📿 Do You Like My Cool New Robot Voice?

How ChatGPT and a Zen parable reaffirmed my commitment to remaining human

At the Salton Sea, California

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

Yesterday morning I sat down to write this Substack essay, and watched the cursor blink in and out at the top of a blank page. 

There was a large part of my life where watching the cursor blink was just a part of my writing process. I imagined this blinking was summoning forth some scrap of an idea, something that I could catch by the tail and explore in a circuitous amble until I arrived at what I wanted to say. I would watch the blinking cursor in the same way that I watch my breath in meditation practice, noticing what thoughts emerge. I would do this for as long as it took until I felt moved to put words on the page. I would sit in space until something moved me to fill it. 

And then, I had a baby.

Now, instead of watching the cursor blink forth ideas, I watch the cursor blink away time. The cursor hasn’t changed, but my relationship to it has. Each blink is a second of squandered child care, or another moment shaved off of the precious window before she wakes from her afternoon nap. It’s a dish that I could have been washing, an email that could have been sent, a cupboard that desperately needs organizing, an errand that needs to be run. 

The limitation of time is a tug and a tension that I find myself negotiating rigorously now that I’m a parent. At least I know that I’m not alone in this; I think it’s a fairly consistent tension for most of us modern humans. 

My discomfort watching the cursor blink steered me over to ChatGPT. Here I set my eyes upon a different blinking cursor: one that has access to every byte of information ever uploaded to the internet. Out of perverse curiosity, I wanted to see exactly what this cursor was capable of. I felt the illicit thrill of stealing fire from Mt. Olympus as I typed my inquiry into the AI chat bot. 

Write an essay for The Laundry on Substack in the voice and style of Adreanna Limbach.

Within seconds, the cursor started moving like the planchette on a Ouija board, directed by an unseen hand. Words that were written by a robot using my voice, scrolling across the screen. If ChatGPT has access to everything ever published online, then it also has access to… basically everything that I’ve ever written and recorded. Years of articles, interviews, social media posts, blogs, all combed through and synthesized to write an essay as “me” in 30 seconds flat. 

Here is a little sampling of what the chatbot wrote in my voice: