The Flamingo

As someone who’s always wanted to be a writer, the rise of ChatGPT and software like it that mimics the very real work that I’ve been pouring my life into is downright depressing, and to begin, I want to address the matter of voice, that thing which ties all writing you’re compelled to keep reading together, whether it’s something you recognize or not, because even those prose stylists who opt for an invisible voice have made a conscious effort to do so, to obscure themselves as an author to maximize your enjoyment of a particular aspect of their work like character or plot, a choice that cannot be made by a machine, because as much as the charlatans who wish to peddle their meager wares would want you to believe it to be capable of sentience and decision-making, the way these machines work is not through a process of pure expression or invention, but instead as a jukebox with poor selection by which the work of actual brilliant thinkers is devalued into a widget and mass-produced for you, and by intaking such writing you’re essentially eating gas-station food for thought, when the world’s best chefs are waiting to prepare meals for you, the writing of the machine so boring and rote and purely functional as to strip any spark of joy or wonder or interest from it, and a part of me wonders whether none of you enjoy humor or joy or whimsy, especially as I sit by a creek in rural Pennsylvania, surrounded by writers I’ve admired as friends, peers, and aspirational figures, where the whole experience has the vibe of the dying days of summer, worrying about the way the tides have turned against us in many ways, because I cannot say that I’ve ever seen writing from one of these mere machines that made me laugh, or smile, or given me pause to reconsider the ways in which I think about the world, and that’s by design, because you and I are building a relationship on the page as you read this, dear reader, we’re performing magic, like Stephen King talked about in On Writing, and you can’t really ever build that kind of relationship with a machine, because it serves and serves alone, rather than demanding anything of you, in the way I wish to demand your attention here, dear reader,

but maybe that’s not enough for you, and you do not care about us writers so directly as individuals, which is fair to an extent, we are a whiny bunch, even if I would argue that we’ve more than earned that write to complain about the state of the world, a world which might not physically last much longer at the rate of environmental degradation that software like GPT accelerate every day, and you like living on the planet, I’d hazard a guess, dear reader, you like having summers or winters that are navigable outside of your home, and consistent food supplies, and fresh waters, and the possibility of existing in an eco-sphere that supports life as we know it, not that everyone does, but that the algorithms certainly know nothing of, can know nothing of, because it isn’t in their programming to be able to feel or understand the things you feel or understand when I gesture at them, and I know you’re waiting for what this has to do with flamingos, and I promise there is an answer, but I’m holding the suspense to keep you reading, but besides all that, maybe you’re the time-is-money type, and you’re starting to protest that the ease and the time and cheap monetary value of the work historically has to mean that it should never be worthwhile, whereas someone like me, who builds their life around the arts, feels quite the opposite, that there is almost no other reason to live other than to appreciate that which is beautiful, whether that be the relationships we build with real people or the art we build for them, but I would remind you as well of the recent cryptocurrency bubble, and the day-trading bubble before that, and the subprime-mortgage crisis before that, and the dot-com bubble before that, many of which were meant to tie some grand technology to the idea that said technology is going to make everyone a lot of money, but just as often ended in catastrophic ruin for many involved, and that by devaluing the labor of those in an intellectual class, you only serve to make the average person weak and stupid, only we don’t have to be if we refuse to play the game, but I have one more big point that should hopefully convince you, 

and furthermore, let’s assume for a moment, dear reader, that you are not one of the moneymen trying to bring about the technological apocalypse, but a regular person, working an ordinary job, just using that little bit of tech to make your day less stressful, I ask if you really believe, deep in your heart, that the world would be better off if freaks like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg were even more obscenely wealthy than they already are, that the world would be better under the benevolent rule of neo-industrial monarchs who would gladly suck the marrow from your very bones if they thought it would bring them one more pretty penny, because I, for one, would like those anti-social nuts as far away from me as possible, thank you very much, even as many of us are stuck using their platforms, even as they’ve grown a real chance for fascism to become the dominant ideology of my country, eighty years after we fought the largest war in history to push it back but now our reliance on the machine has led to us not reading, not thinking critically, not funding our schools beyond mere mathematics and sciences, such that we have become a nation of the functionally illiterate, willing to go along with whatever our reality-TV leader wishes us to do, but that is not the world I wish to live in, because, believe me, I understand how thinking is hard, and have often wished I didn’t have to think quite so hard, especially in my days as a student, or in the office writing the same email a thousand times over with little variation, but this is not an essay meant to depress, but instead a sentence to serve as a kind of micro-manifesto against the mildly apocalyptic threat that faces all of us, one that I hope, dear reader, might somewhat convince you to rethink your desire to rely on LLM’s as tools to offload your thinking from the muscle of your brain, no, I do not wish to have my head in the sand, like a programmer friend of mine recently accused of me, but instead wish to keep myself balanced on one foot as you see here, screaming out for us all to wake up, and see what it is we are becoming, because I’m not so sure I can keep myself balanced in this way much longer.