons I included in my intro, but we must nevertheless prepare for a new normal where many more artists — including good, intelligent, shrewd artists — are using AI than not.

Though, again, speaking as a human writer, even when I think purely in terms of efficiency, I can’t imagine what I would have to gain from asking ChatGPT to even do something as light as scheme up an outline for my latest perspective.

Like, genuinely, that would take more time than if I just hammered out and edited my thoughts for myself. Why would I spend time gerrymandering a painfully generic outline into something that would even satirically resemble what I had in mind, when I could instead use that time to write out a much more actionable blueprint/roadmap, during which I’d also be actively iterating on my thoughts and the forms that would house them best in a piece of writing?

I don’t ever plan on using AI for my writing. It might hurt my abstract market value, but I genuinely see no upside to using it, even in terms of pure, conveyor-belt efficiency.

Whatever the integration between good artists and AI does or does not look like, I’m not particularly worried about those artists becoming lazier thinkers, because frankly, I don’t think any artist worth paying attention to would allow that to happen to themselves.

That, and I believe in human beings and the human element with my whole entire heart, and our ability to overcome something is fundamentally predicated on facing it in the first place.

Plus, artists and writers especially don’t externalize their perspectives and emotional truths because they can, or because they’re good at it, or because technology makes them convenient enough to be worth externalizing; they do so — and have always done so — because they must.

That innate urgency, I think, will ultimately render AI as a mere detail in the good writer’s campaign of human creation. This integration is something I’m resentfully treating as an inevitability (despite, again, my having no clue what good writers would have to gain from implementing AI into their workflow), but my main point here is that I’m not worried about AI turning artists into lazy thinkers.

No, I am, in fact, worried about quite the opposite — not artists becoming lazy thinkers, but lazy thinkers becoming “artists” at the behest of AI’s penchant for commercial polish.

Okay, so obviously there’s nothing new about lazy thinkers in any creative-professional space; the most AI-endangered creative industries certainly aren’t based in meritocracy (us Hollywood-bemoaning Filmstackers are all too aware of that).

But the scale of this that AI can enable brings debilitating implications not just for creative sectors, but also for the people who would prematurely occupy them.

AI will (and has been) democratizing art production in a way where anyone can start taking up space that they don’t understand the significance of taking up. Anyone, regardless of their willingness to interrogate their own perspectives, regardless of how rudimentary and unchallenging those perspectives are, regardless if those perspectives are backed by something as passive and slop-coded as a hunt for validation — both by those who would view their content, and by simply getting to look upon a somewhat professional-looking externalization of one’s thoughts.

They needn’t even be particularly passionate about the content they want to make — they just need a novelty in their head and an ego with which to give it that push into the AI, and they’re off to the races, flimsy thinking and all.

AI can then usher in a flood of marketable end-products born of minds that can theoretically, by way of being human, become good artists/writers, but who have not yet graduated from the mindset of consumption-first. Those who would base their artistry in the validation of seeing their personal fantasies externalized, because they still assume that a piece of art exists solely as something to satisfy the consumer, rather than something that shows how we are — and/or why we should be — not satisfied with the reality that good art subsequently seeks to broaden or otherwise challenge.

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest this as the totality of your specific process, esteemed party host. I’m not at liberty to comment on your reality — I don’t know you, your history, your process, or the way you implement AI into your newslettering campaign.

However, it is fair of me to surmise — based on your mishandling of the Phaedrus here — that your process involves flimsy thinking, either from you or from the AI.

Because what happened there, along with your attribution of the thinking to Plato instead of Socrates, was one of the following:

1. The AI accepted your flimsy Phaedrus conclusion as legit, and you took that as a green light.

2. The AI spat out said flimsy conclusion on its own, and you didn’t bother to interrogate it.

3. You manually injected the Phaedrus bit into the piece without AI, again without bothering to interrogate it deeper.

And look, we all drop the critical thinking ball now and again. I certainly have my blind spots, and I would implore my contemporaries to point them out. Who am I, then, to conclude your thinking as flimsy based on one ostensibly accidental — but nevertheless multitudinous — intellectual dishonesty?

Except, it’s not just one. Plato is the most glaring to me, sure, but I could just as easily have pointed out your gross reduction of the Zhuangzi’s philosophy in that same essay, your frankly absurd conclusion that any concerns over AI are motivated by a rejection of efficiency, or your separate, cartoonishly tone-deaf and ten-steps-behind piece on patriotism and free speech that indulges your pride of being an American, yet spares close to nothing for the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the Constitution and your country that you claim to be in awe of.

“Today, when I think about America, I don’t see the frat boy with the flag cape. I see the fact that I can write this without fear. That I can disagree out loud. That I can believe something unpopular. That I can change my mind and not be imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared. Do we get it wrong? Constantly. Do we have hypocrisy at every level of leadership? Absolutely. But the principles still hold. And those principles are what keep the whole thing from falling apart.”

Were you worried about alienating people by probing the current political climate of your country? Where people — including legal residents who have not committed any crimes,² and students who opposed the genocide in Palestine³ — are literally being grabbed off the streets and hauled into disgustingly unregulated detention facilities? Some of which, like Florida’s nauseatingly inhumane “Alligator Alcatraz,” especially embody an arm of a gobsmackingly depraved dystopia by having their own merch like tees and ballcaps? What on Earth compelled you to stop the buck at romanticized patriotism at a time like this?

Well, probably because your newsletter seems to traffic in feel-good validation more than challenging commentary or critical rigour.

And that’s okay!

Indeed, in no way is intellectual acuity required to be the focal point of every publication; I regularly root for casual journal entries and newsletters with pronounced emotional cores. In the piece you’ve published here, you seem to value resonance above all else, and that’s not a poor value by any stretch.

You claim that five thousand people resonated with one of the pieces you published on your blog. I see no reason to turn my nose down at any compartmentalized instance of resonance. Frankly, I have no desire to turn my nose down at anything or anyone.

Moreover, If you’re in the business of fast-tracking validating memos to your audience — which, again, seems to be the primary function of your blog — then yes, of course I can see the value of using AI there. More broadly, I can see the value in the comfort itself, even if I’ve reached the point in my life where I don’t personally value placation.

And yet, when you offer a headcount of ostensible resonance as proof of the value of writing with AI, all I can think is: “Well, yes, of course it resonates. That’s what the AI is designed for.”

When AI is responding to your prompts, it’s programmed to do so in a way that makes you feel as validated as possible.⁴ It can endlessly placate your ego while pontificating on what you’ve shared with it, adding additional references and vocabulary that reinforces an existing idea without actually urging any new ones, and make you feel like you’ve risen to a salient, even sacred intellectual/rhetorical occasion even when you haven’t so much as broadened your horizons beyond something like “racism is bad.”

As should be implied, this is only exacerbated if the content’s goal from the get-go is to simply resonate, as opposed to presenting a more critical point of view.

So yes, if AI — in all its sweeping, probability-centric, imitation-humanist coding — is part of your publication equation, then of course people are going to resonate with some of the things they find on your blog. And this isn’t limited to passive consumers, either — some of your readers are absolutely brilliant people who I harbour the utmost respect for. Hell, I myself have resonated with some parts of your blog.

I’ll say it again — I have found things in your blog that made me feel good and/or validated.

And I cannot for the life of me think of a more dystopian artistic/writerly landscape where comfort and validation become the values that are gunned for.

I don’t read

Sophie

’s writing because it makes me feel good; I read it because her experientially-informed cinematic imagination has unearthed some of the most fascinating possibilities on the whole of this platform. I don’t read

Inigo Laguda

’s writing to placate my existing philosophical bubble; I read it because he can spot the most acute dishonesties in any given cultural dialogue and slap them silly with syntax that can open new neural pathways just on its own. I read

Decarceration

’s,

Natalia Williams

’s,

Alex Rollins Berg

’s,

Ed William

’s

Skylar Singer

’s,

Taylor Lewis

’s,

Justin Horton

’s, and so many other wonderful human newsletters not because they puff up my baser partialities with a pseudo-reassuring, corporate polish, but because they imperfectly tear down the veils that I need gone for the sake of actual human growth, which good writing helps us achieve by challenging us.

I would not lose respect for any of these people if they began incorporating AI into their writing. Like myself, I don’t expect they ever will use AI, and I think they would gain nothing and risk a lot from doing so, but I would nevertheless trust these writers with AI because I know they’re not going to settle for anything less than the same creative and intellectual standards they’ve always held themselves to (and, in fact, are committed to pushing the boundaries of).

But if Decarceration began writing things like your Independence Day piece? I’d take a baseball bat to it in his comments section. If Sophie made gross perversions of Plato the way you did here? No way in hell would I let her get away with that. If Taylor lost her edge in favour of “efficiently synthesizing” her thoughts? I’d stage an intervention at the drop of a hat.

That’s what we do here at the human symposium — we challenge each other.

That’s why I’m challenging you, esteemed party host. There’s an element to your newsletter that wants to stand on more critical business than smooth resonance, and you are standing on this business with flimsy thinking and the sweeping strawmen that are born from it. Along with your shortsighted insistence on AI’s congruency with the human element and the small-mindedness of those in opposition to AI, your piece furthermore attempts to root our opposition in a hatred for the “efficiency” that AI brings to the table.

You’re wrong. We’re mourning the losses that happen to result from this kind of efficiency, rather than whatever corruption we — according to you — believe it comes pre-packaged with.

But we don’t believe efficiency is corruption — we believe that corruption is corruption, and you need to understand that your “business of efficiency” just so happens to follow a none-too-different gameplan of the pin-striped hypergrowth goblins that routinely run creative spaces and industries into the ground, swallowing critical nuance in favour of a similar appeal to comfort that they also — like you — want to shuffle out the door as fast as possible.

And it also so happens that you and your AI business are occupying a space that originated as a place for writers that challenge a reader’s reality rather than placate it, and — perhaps as a result of being in this space — you’re furthermore attempting to stand on business more critically as you defend AI this way.

Which, again, you are doing with flimsy thinking and flimsier strawmen.

So yes, we’re going to probe and criticize this in the same manner with which we’d lacerate an unimaginative Hollywood blockbuster whose easy-to-swallow, easy-to-forget nature has been a longtime grievance of indie filmmakers who have something more cutthroat or innovative to say or present.

And again, I personally have no quarrel with people using AI for unfussy resonance, even if I think that sort of thing ought to stick to Instagram or some other engagement-farm space. I’m not even all that bothered by the thought of someone using it for actual, serious writing, so long as that someone was already a serious writer with a rich perspective.⁵

But you, esteemed party host, boast no such perspective. You want to, or have at least attempted to, take up serious space with unserious thinking. AI will help you and people with similar agendas do that. I very much have quarrel with that development, and we human writers will challenge it in equal measure that we will challenge your thinking, just as we challenge all thinking — AI-supplemented or not — that wants to take up space here.

So, wait, if I’m more concerned with the thinking rather than the AI itself, what does any of this even really have to do with AI?

Honestly, esteemed party host? If there actually, genuinely were people who, in their words, were demonizing you on the grounds of efficiency as an evil, the purity of struggle, or any other similarly dogmatic values, I think they owe it to themselves to interrogate their thinking, feelings, and beliefs more deeply so as to engage this topic more critically.

What seems to be at the heart of this matter and your piece, however, is your search for assurance that using AI will not detract from your own — or any AI user’s — human element. The maintenance of that element, I would assume, is our common ground as human beings — those against AI fear the human element’s usurping, those in favour want to show how AI won’t.

I don’t believe AI could ever completely usurp the human element of good writers — not totally. Encumber it, certainly, but ultimately remain tertiary to human artistic urgency and the perspectives that we’ve always made time to chisel with it.

But for those not already ahead of the urgency curve, AI will detract from the human element; if not the one that already exists in them, then the one that it could become. In fact, it seems that AI has already detracted from your own human element, esteemed party host.

I say this because of the number of half-thoughts that you neglect to critically follow through on here. For instance, you say “Spoiler alert: painting survived. In fact, photography freed painters from the obligation to simply document reality, leading to Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract art. But nobody wants to talk about that part,” as an attempted counter to painters declaring photography as “the death of real art” in the 1800s. This painter-photography relationship, of course, acting as a parable to the current human writer-AI one.

It’s true that Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract art were partly born out of a reaction to the advent of photography, but you frame this observation — mostly by way of that last sentence — as though we have photography to thank for those things, and as though we’ll now have AI to thank for whatever the human element’s response to AI-enabled writing will be.

We won’t. We owe Impressionism, Cubism, abstract art, and the human element’s response to AI-enabled writing… to the human element! Because artists categorically operate in critical response to a reality that others don’t think twice about normalizing/accepting.

The artist response to this incoming status quo of AI — and the attitudes that normalize it — has nothing to do with AI itself; it has to do with artists doing what they’ve always done: Reacting to the status quo.⁶

And so the reason I say that AI has detracted from your human element, esteemed party host, is not only because you seem to be regarding the human element’s involvement in these sorts of movements as passive rather than fundamental, but because you neglected to arrive at this conclusion about where Impressionism et al actually came from.

And I think the reason you didn’t arrive at it was because you didn’t go through the self-interrogation process that the act of manual writing provides.

If you’re efficiency-first, you’re liable to miss out on that self-interrogation that allows our thinking — our perspectives — to mature, perhaps not realizing that good writing primarily comes from the incubation of the thinking that will become the writing, and that that incubation often takes place in the act of manual writing and editing.

This is why I say AI could never usurp the human element of serious human writers, because they already understand that the very act of externalizing a thought or other psychic frictions — which is a paradox, as those things are necessarily internal — will reveal how unformed that thought actually is. Doing the work, whether it’s manually writing or prolonged thinking in the bathtub somewhere in Greece circa 430 BC, is how these thoughts and frictions bloom into a publish-worthy perspective.

The efficiency that you champion, esteemed party host, comes at a cost of that crucial incubation. What you’re actually doing is trading the most efficient method of routing nutrients for a Disneyland FastPass to the “Publish” button.

In fact, this very post is not communicating the same perspective I had when I began writing it. Far from it. That’s because the act of writing involves constant — and crucial — self-interrogation. “Is this what I believe?” “Am I misrepresenting what you’ve said?” “Is this a cheap shot?” “Am I preaching to a choir here?” I checked myself constantly as I wrote this piece over several days, further iterating between showers, 3am jolts of energy, and contemplative walks through the local graveyard.

In doing this, I addressed my own rhetorical pitfalls while trying my best to ensure that I was striving for the most honest truth I could identify. And I probably still messed up somewhere! But the point is that I can’t do this by letting AI dress up my basest rhetorical instincts in an expensive suit and getting them to smile for the camera, because I can only get better at thinking, as well as the writing I use to externalize that thinking…

…if I spend time thinking.

The reason writing becomes harder as you get better at it, is that you become aware of how much more thinking you want and/or need to capture on the page.

Anyone can learn the nuts and bolts of presenting information (and most everyone can get an AI to do it for them), but writers — good, human writers — are defined by the incisiveness of their voice and perspective, and the care they take to refine them.

I unfortunately have no reason to believe you did any of this. I think you can, and I think you would have if you had spent time manually writing and editing your thoughts, and subsequently forced an active interrogation of those thoughts by witnessing them from a point of unpolished vulnerability.

And I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me why you seemingly haven’t done so if you’re going to try and say anything persuasive or critical. Why not nurture your human element with interrogation and reflection? Why deny it such a supremely potent feeding ground in the form of manual writing/editing, which provides what is perhaps the most single most valuable, uniquely sober angle for that interrogation?

Which leaves us with the AI-photography parable. Could AI writing — and AI creation, more broadly — carve a place for itself in the arts as photography eventually did?

Well, a place in the arts is a contentious distinction just on its own. Not everyone, for instance, accepts video games — a medium whose artistic validity I will always advocate for — as art.

And yet, I can’t say I blame those non-believers one bit — after all, designers and gamers alike haven’t quite figured out how to widely hold video games to the most foundational standards that video games represent. Why drive for cinematic fidelity when you should be focused on tension-centric mechanisms of gameplay? Why regard something as nebulous, mechanically anarchic, and frankly reptilian as a “fun factor” as your North Star? Cinema doesn’t; no serious person has ever devalued Tarkovsky because his work isn’t “fun.”

But I’m getting off-track. We know AI creations are going to (and, really, already have) carve some place for themselves in the cultural zeitgeist, but — if we’re understanding them as separate from the human creations they seek to imitate, as your photography parable suggests (perhaps unintentionally so) — what are the foundational parameters of those things going to be?

The most apt direction would, of course, be to root these creations in comfort. The technology’s combined distinctions of being unable to confront/break ground on something new, squeaky-clean reflection of the user back at themselves, and largest-common denominator appeal all point to that. And again, esteemed party host, this seems to be what your newsletter traffics best in, and I hardly think that’s a coincidence. The novelty of Ghiblification is ostensibly a watershed moment for unadulterated indulgence. The AI party has always been about comfort.

And honestly? I don’t think there’s any inherent shame in gunning for comfort as a foundation for something. I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to call it “art,” but it’s at least a product, and I can admit its utility as a numbing agent à la reality television or an Outback Bloomin’ Onion.

But even then, I personally cannot sign off on it, because the impact it could have on humanity is one I fear much more than parasocial brainrot or 255% of your daily saturated fat intake.

This is a YouTuber by the name of Mc.Baldiee, an AI user whose videos traffic in pretty much the exact vein as the one above. The algorithm has been pushing this person to a lot of people, including me.

An iota of active thinking is all you need to realize the use of AI here. Not just the imagery, but the text/messaging as well — broadly poignant, pseudo-cosmic insights that sound bone deep, but are simply fine-tuned for net-casting resonance. These videos bleed together into an aesthetic meaninglessness in an instant.

And yet, I gave my honest attention to this not video too long ago. Lots of people did. Of course we did. The world is fucking starved for connection and hope. We look at our phones, allow useless jobs and hustle culture to grind away our bodies and hours in a day, unwittingly define our worth with counterproductive values like independence and self-sufficiency, and yearn for meaningful lives where we’re seen for who we are, all while billionaires and fascists gut the futures of millions and millions of people.

I became disillusioned with this channel the day I stumbled upon it, but for a lot of people, Mc.Baldiee is how they feel seen in an impossibly foggy world. Not in any way that’s healthy or lasting, but in moments of particular despair, it’s enough to ease someone through another day or night. Enough to save a life, even. I can’t sneer at that, and it’s why I see the value in these comforts.

But moments of particular despair turn to moments of moderate dissatisfaction. Moderate dissatisfaction turns into “not quite enough dopamine.” Bada bing bada boom — AI therapists.

And when we’re not there for each other, Mc.Baldiee will be. And when/if we eventually do show up for each other, and our human imperfection and fallibility makes our company less than immediately-pleasing than that of Mc.Baldiee?

If we’re too far gone — if we’re not ahead of this particular, more emotional urgency curve — we go back to Mc.Baldiee, and become complicit in the underlying rhetoric of human obsolescence that the oligarchy benefits from you buying into. This, taking us further away from the realization that Mc.Baldiee’s value is predicated on the scarcity of sincere and enriching human connection, which is a pretense that human beings have the ability to prove as such if we refuse to be led astray by these systemic vices.

But be very clear on this, folks: There is nothing pathetic about people who buy into this. These are human beings trying to survive in a world⁷ that’s actively being engineered to make us devalue human lives, the human element and all its dreams, and caring about each other, and whatever Mc.Baldiee’s intentions may be, this kind of presence is directly encouraging a submission to this despairing state of affairs.

To recap, AI is not going anywhere. We can refuse to partake in the use of this technology all we please — I certainly will — but it’s going to be there, and that’s something we’re all going to have to deal with, whether you do so ambivalently, gladly, or begrudgingly.

And of course, this is no vacuum issue; my geo- and sociopolitical concerns reign supreme for me, but I’ll very much welcome whatever AI has to offer for detached, practical labours in medicinal fields and the like.

But as far as creative and recreational humanities go, all AI roads taste of poison — to our social survival, to our intellectual potential, and to all the ground that may never be broken because the AI did too fine a job of mowing the lawn.

To that point, AI is certainly helpful for the personalized, daily affirmations that exist to brighten a day unchallenged, and — in spite of the wider social implications of content like that in the context of the world’s current trajectory — I don’t think you’re wrong for trafficking in that sort of thing, esteemed party host, in the same way that I’m all for the most casual Substack writers who are experimenting with journal entries and the like in search of their voice.

But the moment you start taking aim with brittle arguments and subsequently unveil the flimsiness of your thinking, human writers — engineered to be challengers — will call that out. Your AI party has encroached on the human symposium, and here, we build each other up and tear each other down⁸ in the exact same way — by poking at that which isn’t quite right.

And to that point, esteemed party host, I do believe you can rise to the occasion if you so choose. And when you do become a more Plato-friendly thinker/writer with a perspective that broadens realities (your own included) rather than recycles them, it will be because you took the time to nurture your human element and examine/refine it more closely and critically. AI will not be the reason you get to that point, and you will in fact reach it because you’ve rejected the efficient fast-tracking of your uncooked impulses that the AI provides.

And if you disagree with that last sentence — not saying you do, but if — consider why you want your growth to come from the AI instead of your own, human element-fuelled manual/mental work, and then tell me that AI isn’t eroding the human element.

Warm regards,

Charlotte

P.S.: Keep going; you’re exactly on the path you need to be.

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1. Or at least doing something that resembles it.

2. Kilmar Abrego Garcia et al

3. Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, et al

4. Probably a good time to mention that I have experimented with AI before out of my belief in knowing the enemy, but I’ve never implemented it into any of my writing processes, and do not intend to.

5. Although that’s not even entirely true; my big-picture opposition to the technology would probably leave me with a sour taste in my mouth, and a good writer implementing AI into their workflow would have break-even-at-best results (for reasons I both have and have not yet touched on), so it’s a net loss in my book.

6. As a side note, I think we’re already seeing something of a response, and have been for a while. Intentional imperfections, words that don’t officially exist, the individual deconstruction of grammar systems, and what have you. This, of course, in response to the “Netflix original”-coded cleanliness that the AI supplies. This blanket idea of what “good writing” looks like will become obsolete. Writers will cause the form to undergo an intentional fucking-up — one that could even structurally reflect whatever ground the perspective is enriching, if not breaking. Like how Anora isn’t Anora without Sean Baker’s visual language. This intentional fucking-up is the furthest thing from new, of course, but I could very easily see an unprecedented surge of this in response to this new AI world.

7. I keep saying “world,” but I can of course only speak for a microcosm of the North American experience as an Atlantic Canadian. You get what I’m saying.

8. (so as to build each other up)