You can pry my em dash out of my cold, dead fucking hands.
I'm not surrendering to the AI slop and neither should you.
I have a complicated relationship with AI.
It’s an occupational hazard for me to not understand it, not know how to use it at work, and not consider its implications for us professionally and societally. But I’m also fucking tired of wading through oceans of dreck on the internet churned out by some fuckstick with a keyboard and a side hustle slinging shitty courses about how to sell courses.
But I never, ever fucking use it for writing. Because the craft is the fucking point.
Writing is hard. Messy. The torture of trying to find the right words or sitting and staring at a blank page isn’t the obstacle, it’s the purpose.
And see what I did there? I used the dreaded fucking “It’s not X, it’s Y” sentence structure that writers have been using for generations and I refuse to capitulate and let the robots have that any more than they can have my em dash because my ADHD brain loves a parenthetical.
Art is resistance. It always has been.
And in my mind, writing is fucking resistance including using all of the phrasing rhythms, all of the punctuation, all of the literary devices that AI is fucking famous for regurgitating because it learned those things from fucking writers.
I’m not going to nerf my writing style or abandon perfectly useful prose and mechanics because some bitch boy with a god complex decided his robots should chew up and spit out books.
Every fucking week on Beyonce’s internet I get some chode with a basement apartment and a Corolla with no spare tire telling me I’m using AI to write.
Chad, just because people write better than you and use complete sentences and understand words with more than two syllables doesn’t mean the writing came from a fucking machine. I’m really sorry that your limited fucking world view has meant you’ve never read anything more structurally and literarily complex than the ESPN sports ticker, but the rest of us are out here expanding our minds and shit so please go pick up your thrifted Vinyard Vines from the cleaners and leave us the fuck alone.
AND ALSO.
While I’m hollering at people, I will also not be taking fucking criticism from people who rage at anyone who so much as touches an AI tool. The discourse about Hank Green this week has me in a froth because this is, by all accounts, a man who is smart and reasoned and contributes so much good to people and the world, and people fucking eviscerated him because he talked about using LLMs for research, realized how often they were wrong and inaccurate, committed to changing his habits and being more mindful, and people still couldn’t fucking accept any of it.
(Our reductive inability to actually see and accept accountability and apology in a cancel culture world is a different post entirely, we’ll get there).
There are very fucking real ethical and environmental concerns about AI that require people to raise them, address them, and throttle the companies building it in reasonable ways so that people in small towns don’t have to live next to acres of high-pitched, mind-breaking data centers that could fucking be cooled by means other than water but whose billionaire fuck boy sociopath owners simply won’t spend the money to do so.
But it’s also positively accelerating scientific research, advancing severe weather warning systems (ironically as climate change rips across our planet), restoring quality of life and accessibility for humans…it’s simply not a black and white equation as most significant technological advancements ever are.
I used to say about social media that the tech itself is inert, it’s human behavior that makes it moral or not. It’s fucking exhausting to be a person who thinks in public and refuses to perform certainty for either the “AI EVIL” or the “AI SAVIOR” side of the argument. I’m fucking tired of the way "AI is coming for your job" gets said by the same people setting the policy that makes it true, and the way the industry sells inevitability instead of like a decision people are actively fucking making every day.
So I’m not going to fucking pick a side. I’m going to sit in the messy, complicated fucking discomfort of being a writer who writes from my own hands on keyboards and ink-stained fingers in notebooks (yes I still fucking use pens, fountain pens even) and who is surrounded by Becky and her shitty AI-generated novel but will keep writing anyway because that’s what I fucking do and my audience isn’t a bunch of clowns who would fall for that unimaginative, lowest-common-denominator word detritus anyway.
Most things worth thinking about are fucking hard, nuanced, and complicated. Hell, I am fucking hard, nuanced, and complicated. So you can pry my em dash out of my cold, dead hands while I use Claude to remind me to fucking take my medication and water my plants and rebalance my 401K.
I’m going to write more words now, fuckers. With my own damn brain. Go do something productive.