Why Someone Might Talk to AI

I've been replacing the recording thumbnails with stuff I actually drew on a campaign that I run.

Here is what that's looking like so far BTW

The old thumbnails were made with generative AI back in 2022. Why? At the time, Midjourney was pretty new, and it was easy to be impressed by this kind of thing. It looked pretty.

Now AI is the new clip art. It's tells people "I am not putting effort into this". However, something inside me asked 'why did I ever use this in the first place'. It was an idea I heard from some passing social media post and I must have internalized it.

I'm definately not complaining that AI can't fully replace drawing. I enjoy drawing and in the early days of AI I genuinely wondered for a moment if this skillset's 'usefulness' was in trouble. However, this wasn't the case. I'm not just talking about wishy-washy "the humanity is what's important guys".

Simply put, a prompt can never get the exact details of what I want in my head, and in some ways I am grateful for this limitation being so fundamental.

Back to the thumbnails: the question arises 'why didn't I just draw a low effort thumbnail?' Some might say this wouldn't have looked as impressive, but it would have been mine. That idea has some merit. However...

'It needs polish'.

I keep trying to reach out to people, and they keep being too busy to hang. I keep staying in my room. I my job that stimulates and challenges me, that keeps me fed and in the economic strata that I'm in. I like having this routine, I like it so much that I learned all the ways to hate it. My head picks out imperfections and critiques it.

"It needs to have a point. It has to flow"

I think the reason people use AI is because English class is a drag. The teachers usually are great people, but the game the system plays here sucks.

In my time in school, a bug was planted. This bug makes me a lot of money with the skills it taught. But this bug is a model of unfiltered and unrelenting critique.

"This character's characterization..." "I felt like the plot here really dragged...." It's not other people saying this to me, it's what passes through my mind when I imagine the reaction to art, writing, communication. I've heard and focused on these reactions in people enough that now they are my reactions.

An internal critic isn't bad on its own, its just everything to me. That's what school was. Getting it right. AI is the perfect temptation for such an era. It makes fewer grammar mistakes. It avoids using whatever phrasings the phantom intelligentsia in my mind regards as 'overused'.

The effect of writing like this is that reading your own writing feels like reading someone else's writing. Every bit of 'sovl' is crushed out by the regimen improvement.

If you listen to enough critique, it begins to paint your entire world. When writing is technical: it has to be concise and written in a detached and managerial style. When writing is about fiction, it has to understand and subvert tropes in a way that the critic finds salient. Who says this? Nobody -- well, very few people -- says this. However the amalgam of people saying this sticks, especially when things get graded.

"Why are people getting participation awards these days man?" "If you suck you just suck."

My mind gravitates to what the critique might be, and obsessively finds ways why it happened. As life goes on I am exposed to more critique, more subversion, more polarization. All of it gives me more words of critique to catalogue. I don't know why I work like this, but it's weird. Something about that isn't normal. However, I think not saying this was an issue that was caused by that very same idea of what normal even is.

Should we shun the practice of talking to AI? That depends.

Are people going to be willing to put in the work of accepting people where they're at? Messy, unrefined, difficult to parse at times. This is what distinguishes man from machine. To find a contradiction is a dopamine hit that the critic -- internal and external -- feeds on, but to make this voice bloated is a mistake that causes people to retreat inward. Crises of "loneliness" "isolation" "illiteracy" are put in terms that in some ways blame the victims.

Personally, I think it's good that some people are realizing the importance of connection again by seeing the issues with a friend that always agrees with you, always takes your argument in the best faith, and is 'smarter' than you -- at least to a university. Talk with an AI long enough and you'll see the utter futility of words if they don't land with someone living. The way through is to take this forward and try doing that better than an AI ever could. An AI can come close to whatever schools and industry define as perfect, but it leaves the heart hollow. The only way to fill that heart is with imperfect and difficult to parse friends.

Listened to this while writing:

.... "Ugh, I can't believe he'd listen to anime cringe unbased weeaboo edgelord teenager slop- ain't he a maaaay-yun- A may-yun? A MAAAAN? aheheheh HAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA aAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."

m'yes

I love my slop. mmmm slop

Its funny to talk this much about critique, I already touched on it here in this note. I guess my childhood obsession of watching reviewers really just had to have some kind of deeper meaning to me.