Go fuck yourself, smart guy

Someone asked if I could tell ChatGPT was changing my voice

“The Fingerbanger” Michael Korman (🎹) left this comment on my “I want to look smart” post:

“I’m curious to know whether you could sense back then the difference in tone that ChatGPT was putting into the writing, or if it only became clear in hindsight, after you had some distance from it. How did that play out over time?”

I don’t think I really picked up on the difference in “tone.” I think I liked how it made me sound like a “writer.” Which is clearly a fucking red flag I should have noticed… writing that is aware of itself is fucking off-putting. Like “go fuck yourself, smart guy.”

It wasn’t like I just took the first thing it gave me. I went back and forth and tried to make it “sound like me.” I was legit excited to have found what I thought was a solution to this nagging sense that I was good at ideas but not good at writing. I definitely abandoned it out of nowhere after a pretty good run… so I must have had some sense that something was wrong. But I wasn’t losing sleep over it.

It became most apparent recently when I started handwriting in a notebook and just telling stories… going back through my life and describing shit I’ve done. Projects, relationships, businesses, random weird shit. I realized my natural voice doesn’t attempt to interpret events or make meaning of things… not for me or the reader.

I don’t try to wrap things up or make it easy to understand. I don’t pretend to have stuff figured out. I don’t write from “above” it. I write from in it. More like gonzo journalism, maybe? No linear chain of thought.

And it’s so much funnier without the interpretation. Which is still the most important thing to me… funny. Not helpful, not inspiring, not insightful, not authentic. Fuck all of that shit. Funny or die.

I also felt guilty… like I lied? My memory of things isn’t as clear as those posts sound. I literally haven’t read the ChatGPT-shaped posts in full. I can’t. I’ve skimmed them and I just want to run away.

So the “answer” is: even if I did sense the difference in tone, I was too excited that I’d found something to help me write how I thought I should be writing. And once I had that “solution,” I was just cranking out content — posts, “essays” (I hate that I even called them that, for fucks sake, man) — instead of doing the real exploratory shit that kinda sucks but results in more interesting ideas and details.

The notebook and a couple weeks of writing gave me enough material to see what I actually sound like. And it reminded me how important the specific, unexpected details are… the shit you can’t plan. It’s way cooler when you can tell the creator surprised themselves. That doesn’t happen when someone has a planned insight they want to make.

I’ve been looking at content lately and I can’t remember the last time I saw something that made me stop and think “this is fucking cool” or “I never thought about it like that.” It’s all garbage. Maybe that’s why I’m posting again. I can’t just sit there thinking about how shitty it all is without doing something.

Who fucking knows. Thanks for the question, dude.