I don’t think I’m old—I’m a young Gen Xer, depending on how you count out the years, and, more importantly, I am by no means a Luddite. I have a phone that is far more intelligent than I am. I have a proper computer. I drive a car that communicates with my phone in waves beyond my comprehension. I understand that the youth must unironically find communion with each other on the app called Discord. I am savvy in the ways of the self-checkout aisle. I spend a lot of time on the app formerly known as Twitter. I can face down the occasional QR code without screaming at anyone. I am just as able to read a book on Kindle as if it were a pile of papers in my hand, but, hear me out…
It’s probably time for me to kick off this mortal coil. I feel the end has basically come. Stick a fork in it.
Why? You must surely be asking yourself. What could cause this sudden demise of a substacker we love so much?
Well, because I am unwilling to learn even one wretched thing about AI. I have reached my limit. That stuff is dark and crazy. I can’t even begin to experiment with it or even know what it is or even how it works.
The thing that freaks me out is that I don’t know what is true and what is false about what people are saying about it. I saw somewhere that some AI situations were spitting out complete nonsense. And then somewhere else, I saw that if you tried to get whatever it is that delivers this stuff up to give you a “white person” it would not, no matter how hard you tried. If you put in something like “medieval knight” it gave you a girl boss person of color.
Just as an aside, if you type “knight” into the Substack AI images option, this is one of the images that comes up, heh:
I guess this would be a really important moment to clarify that I don’t in any way feel like dying. I am not depressed. I am not even sad. What I am is completely unwilling to learn anything about this new technology. It’s not that death is absolutely preferable to having to use Google Gemini or Chat GPT, it’s that I’m prepared to dig my heels in as far as they will go.
And yet, even with all my resistance at the ready, yesterday, I was trying to search for something on the browser I am inexplicably using—Microsoft Edge, I know, I don’t know why—and instead of it just giving me a lot of search options, this big gray box came up in which was a sort of generic block of text masquerading as information I wished to receive. Except that I did not desire a big gray box of random, substantiated “information.” I wanted to read articles written by sentient human beings with names I could link, should I desire to lean intellectually upon the content for which I was searching. I had to click several times to get away from the gray text box to see if there were any articles associated with the subject of my inquiry. It was not the first time it had happened. For the last two weeks, getting past that gray box has occupied some substantial amount of my emotional energy.
At the same time, I’m almost done reading Friedman’s Fables. No lie, it is an unnerving, if not uncanny kind of book. If you thought you had insight into the human person, Friedman illustrates that you don’t even know an eighth of it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Demotivations With Anne to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.