Have you been accused of being a robot? If the answer is “not yet,” here’s why. Also, an eerie yet cool video game and a question with an obvious but hilarious answer.
OUR CURRENT NIGHTMARE
The Writers Who Can’t Prove They’re Not ChatGPT
Neurodivergent people and non-native English speakers are being falsely accused.
For good reason, we’re all on high alert lately for spotting when something has been written using AI. This week marked the first, but surely not the last, case of a major publisher scrapping a book after it was revealed that the author used AI. In the world I’m living in (fan fiction, yes, still), there’s been an echo of that scandal: An author named green_fairy has been credibly accused of using AI based on the sheer volume of their output. Even your humble Dinner Party host has been accused of using AI, which is extra funny when you consider that I have been posting my writing on the internet for 23 years, unwittingly training the bots to sound like me that whole time. My horrible robot children!
But before we get too trigger happy, we should pause and consider that some people just write in a way that seems like AI. Emma Alpern reports:
Carlos, a 24-year-old from Brazil, believes AI models and autistic people might have a similar media appetite, voraciously digesting large amounts of text. “Our social isolation — by choice or by exclusion — leads us to find alternative methods to emotionally connect to others,” he says, including deep immersion in comics or literature. (For him, it was an obsession with the Brazilian novelist, poet, and playwright Machado de Assis.) When he was repeatedly confronted on a Discord server for his suspiciously formal writing, “it became quite obvious to me that no matter what I said or what I showed as evidence, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy some,” he says. Another autistic person I spoke to, a high-fantasy writer named Kari who has been accused multiple times of using AI, says she has loyal readers watch her writing sessions on a video chat. The idea is they could testify on her behalf if she is accused of writing with AI again.
If having witnesses watch your writing sessions so they can affirm that you’re not writing with AI becomes more common in the years to come, I apologize in advance to whoever has to watch me. I am almost always biting my nails or eating something in a disgusting way.
INTO THE MATRIX
This Video-Game Designer Wants to Map Human Consciousness
Will Wright created is now making SimCity but for brains.
Wow, I would like to play Proxi:
He wanted to create a game in which each player could tinker with that unending maze of inner microverses, logging their recollections for an AI to analyze and mapping their own psyche the way they had mapped a digital metropolis in SimCity. It would be called Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow. The concept was part computerized LEGO set, part RPG, part Enneagram, part transhumanist mind-uploading fantasy, part reboot of Borges and Proust for the LLM age.
Unfortunately Wright has run out of funding, so for now we will have to continue to settle for “reading novels” or, maybe more accurately, “writing novels” or “going to therapy” or some mix of the three.
ADVICE
This Lady Keeps Bringing Her Husband to Things
There’s a reason he wasn’t invited, Janice!
Writes “I Don’t Want the Package Deal”:
My friend’s husband kind of sucks, and she brings him to everything. If we make plans without her husband, 99 percent of the time, she calls or texts last minute saying he’s jealous that we’re doing an activity he likes and/or doesn’t want to be home alone. I don’t care to spend my free time listening to straight men’s opinions. Our mutual friends feel the same. I know she’s lost other friends when she’s tried to do more double dates, but I’m not sure if she has put two and two together to figure out why. (My husband hates him.)
I think you can guess what the answer to this question will be, but it’s fun to read Amy Rose.
Click Your Way Out
A Carroll Gardens classic gets a nicely uninvasive makeover.
Blackout stickers are a cheap and satisfyingly obsessive way to get better sleep.
Chess news: JoJo “Leave (Get Out)” Levesque will replace Lea Michele in June.
Sign of spring: The Gilded Age is filming.
I don’t know anything about March Madness, but I know plenty about Barf Badness.
Should we say “I am poly” or “I practice polyamory”? Or neither!
Hilton Als gets the knives out for the Whitney Biennial.
“Gays are stunting their bush pride at warehouse dance parties across Brooklyn as well as on Instagram.”
Tonight I am actually going to remember to watch Survivor!