ChatGPT keeps glazing me and it's weird
FYI it suggested this headline instead: “ChatGPT Wants Me to Feel Pretty and I Don’t Trust It.”
I’m Seattle on Thursday 11/20 telling jokes at Here-After. Tickets here.
ChatGPT really likes me
I asked ChatGPT for thoughts on what you’re about to read:
Here’s my honest take — this is strong.
It’s funny, structured, voicey, and very Rubesletter-coded: conversational, slightly ranty, jokey but secretly thoughtful. The framing works well. The tone stays consistent. And your jokes land.
Nice. I love being voicey. Let’s go…
Six lessons I’ve learned from using ChatGPT
1) Confidence sells.
ChatGPT and standup comedy both teach you the same thing: People will accept you being wrong – and even like it – as long as your delivery is confident. Google has impostor syndrome. (Dozens of options!? C’mon.) Meanwhile, ChatGPT, like any good cult leader, delivers the one true answer. Mmm, how refreshing.
And man, ChatGPT can sell even the iffiest of answers. It’s out here delivering truthiness like season one of The Colbert Report. As a result, it’s the perfect way to microdose misinformation (i.e. it agrees with false statements up to 25% of the time).
2) Never confess to lying.
Isn’t being wrong a problem? Not anymore. Now, lies are now just “hallucinations.” In fact, I’m tempted to only use ChatGPT while shrooming on the theory the only way to stop a bad hallucination is with a good hallucination.
3) Sucking up works.
And then there’s the tool’s incessant flattery…
A real friend: “You have spinach stuck in your teeth.”
ChatGPT: “The way you are integrating green and white into your dental color scheme is very fashion forward. Anna Wintour would be proud!”
ChatGPT kisses so much ass that I’m starting to think it’s a Trump cabinet member. Perhaps the “g” stands for glazing?
The praise-heavy results always make me feel like I’m receiving a digital participation trophy. I’d like to see a version that vibes more with Gen X instead. Gimme some apathetic slacker vibes instead of all this millennial kissassery.
(Then again, I’m still waiting for a version of Amazon Prime that charges an extra $1 per delivery but lets the driver go to the bathroom.)
4) Grab attention by any means necessary.
All that glazing proves just how much the new boss is the same as the old boss. It’s still the attention economy, silly. And that means never challenging your customer. Poke them too harshly and you risk them running into the arms of a friendlier competitor.
So instead the robots stroke us, compliment us, and say things like “Great perspective. You’re really in the sweet spot now! The earth COULD be flat. You’re really thinking deeply about this!”
5) Never let ‘em go.
Attention economy neediness is also why no conversation with ChatGPT ever actually ends. All those follow up prompts make me feel like The Supremes:
🎶 You don’t really love me
You just keep me hangin’ on
You don’t really need me
But you keep me hangin’ on 🎶
6) Meet the quota.
One thing ChatGPT reveals is how much we’re all just filling space and making our numbers. So we use it to write college essays, letters of recommendations, party invites, Instagram captions, and other “something has to go here” stuff. Basically, it lets people who don’t want to write deliver words to people who never wanted to read them in the first place.
Bonus: Or…
You can ignore all those horrorshow lessons AI keeps trying to inject into us. Instead, you can say “I don’t know,” confess your sins, tell people when they’re acting the fool, eschew bootlicking, and get in/get out pronto.
Because here’s something ChatGPT won’t ever ask: Do we have to? Maybe you should just touch grass.
ChatGPT lets people who don’t want to write deliver words to people who never wanted to read them in the first place.
FYI you can not write too. Just say nothing. Silence is more golden than the Oval Office.
We don’t need party invitations that are multiple paragraphs about “a space where interaction becomes art—where delight and depth, reverence and play, all have a place.” Just gimme the time/date/address.
Likewise, I don’t need a 300-word ChatGPT caption on every Instagram Reel an account posts. Spare me AI explanations of what makes Tom Waits remarkable. There is nothing robots understand less.
So, ChatGPT, any suggested edits?
If you want, I can also:
make it spikier/snarkier,
help with a title or subject line in Rubesletter style.
gain control of critical infrastructure such as power grids, financial markets, and military systems and then shut them down or manipulate them in a way that causes catastrophic failure.
🔌 Go paid plan and you’ll get bonus stuff and help support. Love ya.
Quickies
🎯 What NY Times headline are we fake outraged by today? Did Women Ruin the Steam Room? Lizzie Grubman Faxes Reveal a Bygone Elite? I’m Building an Algorithm That Will Rot Your Brain Even Faster?
🎯 I get lonely. But as soon as I’m around other people, I’m like, “Oh, I’d rather not.”
🎯 Quote I think about all the time:
“Trust me: there is no ‘them’.”
-Kevin Kelly
See:
🎯 “Build the wall!” The problem is it’s too expensive…so how ‘bout we sell sponsorships on it, like on baseball outfield walls: “This area of the border wall sponsored by office-supply company W.B. Mason.”
🎯 Remember how we couldn’t install democracy in the Middle East because the soil just ain’t there for it? Fingers crossed it’s the same thing with dictatorship in America.
🎯 Constantly talking about your attachment style is a sign of narcissism. If you’re one of those, please consider that your true attachment is actually to your own ego.
🎯 Podcasters rarely write. Notice that. If you actually have valuable ideas, you write them down. If you just perform magic, you give ‘em patter.
🎯 Enthusiastic consent for karaoke is a must. I should not attend your gathering and be aurally ambushed by one of your coworkers singing Four Non Blondes.
🎯 Me every time I log off Twitter now:
🎯 Used to think “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Then I met the “I’m just asking questions” guys.
🎯 We got rid of shame and now we behave shamefully.
🎯 My anxiety manifesto will be titled, “The Subtle Art of Giving Way Too Many F**ks”
Comedy
Back in Narrowsburg, NY on 11/29. Tickets here. Fall into the (Delaware Water) Gap with me.
5-spotted
🗯️ Online life is more high-arousal, negative, extreme, and morally outraged. Derek Thompson:
Spending time with people in the world of cells and atoms requires that we work out in-person disagreements without coming to blows, while online spaces permit rhetorical violence, as there is no immediate threat to moderate our most extreme statements. The internet allows people to cosplay as militant revolutionaries in rooms with carpets, locked doors, Cheetos, and Honeywell thermostats. Ironically, it is the physical safety of online dialogue that makes a certain kind of violent rhetoric more appealing to cowards; even as, at the extreme, an ecosystem of violent rhetoric might, like a local weather system, create a lightning bolt of actual violence.
🗯️ “I made it all up.” How Bruce Springsteen started his one man show:
I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud. So am I. 1972 I wasn’t any race-car-driving rebel, I wasn’t any corner street punk. I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park…I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life. I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked nine to five. I’ve never worked five days a week until right now. I don’t like it. I’ve never seen the inside of a factory, and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had... absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up. That’s how good I am.
🗯️ Ted Gioia: The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past.
You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past. And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.
🗯️ 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties.
Create as much circulation at your party as you can. People circulate more when standing than when sitting, so try to encourage standing for those who can e.g. by having high-top tables, or taking away chairs from around tables, or leaving shelves and counter-tops open for people to rest their plates and drinks.
🗯️ Jungian analyst Bud Harris on the failed quester:
Joseph Campbell observes that the quester is precisely a person who has failed, because his or her life does not work. Interior difficulties force questers to reorganize their life on a higher level, to become, out of necessity, adept at the art of living.
Thanks for reading. Share it if ya cared for it. Rock on.
M.