Don't Be Boring

The mantra I'm shoving down my son's throat

If you ask my son his age, he will declare that he is “seven and three fourths years old.” When you’re little, ever fraction counts. At some point along the way, maybe when he was five and one third years old and had his first experiences with kids making fun of other kids because they weren’t the same as them, these words tumbled out of my mouth:

I’D RATHER BE WEIRD THAN BORING!

(I definitely felt weird with this hairdo vest combo)

So now, approximately 2.75 years later (is this math right??), this saying has become a running joke between me and my son. When he says that I am weird or lame, I shout, “I’d rather be weird than boring!” And then he says, “I’d rather be boring!” And on it goes until we move along to another important topic, like the Minecraft movie.

I don’t know where this mantra of sorts came from. It sounds like something my mom would have said, so maybe it’s genetics or maybe she is haunting me and putting words into my mouth, which I love. Whatever the source, today I was reading a piece in the New Yorker called “A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts,” and the words I’d Rather Be Weird Than Boring started running through my brain. This is because every fiber of my being recoils when an actual human says they use A.I. to “brainstorm” or “write” or “create.” The point of the piece is to show that using these “tools” doesn’t make us more creative. It makes us fucking BORING.

This is not a “the lady doth protest too much” situation. As a Gen-X person who was heavily influenced by things like Henry Miller and typewriters and Toni Morrison and Naked Lunch, I will forever believe that creativity should not be outsourced, and that struggling to find the right word, even if it’s not the BEST word, always wins out over typing in some keywords and getting a little boost.

It’s not a little boost. It’s bullshit.

When I conduct virtual interviews, I use the zoom “record” function and then later go back and transcribe every word. I also use Otter, which is an A.I. transcription app as a backup to those zoom videos. I would not trust Otter by itself, even though you can listen to the audio. It’s a backup, and if I relied on its transcription alone my interviews and profiles would sound like they were written by not just a robot, but a drunk robot who also maybe took some ketamine and wasn’t super original to begin with.

None of this makes me a saint. It does make me angry, though, and sad. I hope Henry Miller and Toni Morrison haunt every writer who uses A.I. as a “tool,” and not a cool haunting where they dispense advice or solve a structural problem that I’ve been grappling with in a dream. The New Yorker piece mentions several studies that show the homogeneity of using some bot or whatever the hell it is to come up with an adjective or form an argument. I hope that no matter how stuck I get, no matter how long I have to bang my head against the wall to come up with a closing graph, I’ll just struggle through it until something comes out that’s mine.

I’d rather be weird than boring.