When I first read this article, admittedly, I didn’t really catch anything too weird. There was definitely a logical flow to the writing, but in terms of actual content? I’m not a good judge. I didn’t touch computer science, or any STEM-adjacent subject, after leaving high school. What I could judge, though, is whether or not the AI could take my job.
For the past two years or so, I’ve been writing flash nonfiction for my TinyLetter, Happy Friday. My buddy Ganesh did me the favor and fed the machine my past entries. So, here are three Happy Friday entries that we can now compare against my archive of past emails.
Here is the first entry. I took the liberty of formatting the text as I usually would:
Happy Friday! | The new me.
I was in a cab when the driver asked me where I was from. I told him I was from Brazil, and he asked me if I had ever been to New York. I said no, but that I had been to London. “Oh, well then you’re not really from Brazil,” he said. “You’re from London.” I had been living in London for the past two years, and it was the first time in my life I had been called Brazilian. Not American. Not Portuguese-American. Not Brazilian-American. Just Brazilian. It was a strange experience, but it also filled me with a sense of pride. I am Brazilian. I can be proud of my nationality, and I can be proud of the fact that my family is from Brazil. I’m back in the United States now, and I realize how much of myself I had lost when I left Brazil for London. My identity, my culture, my language, my self-worth. But then again, maybe it’s just me who feels this way. Maybe it’s just me who’s lost touch with reality and the present moment, because there are moments when I feel like a completely different person than who I was just six months ago. Maybe it’s just me, who is still trying to figure out who I am and where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. ✨
My favorite character is this oddly omniscient cab driver. My favorite line, by far, is Not Portuguese-American. My favorite mystery is how the heck I wound up in London, of all cities, when I mention New Haven in two previous emails. But jokes aside, the AI definitely captured my pedantic rhythm. Makes me want to be a little more glib and less like a try-hard “oh, woe is the diasporic subject” kind of writer. The entries also make me realize, in a bad way, how much my writing style takes after my thesis adviser’s work, in a pretty funny way. Because yeah, I’m the kind of person who can get so deep in thought that I sound like a fool.
The next entry pegs me, accurately, for a stupid romantic:
Happy Friday! | The love of my life.
When I was little, I loved the idea of falling in love. It was a romance novel that taught me the word, and it was a romance novel that taught me to believe in love at first sight. I dreamed of having a boyfriend and being swept off my feet by his charm. In high school, I had crushes on boys and girls, and I wanted to tell them all about how special they were to me. But I wasn’t special to them, and if they did like me back, it was only because they liked someone who wasn’t there. They liked the idea of me because I was cute or smart or fun to hang out with.
I wasn’t special to them, but then again, no one is special to anyone else. Not really. We’re all just people who are attracted to each other based on how we see each other, not for who we really are. The pretty girl with the pretty eyelashes is beautiful because she sees herself as beautiful. She is kind because she sees herself as kind. Everyone has their own flaws that they ignore in themselves and exaggerate in others; everyone has their own beauty that they cover up with makeup or clothes or self-deprecation; everyone has their own strengths that they cover up with insecurity or pride; everyone has their own weaknesses that they cover up with confidence or indifference. And we all fall in love with someone else’s idea of us, which means we can never be loved back for real. ✨
lmao. This entry is a wonderful caricature for this email that I sent out in late February. Call it inspiration by Valentine’s Day blues. A bit depressing, too, is the line [it] was a romance novel that taught me the word [love]. Learning about love from a book? Dang, that kinda blows.
This entry makes it even more apparent, at least to me, that although the AI can make fun of me, it’s missing some of the logical leaps I take in my writing. I may simply be trying to make myself feel better at this point, but don’t worry! No one is special to anyone else. Not really.
Now for the last entry:
Happy Friday! | A place to call home.
I have this recurring dream. I’m walking through the streets of a city I don’t know. I’m lost. It’s a big city, and it’s dark, and I’m walking down the middle of the street, because that’s where the street lights are. I’m looking for a place to call home. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had a home, but it feels like a long time. And I want to find one again, so I keep walking and walking until I find someplace that feels like home.
And it’s hard to find a place like that, because in my dream, there are no people around. There’s just me and the city and the street lights and the buildings. But I keep walking until finally I find a building that feels like home. It’s a nice building. It’s not too big, not too small. It’s just the right size. It has windows and a door and a roof and everything that makes a building a home. I walk inside and I’m so happy. I know that this is my home, and I am happy to have found it.
And then, the next day, when I wake up, I can’t remember where my home is. And it’s hard to find again. And so I’m always looking for my home in my dreams. ✨
Another beautiful caricature of this entry mashed up with this one. It’s another excellent example of diasporic blues, mixed with the white-writer cliche of writing aimlessly about dreams. Silly, silly me. But what’s kinda funny about the dream genre — there is a logic to dreams, and to creative writing in general. And these entries, generally, don’t have it.
Going line by line, these pieces, although they match my sentence length, rhythm, and subject matter pretty closely, contain basic “plot” level details that I normally wouldn’t include. This third entry is a good example. In the rationale of this dream, about searching for home, why would the lack of people on the streets make it hard for “me” to find it? It’s the kind of detail that, for writing this short, would have to add up or count towards something at the end. And thus, overall — the endings of these entries are weaker. But maybe I’m just trying to be fancy about it all.
The little voice in my head, at this point, wants to say that what makes my writing special is my soul, but that’s a cop-out. If I’m gonna make a big rhetorical leap here, I think what makes my writing different is trust and sympathy. Trust that the details I give will matter at the end of the reading. Sympathy because you know that my writing, although it has trends, will change. So no, I don’t think today is the day the AI takes my job. But it certainly is the day that AI can pretty accurately throw shade on who I was before.
