This might be the last blog post I will ever write, by me.
Or… at least, what’s left of me.
When your digital assistant and editor are just one button away, will we ever again read something purely written by a human? Will you flip through pages that don’t already have invisible ghost-machine fingerprints all over them?
Things will never be the same. Even if I insist on using a pen in a printed, bundled paper diary. Even if I hammer away into the blank space of WordPress with only my fingers and stubbornness. Even if I embrace my typos, my dangling modifiers, my “faux paus.” (Yes, I insist it’s spelled that way.) Even if I assume that whatever goes in here is organically and lovingly grown from my own little mental world.
But sadly, it isn’t. The artificial seeds were planted — scattered everywhere across our minds, quietly germinating without us even noticing. Every thought we release now is pollinated with genetically modified machine DNA. This can never be undone. Every word you consume these days is a mix of human-created, robot-approved… language eating its own tail in infinite meta. Humans feed AI, AI feeds humans, repeat forever.
What kind of world would that be? I shudder to think, but at least I have 20 years of pure human gold. In fact, I can’t believe all the shit I wrote for the past 2 decades would one day turn out to be something so precious. Every literature written before the pandemic, every diary page, every online journal, every love letter, every post-its,all of it is now more valuable than anything we’ll ever see again, purely because they were written without a hint of non-human touch.
It is sad when I look back at my blog entries 15 years ago, I get jealous of how good I used to write. AI did not make things better for me, although it may have made things better for the agencies and clients. But it feels like I am slowly losing a superpower I used to have–the ability to write. Like, just write.
My paper diary now will be the most cherished daily hobby of mine. I have encouraged my kids to do the same (when I was their age, I was scribbling pages and pages each day since Roblox didn’t exist back then…), but they just tell me it’s too mendokusai (troublesome) and it stresses them out. I never understood how writing could be stressful (unless you are using the non-paid version of ChatGPT because you cannot expense it)… but I have never found anything more therapeutic and stress-relieving than writing (and beating the **** out of a taiko).
So yeah… I don’t know what will happen to my kids in the future, growing up fluent only in recycled languages churned over and over again and spat back out of the man-machine stomach. A generation who might never know the difference between a thought born in the quiet of their own heart, and one mass-manufactured by the cyborg reality we live in.
But maybe, just maybe when the plastic voice gets so loud, we will eventually get tired of it and give up words entirely. Then, we can go back to telepathy again.
