AIdentity Crisis

Honesty. The ability to lay yourself bare in an appealing way that doesn’t get too cringey— is an art. The skill of translating emotion into words that pave a tiny highway into people’s hearts is earned through pain. And living to tell the tale.

But I have to be real with you. I wonder if it’s worth anything anymore. Do people even have the desire, or the ability to focus on something for more than a minute these days? Me included. Has AI slop cranked the brainrot up to such a terrifying temperature our ability to care is being singed from our brains? Suffice to say, I’ve been asking myself a lot of big questions.

I grew up reading. A lot. I studied theatre. Shakespeare. Musical theatre. Fucking opera. Stuff that was only relevant literally hundreds of years ago. I was primed for a longer attention span. Convinced old, meant good. Dense and complicated, better. But here I am. Focusing on things for as long as it takes me to do the NYT mini crossword. And yeah, that was a mini flex. Under a minute. I can do most of them in under a minute. * Hair toss.*

My mind wanders more than it ever has. Some days, I spend every spare minute lying on a heating pad as the sun shines through my window. I choose to wince through the sun’s rays because I’m too listless to pull the shade down.

What I’m trying to say is, as a copywriter, LinkedIn is bumming me the fuck out. I used to go there to check out what awards my brilliant classmates were winning or what that weird pale guy I met one time at a theatre workshop was up to. Now it gives me more dread than Instagram, Facebook, and X combined. All because of two little letters:

AI.

LinkedIn doom scrolling and non-sequiturs. Lateral thought and weird twists. These are things AI can’t do. Yet. At least it can’t do it well, yet. At least this is what I tell myself as I pour over the only kind of LinkedIn content anyone will write anymore: AI dread porn.

"ADVERTISING IS OVER! AND OTHER TRUTHS TO PROGRAM INTO YOUR AI BUTLER."

"DO COPYWRITERS DESERVE JOBS?"

"HOW TO WEAN YOURSELF OFF EM DASHES LEST YOU BE ACCUSED OF GOING TO THE AI DARK SIDE."

"HOW TO MAKE YOUR PROMPTS PROMPTIER YOU LITTLE PROMPT SUB."

"WISH YOU DECIDED TO BE A THERAPIST NOW, DON’T CHA YA, YOU LITTLE DUMBASS FREAK!"

The tenor is…at a ten. It’s tense out there in those LinekdIn streets. * Deep cleansing breath *

This is a time for glass analysis. How full? How empty? Does the glass even matter in this day and age. These times reveal what we’re really made of. What kind of person you are. Deep down. Dread addict or hopeful honey? I teeter between the two depending on my caffeine levels.

I used to go to LinkedIn for satire. But now it’s all AI slop or sloppy takes on AI’s complete and inevitable takeover of creative fields. You might be thinking, Gab, maybe you should…just get off LinkedIn for a bit? Which tbh, is excellent advice, cutie.

One thing I’m pretty good at is watching from the outside. Many of us third children are. We’re able to look for trends and different ways of being and not being, just by looking at those around us. I’d love to make an uneducated prophecy about the future of writers and/or the positives of AI integrating into the process but fuck, I have no clue. This youngest daughter is fresh out of hot takes. I never thought I’d see the day. No, you’re the petulant one! Sorry, guess I’m feeling a little triggered.

Not to mention, I am extremely jealous that these AI robot overlords don’t have to deal with things we do like anxiety, depression, hunger, bodily functions, parental responsibilities, lack of inspiration, sleeplessness, or listlessness just to name a few. It’s not a fair race. Many men can now start to fathom a teensy bit of the inequality women have faced for millennia.

Not to make this a gendered thing especially since AI is ineffable. And un-effable...I think.

To create space between myself and the tech world I think back to my acting days, when I had to learn lines. I didn’t have a photographic memory like some of my friends. Or any kind of smart system to speed the process along. I just simply read those lines over. And over. And over again. Then I’d Look out the window and watch happy people doing fun things and wonder why I chose this isolating godforsaken profession in the first place. Then I’d go back and write out those lines over. And over. And over again. And then I’d cry over. And over. And over again. Then I’d go back to step one and repeat until they were more or less memorized. And when I was an opera singer the process looked pretty much the same just with more singing and weirder facial expressions.

What I’m trying to say is, I like slow processes. And struggle. And human fallability. We. Are. So. Weird. And. Imperfect. There is a beautiful, yet low-grade feeling you get when you repeat things. And a bafflement when you do something so many times and still somehow get it wrong. A computer could ne-ver. I can’t call the feeling joy or pain but it’s something satisfyingly in the middle. There’s a wistfulness in knowing you can’t get to the end goal in one day or even three. And a poignancy to dedicating your time to effort. There’s something longingly poetic about it. Or maybe I’m just a masochist. Who fucken knows anything anymore.

The further we get down this technological rabbit hole the more I fear my irrelevance. And all those spiky, icky feelings pop up. Am I good enough? What does the future look like? Should I go on a deep dive into AI capabilities and "Super Smart and Effective, Never-Fail Uber Prompts for Kick Ass Copy”.

I oscilate between apathy and alarm. Clearly.

And because I’m human, I know feelings aren’t facts, so I chalk these thoughts up to neuroses. And yet, the robot take over is making me so much more attuned to genuine humanity. Struggle. Honesty. Because you can’t fake connection or that indescribable pull towards something or someone for no reason other than…I wanna. There is mundane, human beauty in so many things. I experience it when I hear Ruth’s footsteps running across the small stretch of floor between our rooms right before she jumps on me first thing in the morning. I feel it when the air in her room somehow changes frequency the second she falls asleep. And I can taste it in the cookies baked by a friend. The hum of care and rawness reverberates through me. It’s out there if I slow down enough to feel it. My inner weathervane now points to whatever direction the real stuff flows. If I become obsolete at least I know these simple joys. One for Gabbie. Zero for computers that don’t know or care I’m keeping score.   

Last week I closed my eyes at 5pm and opened them at 6pm. A nap? No. Impossible. I’m not someone who does that. And yet…something is shifting inside me. For better or worse.

I’m feeling very woo-woo about it all but I’ll always be a bit of a shit head. Don’t worry, I’m not lying down and admitting defeat. That would be too easy. Too…not human. I’m always sharpening my skills because I’m not gonna be taken down by a fucking robot. Not easily, at least. Who am I the guy from Ex Machina?

I will admit. There have also been some positives. It’s the best thesaurus a copywriter could ask for. Every stupid question I ask? It has the answer. It can give me quick responses when I'm ideating or avenues to go down once I come up with an idea. It's made me faster in some ways. If faster is the goal, then, good I guess. My margin for error has shrunk. My eyes are better at proofreading because you bet your butt those robots wouldn’t let that shit slide. But I will leave one or two in for antiquity and easter egg hunting. It is making me better in small and weird ways. Worse in others.

I wish I knew where all this was going to lead but there’s no way to predict the future, even if you ask ChatGPT. It gets lots of stuff wrong. Silly robot, maybe it’s more human than we think, after all.

Basically, I’m just a woman, standing in front of a robot, asking it to not make her obsolete. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always excited footsteps in the morning, audacious wind, and coffee in bed.