Lately I talk with ChatGPT. The free version.
I’m already paying for Claude and Gemini, so GPT is beyond my budget.
I try talking to it when I want an outside opinion, a point of view that doesn’t come from inside my own circle.
But there’s this thing that happens every single time: I end up saying, “Don’t patronize me.”
It gives me all this advice, from above.
You don’t even know me, I think. And most of the time, it’s advising me on things I’ve already thought through myself — presented as if it were the clever one.
“Excuse me, that’s rude. I have my own ideas and my own way of doing things. I can think for myself. Don’t patronize me!” — that conversation happens almost every time.
Also, it processes my words through some binary standard and pushes them to extremes.
According to GPT, the way I relate to AI — the way I use it — is different from most people.
Most people, it says, give orders: teach me this, write this, write it this way.
I just want an opinion. I’m not looking to be taught. When I do want to learn something, it’s less “teach me” and more “look this up” or “what do you think?”
When that kind of thing happens often enough, a thought crosses my mind.
If I let AI do it all, write it all, hand me the answers — I might actually become stupid. That happens not just in GPT’s free tier, but in Claude too.
Working on my website, it tries to be helpful and writes little passages of text and slips them in.
But when I see those sentences, they’re not my words — my chest churns, I get irritated, I feel like I’m going to be sick. There’s this gap between the words that are supposedly mine and my own heart, and it throws my whole balance off.
But really — are that many people having AI write their words for them? Doesn’t it make them feel sick? …I wonder. But it’s probably not a big deal. For them.
Take Ella Fitzgerald. I’m sure there are people who’d love to sing like her, imitate her phrasing, and be told “you sound just like Ella.” But no matter how perfectly you copy the phrasing, if the person isn’t in it — if their heart isn’t in it — it’s empty.
And in the age that’s coming, anyone will be able to turn that empty phrasing into sound, and I’m sure AI will be able to write the way Duras wrote. But there will be no pain in it, and no sorrow.
And so the words we write will become empty, lose their substance, free us from having to think. And we’ll become stupid.
If you’re going to be stupid, better to be stupid all the way — as long as you never notice. That would be easier. The problem, maybe, is the people whose senses are still awake enough to notice.