for_real raze i've spent most of my life reaching out to people and feeling my fingers close around air. once in a great while someone will buck the trend and reach back. but in many ways it's been a deep dive into disappointment and loneliness. this desire to make a meaningful connection has never really gone away. i guess it's just the way i'm wired. i don't want to exchange pleasantries and empty platitudes. i want to know what the indigo bunting sings from its perch atop the birdhouse_in_your_soul. about a month ago i landed on a software engineer's blog while staggering down the information superhighway. he wrote some things that resonated with me. mainly about the internet, and a longing for small communities fuelled by meaning and vulnerability. i was getting ready to send him an email when i felt a funny tickle in the back of my brain. something about the way his posts were put together gave me pause. then it clicked. i've poked at chatgpt enough to recognize its tone and the way it structures sentences and starts to repeat itself in a very specific way after a while. this was that. and there was no effort being made to hide it. there's some pretty incredible irony in allowing a neural network to speak in your stead about how much you miss the days when the online world felt more human. a different kind of person would have laughed at that discovery. i wanted to put my fist through the computer screen. my_animal_heart threw back its epicardial fat pads and howled. i'm not going to pretend i've never messed around with an ai image generator or had a ridiculous late_night conversation with the hilariously inept and poorly-named cleverbot. i can understand people using claude for coding assistance. what i can't wrap my head around is someone willingly surrendering their voice and allowing a bunch of artificial neurons to be their brain. but this is the world we live in now. today we have actors and writers and entire bands that are inventions of technology gone wrong. they don't exist. they were stitched together by machines from data sets and statistical probabilities. and almost no one can tell the difference between the synthetic ghosts and the real thing anymore. there are places i've stopped visiting because all the worthwhile content has been replaced by ai slop. the general attitude seems to be, "ai is coming for everything, so you might as well embrace it if you don't want to get left behind." i would rather stand alone at the side of the road choking on dust. ai might be able to write you a catchy tune. it won't give you the sound of untrimmed fingernails clipping piano keys. or a singer who swears mid-song after stubbing his toes on a mic stand. or any of the all-important imperfections that make us more than just a mass of mindless automatons. it won't fall behind the beat or belch at the end of a ballad. there are no accidents. without accidents there can be no surprises. and if we're no longer interested in being surprised, why the fuck are we even here? i don't think i've ever been more grateful for this place, where our words are always and only ever our own. where battered faith and frailty can lock eyes across a quiet room and feel no shame for what they are. where our chosen names are not masks, but the bone behind the soft tissue that binds us. 260706 what's it to you? who go blather from