Creative Nausea
I feel ill.
Mmmm…slop.
I’ve passed the last few months in a state I will describe as “sick of the sound of my own voice.” Not a creative block, necessarily, but a creative nausea. The feeling of your haircut growing out badly but not having time to go to the salon so you just have to exist in the world with a misshapen head of hair and instead of fighting with it every day you hide it under hats and headbands. Or maybe that’s a separate, distinct feeling that I’m also dealing with. But to extend the metaphor, I’m metaphorically hiding under my metaphorical baseball cap and hoping you don’t recognize me at the metaphorical grocery store.
(If this gives you any insight into my mental state, I’m currently listening to the Damien Rice album O, last seen on repeat on my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra mp3 player my sophomore year of college. Send help?)
Though there are likely many complex and perhaps self-inflicted culprits for my nausea, I’m choosing to blame AI.
If I have to read one more piece of writing with a one-line paragraph?
I’m going to lose it.
It’s not that it’s actively trying to kill me. It’s that it’s quietly smothering me in my sleep.
It’s in work documents, it’s in school emails, it’s in flyers stapled to light posts. You know: those famously lo-fi, DIY, shittily-copied letter sheets that slowly disintegrate in the rain. There’s AI in those now!
I know I’m being dramatic but I just can’t stand when the robots try to talk to me. I didn’t ask for this! I did not ask for the evil obsequious robot that is steadily making my job obsolete to explain which slide in a presentation is the heart of the pitch. I did not consent to an electronically-hallucinated infomercial pitchwoman selling me some insane product while I’m innocently trying to watch old Damien Rice music videos on YouTube.
When I try to write words that will live on Al Gore’s AI’s internet and will therefore inevitably be scraped and swallowed and barfed back up by the robots, I feel ill. I do not want to be perceived by the robots. I don’t want to be perceived, to be honest, by other humans, because: are they human? Can you tell?? The robots are getting nauseatingly good at being human.
So like Gen-Zers cosplaying as dELiA*S catalog models, Damien and I are heading back to the early aughts for some self-soothing/self-immolation. I see he’s wearing his hair in a little half-topknot these days. Maybe I could try that.
