the girl from enchilada 🌻🌺

One of the most resourceful and intelligent people I knew has become near addicted to ChatGPT and relies on it for nearly everything.

The person who taught me photography and gifted me my first camera is now using AI to generate images.

One of the most resilient people I know, who packed up as a teenager and immigrated to another country with zero support and got their degree barely knowing any English is now using AI chatbots to make decisions for them.

after getting sober 12 years ago, my father grew very vocal and opinionated and more “himself” (though it was a double-edged sword, and i won’t get into that), and then the ai came and he can barely say more than two sentences from his own mind on his facebook posts now.

my brother, a chemical engineer, honestly can’t tell you if something is ai or not—plus, i’m under the impression that his job utilizes a crap-ton of ai, like every job in existence right now.

before i bailed from there again last month, i started seeing a fair number of baking and science accounts on instagram absolutely praising ai for “streamlining” everything, and i started seeing actual art accounts praising it and utilizing it as well.

sound mysterious? or familiar? it's happening with smartphones rn. i'm gen z and never knew the world without internet or (smart)phones. now that our prefrontal cortices are almost done developing, it seems more and more young people are fed up with the internet. apart from brain-fried junior tech bros (sorry, i'm biased), "generation iphone" pines for offline holidays and analogue journaling. instagram is full of content decrying instagram. & the reason we can't quit is that phones were sold to us as the easiest solution for everything. have your wallet on your phone! have your mail on your phone! your train tickets! your banking! your id! your friends! your hobbies! your job! your controls for your window blinds! how easy! smart! modern!

now that our entire lives are on our phone, DiGiTaL NaTiVeS are fcking sick of phones. and it's impossible to quit because modern life is basically impossible without a smartphone. additionally, the market has swooped in and monetised our attention span beyond the original intentions. cue the explosion of short-form content designed to keep us scrolling eternally. our attention is the currency, and now that that's been utterly fried perfected, the market is moving on: to selling us our attention span back. app blockers, flip phones, digital detox retreats. first we paid to be distracted, which was sold to us as innovation, and now we're paying to get a shred of our abilities back. also sold as ...innovation, somehow. either way, we're paying.

in 10-20 years, everything will be ai-ified. and we’ll feel the repercussions. ai-generated websites everywhere and ai summaries and every app with an unavoidable ai "helper". we won’t be able to synthesise information anymore because we’re not required to sit our butt down and tease out details ourselves. we’ll be so used to being served “this article’s mains points summarised for you” that we’ll complain it's "tOo hArD". and then, the market will move on. i swear with my hand on a holy bible (and i am catholic) there will be some pay-per-device ai designed to filter/block other ai. purchase a license, and it'll block all the in-app ai, the summaries, the ai websites. you will pay money to think again, after you paid money to never think again. it will happen according to the patterns we see now when trying to detach our life from smartphones. and as it was with smartphones, the only people insisting the ai infiltration of daily life is both inevitable and needed are the people trying to sell it to you.

i’ve never been one to doomscroll or hang around on websites for very long, but whenever i read from a physical book, or do something by hand, it feels like a detox. i still have a physical wallet (mainly because it’s a good durable wallet, i’ve had it nearly 15 years and it doesn’t have any wear on it), and i won’t explain it, mainly because i don’t really want to, i want to leave people guessing, but… somehow, by some dark magic, i have actually sincerely managed to get away with not having a smartphone this whole time. i had a “dumb phone” for a while until it died, and the place i used to live in still had a landline, and the phone i have now is my mom’s phone and she and i barely use it (and when we do, it’s for its original purpose: to make phone calls).

i was born in the 90s so i remember life before the internet took off. i remember when the iphone was released and when more and more entities were adamantly insisting for us to go digital. i also remember hearing that electronics are vulnerable to electromagnetic interference, i.e., direct bursts from the sun. i was doing some research last night about gamma ray bursts from stars just to make sure the thought i’ve had in the back of my mind since i was about 14 wasn’t incorrect, and it’s not unheard of with the sun, even though they happen more with larger stars: our sun still shoots out plumes and waves of radiation, especially if the vast amounts of aurorae we’ve been experiencing are anything to go by. i don’t have any idea what’s happening with the sun right now as it seems like every single day we’re seeing aurorae happening and in the most unusual places like colorado (tbh, i don’t think anyone does: if there’s one thing being a science nerd has done for me, it’s that it’s kept me from putting on a tinfoil hat, i’m too much of a skeptic 😅) but this alone should be enough to convince you to not rely on electronics. it definitely has me, my own background notwithstanding.

in fact, you want to know how baked in this is? i have this really distinct memory of taking biology class in 7th grade and right before we were to start the unit on evolution, our teacher actually had us take home a permission slip saying that it’s okay to study this, and again when we started doing dissections. my mom happily signed both (and the latter i understand completely), but it’s always made me trip balls just thinking about how there are actually people out there who don’t believe in darwin’s findings, or that we shouldn’t be studying any of them. i also remember being a little kid into paleontology, reading about and being fascinated with creatures that are millions of years old, and my bible-thumper grandmother wondering why i so “blindly accepted the idea of people finding fossils somewhere when for all (i) knew, they could’ve been planted there”.

(frankly, my issue with ai research is it’s basically frankenstein’s monster at this point, how it’s being abused to the worst extent possible and to the detriment of everything. and the culture surrounding it (shoving it down our throats at every whim when no one consented to it, using it to scrape websites for content) is akin to rape culture.)