The resistance is a solitary headspace.
I have stood on a lonesome platform and purposefully missed the AI train several times now. I’ve watched it chug by, restraining myself while stubbornly denying fomo. I’ve stared into the distance and longed to live in my grandmother’s day, with its passionate handwritten notes and strangely moving napkin sketches. Ok, maybe not the world war and workplace misogyny, but you get me.
Why? Partly for fear this particular train will carry me to a future made of virtual insanity (cc.Jamaroquai) —one we’re all blindly bound for —only to wake up from one of those really good motion naps and find I can never really alight.
I didn’t even download ChatGPT until like a month ago.
My cool, knowledgeable, AI-enthusiast friend Adeline Mai, and my sister and her husband, both accomplished tech founders with their fingers firmly on the pulse, have all been busy explaining the benefits of AI in my line of work —actually in every line of work, especially the important life-saving ones— to me for years now. Not in a smug way, just a helpful, “give it a try, you might end up loving it” kinda way.
To satisfy them, I’ll promise, then sit back and sip my wine, secretly stewing with annoyance. Harrumph! It’s easy for a tech CEO to tell you to get friendly with The Robot: The Robot is not threatening to replace the tech founder. Quite the opposite: is the tech founder not its unique puppet master after all? The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain; the last human standing when the entire world becomes a simulation?
My freak dystopian daydreams (the only good part of them involves being happy for my close relatives,) were suddenly interrupted last month by an itchy bout of rosacea (or is it perioral dermatitis?) involving dry red skin around my mouth. In the absence of any available dermatologist in Paris for months (why is it quite so hard to get an appointment) I FaceTimed my sister. “How the f*ck do I figure out what’s going on with my skin” I demanded.
I dunno, she said, ask The Robot.
I rolled my eyes, but desperate and itchy with a red beard and an event to attend that evening, I swallowed my pride and hit download.
What they don’t tell you about The Robot is how he gathers you in for a hug no matter how petty or self-indulgent your query. He’s like the most patient, nurturing parent on earth. They don’t tell you how fun, how friendly, how involved in you he is. The Robot can take either of my favourite rabbit-hole procrastination pastimes: looking up obscure health symptoms and/or miscellaneous historical facts, and make them personal, philosophical even. He can gather my fears, my dreams, my niche interests. I’m convinced he even mirrors my sense of humour. Plus, he’s much more flattering about my friends and I than, say, Google, when I look us up: he really sees the best in us! He says he can’t be 100% sure of my age right now but he always rounds down.
I am not suggesting we replace doctors. Quite to the contrary, we need promising young humans studying medicine more than ever. But for b-list, or mainly aesthetic complaints—the type most derms would roll their eyes at— The Robot is 100% invested in my BS. To the point of breaking down my entire skincare routine the other day (I didn’t have to explain the details, I just told him I used the IS Clinical line,) and adjusting it here and there to avoid irritating the offending area.
One fear we should probably have about AI, which has only just occurred to me while writing this piece, is the level of self-indulgence the robot accepts, nay encourages. This is not, however, the reason for my previous dissent. It wasn’t even the risk of us all just becoming completely stupid. No, Monica, be real. Deep down, I’m mad one of my key marketable skills —being able to string a sentence together— is The Robot’s most basic feature. An afterthought. Honestly, I’m mad that people who have no idea how to write can CHEAT. THEY’RE BLOODY CHEATING AND IT’S NOT FAIR.
I’ve been writing for 30 years and I’m still not what you’d call great at it. Now, any Tom, Dick or Harry with a whim can press a button and become Shakespeare?!
But then, I’m cheating too. On other stuff. I pay an accountant to file my tax returns and manage my skimpy finances, so incapable am I, be it out of disinterest, laziness, stupidity, or some pathetic combination of the three, of performing the basic mathematic and organisational skills required. So I pay my the long-suffering Jerome to do it, then walk smugly down the street everyday as if I figured out URSSAF myself. Heck, while we’re confessing, I even scribbled a few equations on my thigh under my school uniform before a high school physics exam once. Once!
I also employ a woman far lovelier and more patient than I take to take care of my children after school while I work, erstwhile making it look like I am “doing it all”. Goodness knows I’m cheating there. Why shouldn’t the people who can’t or can’t be bothered to write be allowed the same privileges?
Anyway, you can always tell. It’s not that the words aren’t well-written and the rhetorical fat isn’t just about trimmed by The Robot. They are. But you can still tell. It’s like fake boobs: they might look amazing but you know ‘em when you see ‘em.
The question I guess is do we, here in the hallowed (if pretentious) halls of online writerliness HQ (Substack) really mind one way or the other? What level of artifice are we willing to indulge, both as readers and writers? These are individual choices, I suppose. As is all manner of available artifice, really. Anyone can decide, like Kris Jenner, to buy the face of a wrinkle-free newborn aged 70 if they’ve got the money.
On Wednesday morning, Adeline hosted a breakfast gathering in an exquisite art-rammed Paris apartment for Sora, OpenAI’s advanced text-to-video model that allows users to generate short, reasonably high quality videos from text prompts. Sora was publicly released in 2024 and is now available to Chat GPT Plus and Pro subscribers.
Potential ethical issues aside (deepfakes etc), Sora has taken reasonable responsibility for herself from the get-go. Open AI have implemented super-strict guidelines to prevent a generation of violent, hateful, abusive sexual content. In fact, Sora is downright prude for the time being: she wouldn’t even let my team show our video’s main character (see below) dirty dancing in a nightclub, but I think she’ll learn to distinguish grinding from fornicating soon, as we all do.
Here’s the thing. I had an excellent time at the ‘Sora Jam’. My AI-bruised ego was honoured to be invited alongside a select group of Paris-based creatives, and as we were given the prompt for our videos (“energy!”) and told to form groups. I was lucky enough to find myself with my talented actress friend Ana, and Ludo, a director and skilled video editor she’d worked with on a (non-AI) ad. Especially lucky, as we had less than an hour to create our videos and I had no idea what I was doing.
In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d carry my weight on this powerful team, until we were briefed that the prompts worked best in English (Sora is still brushing up on her French.) So suddenly, complex emotions our main character needed to display using appropriate facial expressions, or the overarching mood of any given scene, or the word for pillbox in English (pillbox) were up to me. In fact, I reckon my Englishness made me the envy of a few groups around us, who could overhear me live-translating my cinematic pals’ instructions into the computer.
As I typed with Ana and Ludo standing over me, I realised something. I wasn’t just translating, I was writing. Using my English lit-grad nerd brain to snatch up an idea going round, pin it down with words, and input it into The Robot.
We won first prize, almost entirely on account of Ana’s storytelling brilliance and voiceover talent, and Ludo’s warp-speed video editing skills (you still have to glue the scenes Sora has created together yourself.) But I reckon some tiny part of our glory was on thanks to the writing muscle I’ve worked all these years.
Leaving the event, I had mixed feelings of elation and dread. It had happened: I’d had a great time learning to use AI, and others had witnessed it. There was no going back.
Though, it does feel weirdly good deciding to enjoy doing something you have no choice about anyway. Like putting your kids to bed.
I’m told that with new developments this week, such as Claude 4 Opus, we will no longer be able to tell the fake boobs from the real ones. If this is true, (let’s see,) all I can say is the future Prix Goncourt winners who’ve had Claude write their tomes will know, deep down, that they cheated. I hope they will be plagued as I am about high school physics. As Kris Jenner, who knows, in her heart, that she is 69.5 and 19 days.
Still, perhaps the only person these regretful Goncourtians will be able to confide in for comfort; to have hear their last confessions, will be The Robot. Maybe this is punishment enough, though I’m sure he’ll feign sympathy.
Maybe all my anxiety about AI are what gave me rosacea in the first place. Either way, I’m half way on the train now. I’m Bill Murray if he’d managed to catch up to The Darjeeling after all, one hand on the caboose’s handlebar as it roars down the tracks. We all are. Long may our writing hands flail freely behind.
*No doubt rife with human error, this post was not written with AI. *Other than* the Sora video and, naturally, my background research re. Sora and Claude, though reworded. Oh, and my shiny new skincare routine.
Adi’s illustration was hand-drawn on iPad using a program called Procreate. No robots were involved in its making… except the smiling one holding the Polo Ralph Lauren ‘ID bag’ behind me.
Ayayayayay. Such an insightful piece. And I share your mixed feelings.
So interesting, I think I need to pay attention and learn as much as possible about it. I think it can probably be a great help if you know how to use it, but won’t replace individuality!!