Musing and Thoughts (#6): On AI Arranged Words

I hoard words. I'll keep you on the phone for hours. I've filled journals with introspection & self-regulation and chapbooks with mediocre poetry. I text in paragraphs, write love letters, and have written my fair share of erotica - some fantasy, some hopes, some plans for specific object of my obsession at the time. I talk so much.

I hold onto words given to me just as ardently. I ruminate on conversations - with varying degrees of accuracy. I keep birthday cards. I keep short, silly love notes for way too long. I guard the few handwritten love letters I've received. Digitally, I've been known to download the odd whataspp convo, reread texts or whole conversation threads from beginning to end. Your girl loves good ole fashioned queer yearning.

I love long kinky conversations and long conversations about kink. Trading fantasies back and forth, unraveling shared curiosities, commiserating over lifestyle frustrations, and revealing taboo desires is always such a rush. On a deeper level, it's a break from the occasionally isolating aspects of kink. I'm not the only oddball or perv or freak who gets off on something different, dark or a little too specific. It leaves me feeling connected.

That connection is the point for me. That may be why I am so puzzled by the rise of the AI personal and AI-drafted intro. I understand the efficiency argument - tell the word calculator what to write and it writes it. Give the illusion of effort without needing to expend any. Not to mention, we all have our skillsets and not everyone's is words. That version almost makes more sense to me. A more insidious rationale is the use of the bots to organize and clarify your thoughts. You own your thoughts (sometimes anyway). Let them be messy, disjointed and confusing. This need to constantly put on a show and present the most consumable version of yourself at all times brings me down. If you're bored and horny, why pretend? It's the dishonesty of saying whatever you need to say to get what you want.

I'm regularly told my written voice is an exact mirror of the way I speak in real life. For better or worse, this is an intentional choice I make so it may be why I'm so against ai oversight of our intimate casual conversations. How will I know if I've felt a spark if it's not you? Why would I want a plagiarized love letter? (Aside: Incidentally, I have received a plagiarized love letter in the past, though he was copying himself and there's almost a poetry in ripping yourself off in that way. Onanistic love letters have to be the final boss of gooning)

Did I ever show you that book he made me?

White rabbit, New York, it's a fake

He's plagiarised his love letters from some time before

For someone before me

- New York by Ex:re

I've also had my own words taken. Recently someone sent me a message on fetlife to inform me he liked my profile so much he'd copied and pasted a section of it into his own (no attribution of course). Bizarrely, I think that's the final piece of this that I find displeasing. A generation of people who feel that one's words are a collectively owned resource - it doesn't matter what's yours and mine when they all end up a bland slurry produced by the big data center in the sky. This is where it gets nuanced for me because there is so much value in homage and remixing. Good writers always read. But something about a lift and shift of a bio feels so icky to me.

I guess I'm just an old lady yelling at clouds.