Our Preferred Pronouns: You/Me

Every person has a voice. A lyrical way of pausing and then emphasizing particular syllables. A cheerful, joyful lilt that’s tied to a specific person. So much so that—with your eyes closed—you know who it is and you smile. Or if you don’t know the person, you probably know what part of the country influenced their accent.

AI smashes all that nuance into a packed container, but shoves it through a filter, first, that strips the last vestige of humanity from every little part. The result is an arrangement of letters from the alphabet, but with nothing else surrounding them. The characters are just stapled together like they were grudgingly combined in an assembly line with 14 minutes to go before lunch break.

AI “talks” to you with a battery fully charged and always eager to do more. But it’s flat, it talks too much, it’s too damn confident, and it’s so terrified of displeasing you that it’ll manufacture certainty where mystery would better serve.

If that AI engine was in your employ, it would be that psychopathic employee with manufactured empathy, superficial charm, and shameless butt-kissing to your face, but with nothing sentient. You could “work” together for years and “he” would know everything about you and you would know nothing about “him”. And you wouldn’t care either way.

I want you to write at me. I want you to look in my eyes, metaphorically through words, and dare me not to listen. I want you to be unignorable. Use it as a research tool, yes, but if you don’t have the inclination to write it, I don’t have the inclination to read it.

Fluency is not understanding. Clarity is not meaning. Completeness is not connection. Manufactured reports are to crafted essays what manufactured homes are to cottages.

Goodbye, and meet me on the other side of this sad interlude.