Writing anything online feels like tendering a gift to a machine. Is it a machine of surveillance, a machine of theft, or something else entirely? The dust hasn’t settled to know for sure; the air is obscured as zeitgeist.

When I run a pen against paper, I feel reasonably assured that my eyes and theirs are, most likely, the exclusive audience. Sure, there’s taking photographs of letters and there’s copying and other methods of mass distribution. Sure. Though I’m not really worried about that, knowing who lives at the address I’m putting on the envelope. Being aware that, despite my settings otherwise, my efforts to string words together will more likely result in some large language model bot devouring my words in the hope of recreating something like it?

I didn’t mind it when at least the random people reading whatever I put out there were, you know, people.

It’s a bit discouraging.

I suspect words are going to be like tables. Pre-industrial revolution, all tables had been fastened and fashioned by human hands. Later, machines enabled mass production and profit motivated cheaper, lower quality tables. Finding ones that were created by a craftsperson became expensive, rare, and something to treasure. “Look!” people will say, “real wood!”

Seas of slop masquerading as sentences are already flooding and flattening the Internet. These large language models effectively turn the rhetorical world into a giant math problem and deliver you the average. No hills, no valleys, just a plateau as far as the eyes can read. People celebrate Washington State for its beauty more than Kansas for a reason; so will be the internet. Many pictures look the same and many sentences sound dry and familiar. The internet was more fun when it was more human.

“Look! Real words!” A letter composed in cursive, a postcard from a friend, the note on the kitchen table: here are the signs of humanity. Many emails, some text messages, most websites that the Google search crawls, the curtain of Google AI that default pops up to block you from the websites it digested… communication that’s distilled through machines.

Why are we here? What is it that we seek when we open our phones, our laptops, e-books and more? For me, it’s often the same thing I seek when I’m sitting on my front porch or pulling a pen out of my desk: connection.

We connect via direct communication to people in our lives.

We connect to our community through news and community groups.

We connect to the broader human experience through books, poetry, movies, and stories.

And here to gobble through it all, are machines. To use it in what way? Exploit for financial gain? Establish ideological loyalties? To catalogue us? To plagiarize? To capitalize on our attention, drown us in noise, make so much stimulation that the quiet feels unbearable??

It pulls me in too; I get it. I’ll look for the long form, the poetry, and the words sent to me by the people I treasure.

And I’ll keep writing here too, despite it all.