dear miss. madhatter,

The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You.

The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You.

“Do you know how much thinking and feeling I’ve done? It’s terrible. And nothing’s come of it.”

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something. […] More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”