Have we lost our damn minds?

This morning I saw a Note that said a robot just ran the fastest 100 meters in history and the seats in the arena were mostly empty. People aren’t interested, it said, they find it creepy. It imitates human achievement but lacks all its inner meaning.

This isn’t another post about AI, so you know. But also?

You should click the link and watch it. He’s right. It’s creepy as hell.

But I had to wonder, are we only not interested when the robots actually look like robots? Because, remember Arnold as the Terminator? He wasn’t so creepy as a buffed dude until the skin got peeled back and you saw what was under it.

Here’s a stupid thing I read. I won’t link it and if you know who it is, don’t say it, okay? Because my rule here is no finger pointing. That’s the worst of humanity and we don’t do that here. We talk about behavior, without a side order of naming and shaming.

Someone wrote a scathing post about the watermarking that’s coming to AI. She’s so angry. So angry. She said once the watermarking is happening, if you write an article and paste it into AI to edit or proofread, it will watermark the whole thing.

Omfg, it will just TAKE your words and claim them. How wrong is that? I actually laughed. Yeah. Tell that to all the people whose words were just taken by AI.

Tell that to all the writers whose words were just taken without permission.

Tell that to the artists and illustrators whose art was taken.

And the musicians, and photographers.

No one was given any choice.

We live in a world where billionaires take what they want and we decide what right and wrong based on our own feelings and maybe even whether it’s useful to us.

Then she said look, she uses AI. Because frankly, she has a job and a family and if not for AI, she wouldn’t have time to write. AI is what makes her writing possible. That’s when I closed the tab and stopped reading. Tell that to every writer from the beginning of time. Think they didn’t have jobs and families?

T.S. Eliot worked as a bank clerk at Lloyds in London before his writing took off. Maya Angelou was a street car conductor. Margaret Atwood was a cashier. John Grisham was a plumber. Octavia Butler was a potato chip inspector. So yeah, spare me.

Maybe if you don’t have time to write, writing isn’t a priority? I know, what a radical thing to say but before AI, writers used to write in the wee hours before the family got up or at midnight after they went to bed. Because it mattered that much to them.

Here’s three things I wanted to tell that person but I didn’t bother.

Number one. If you find it offensive that AI would take your words, that you wrote, maybe you shouldn’t be using a tool that did the same to other people, yeah?

Number two. If you don’t want AI to watermark your words, don’t feed them into AI. At least YOU get the option. All the people AI stole from didn’t get that option.

Number three. Most people don’t actually want to watch robots racing.

Here’s another one. A while ago, I ran across a post talking about why writers don’t have more paid subscribers. All the things we do wrong. So I read through the list and noted all the stuff I haven’t done. I have no paid perks listed on the new perks page. I have no upsells. I have no pitch. I have no downloads, no bonus stuff, no nothing.

For a long time, I really beat myself up for that. Told myself I NEED to make the time to do that stuff. Add perks for paid members, some bonus content, blah blah blah.

Here’s what dawned on me out of the blue.

I have paid memberships to ten writers on Substack. If I earned more here, I’d put it right back into more. But you know what the funny thing is?

The people I pay don’t have that shit either.

And that’s not why I pay them.

I don’t pay them because of the special perks and downloads they offer. I pay them because I love what they write, which is to say I love how they think and how they translate those thoughts into words that move me and make me think and feel.

I pay them because I want them to be here a year from now. I pay them because I don’t ever want to see them write a post saying they have to leave Substack to go get another job to make ends meet. Their writing matters. That’s it. Only reason I pay.

Their writing matters to me. It’s the only reason I sign up for paid subscriptions. Which is to say the writer matters. I care that they earn enough to keep writing.

And when people sign up for a paid membership to my Substack, you know what they say? Oddly, the same exact things. They tell me they’re signing up for paid because my words matter to them. Because they want me here a year from now, because I inspire them or they like the way I think or my writing is worth paying for.

So why the hell am I stressed out about the perks and bonuses I’m not offering when those aren’t why I am paying the writers I am paying? Oh wait. Because someone who gets all their views by pointing out what writers are doing wrong said so? Ugh.

And look, I get it. There are people who make their income telling people how to make money or make their income teaching something. How to play a guitar or how to draw sewing patterns or how to use AI or whatever. We don’t all have to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with saying I write for a living. It’s not “the” oldest profession, lol, but it’s right up there. People have been writing for a living forever. And you know what the perk is? You get is knowing you are helping them build a life in writing.

Charles Dickens first published Great Expectations in 36 parts. Like little chapbooks but they called them serial parts. Know what the perk was? The perk was if you paid to read them, he’d keep writing. And people kept paying and eventually all those parts were compiled into a book and he became an author that we all remember.

You know?

Which isn’t to say I might not add perks or bonuses, because I might.

But now I look at it differently.

I won’t fall in love with someone because he gave me flowers. But if I already love him to the ends of the earth and he brings me my favorite flowers — oh, Lord, my heart. That’s how I look at it now. If you love me, one day I’ll surprise you with flowers.

A few days ago, I saw a Note that was a lovely image containing this quote:

Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms… Jorge Luis Borges

It’s lovely, isn’t it?

Borges didn’t write that.

It’s not in any of his work despite that a ton of websites credit those words to him. Even Goodreads credits that sentence to him. But it’s not in any of his work. So I pasted the sentence into Google and Gemini told me it’s by Jorge Luis Borges.

So I typed back a question — Okay, what’s the source, then?

Gemini said the source can’t be verified, it’s a paraphrase of his core philosophies. I laughed out loud. Doesn’t that just define AI writing perfectly? Those aren’t your words, they’re just a paraphrase of your philosophies. Good one, Gemmy.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve all just collectively lost our minds.

I mean, think about it. We hate AI but can’t tell what’s AI so we want a tool to tell us because we don’t want to watch robots racing. We follow bad advice on the internet because people with more followers tell us this is what we must do to get followers but if they were writing about life instead of followers, they’d be in the same boat.

We use AI and insist it’s “our” work despite that we watched the words magically appear on the screen and we scream louder about witch hunts than thieves who helped themselves to other people work without consent. You know?

And that’s before we even throw politics into the mix.

You know what Jorge Luis Borges did write?

He wrote The Book Of Sand.

It’s about a mysterious book with no defined ending. And every time the reader turns a page, that page can never be found again. You can never go back to it. That page is gone now. How many pages are left in the book? That’s the magic. No one knows.

If that’s not a perfect analogy of life, I don’t know what is.

If you’re going to lose your mind about something, please lose it doing something you love so much, so passionately, you can’t not do it. Even if you must do it at 5:30 am or past the midnight hour. Because today is the page you’ll never see again.