reddit – Kara Jorgensen

This weekend I saw a cursed post on Bluesky, which, of course, was a screenshot from Reddit.

a post from reddit that reads Chatgpt not letting you emulate specific authors anymore. ive been writing my books for several months now, paid for a more advanced model. took a break. came back. now ms. gpt says she can't generate content in the style of specific authors. My prompts were soooo specific and i got exactly what i wanted out of them. for exmaple rewrite in the literary style of "author here" with abundant dialogue and detail avoiding staccato prose." that was my go-to or please write and flesh out in the style of 'author' etc. they tightened the ropes. i have no ide ahow to get around this other than maybe feed it prose i already edited that's technically mine? fuck

What are we even doing here? I am very anti-AI, but I can understand grifters using it to write books and essentially creating a content mill for slop where they make money off the initial sales, start a new pen name when that one tanks, lather-rinse-repeat. That makes sense to me because grifters gonna grift. What I don’t understand with this post is that the poster has been writing a book for several months. Months!

All the AI evangelists tout AI as something that helps them streamline the process, be more efficient, etc., but non-AI using authors take months to write their books. Why bother using it if it literally takes the exact same amount of time as just doing it yourself? The funniest part to me is that this person knows enough about writing that they can see the flaws in AI generated prose. It tends to be choppy, repetitive, and circular or broken up in a way that humans don’t write. I’ve read quite a bit of it as a professor who teaches freshman writing, and it’s easy to spot because it makes mistakes in style that humans don’t.

So this person who understands writing enough to say don’t use staccato sentences, be descriptive, etc. is still using AI to write their book. My question is why can’t they just apply that to their own writing? Half the battle of becoming a decent writer is seeing the flaws in your own prose and fixing it. If you can see it in ChatGPT’s prose, you should be able to see it in your own.

The issue of writing in the style of another author is common in AI writers and novices as well. Voice is something one develops over time. It isn’t something you can shoehorn into a book, and a lot of the “voice of” is really just symbolism, metaphor, imagery, etc. that gets repeated in an author’s work, not the actual structure of their sentences. People like Tolkein or Lemony Snicket might have very stylistic prose that can be emulated, but for many popular authors, that isn’t going to work. This is why I tell my creative writing students not to copy authors they like and just to write what’s in their heads. Your voice starts as an amalgamation of the all the works you consume, but over time, you appear through it. AI can never do that. All it can do is make a Temu version of popular authors, and it tickles me that these slop jockeys think it does anything but pale in comparison to the real thing or to authentic voice. After reading essays my students have turned in, I would rather get 100 off the wall student-written essays than derivative AI slop.

The last sentence in the post is really what had me confused: “feed it prose I already edited that’s technically mine.” What do you mean technically yours? I had assumed that this person was writing chunks of fiction and feeding it into the AI in order for it to spit out something more stylistic and beefed up. Are they not actually writing anything? People who cobble together books with AI get really pissy when you tell them they aren’t actually writers, and I really do wonder how they think they qualify if they aren’t actually writing anything. If you’re just typing in a prompt and having it spit out more words than you put in, that isn’t writing a book. The AI is collating words that make sense together, but in no way will that ever have the authorial intent or cohesion of a book written by an actual author who can plan and weave and use their imagination.

As you can imagine, the comments on this thread were equal parts heartening and horrible. The horrible side contained a bunch of people giving tips on how to skirt the new limitations by tweaking the wording. The rest were chef kiss in that it was a whole wall of “HAHA you actually have to learn to write.” I am one of those people. My feeling about generative AI is that it, its creators, and the people who use it can all get fucked. It is the biggest grift we have seen in some time, and all it does it have people cede their skills and creativity to an over-hyped predictive text program. There is no substitute for human feelings, ingenuity, and creativity, and there is no way in hell I would ever cede any ground to a machine no matter how much brain fog or fatigue I had (since so many evangelists try to say its ableist to tell people not to use AI or that you won’t read it). I sometimes think of all those people who said things about giving into temptation or selling your soul to the devil, and I can’t think of a more apt real example of that than a machine that saps you of the things that make us human.

I made the mistake of wandering onto the wrong side of Reddit (is there truly a right side of Reddit?), and I was faced with so many posts from people whose partners turned out to be trans who were “mourning” their partner’s old gender. My instinctive feeling upon seeing all of these posts was revulsion and being incredibly pissed off.

I was incredibly confused by seeing these posts, especially from partners who claimed to be accepting but still were “mourning” their partner’s old gender, so of course, I read some of them and made myself even more confused and even more angry.

For some background, my partner is a trans woman who started HRT early last year and has been feeling out her gender for the past three years or so. I’m nonbinary and consider myself to be trans as my birth gender does not align with my feelings or self-perception. The closest label I have is agender, but more practically, I’m a bit masc leaning while my partner is way more feminine and was even before she transitioned. We are a T4T couple and have been together for over twenty years.

I always suspected my partner was queer in some way. We used to joke that she had Disney queer-coded villain energy, so when she started to feel out her gender more allowed herself to be more feminine, I wasn’t surprised when she came out as a trans woman. I kind of suspected she was. When I came out as nonbinary back in like 2016 or 2018 (can’t remember when), my partner was unfazed and just adapted to the perception changes to make me more comfortable. I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we might “mourn” for some ephemeral aspect of the other person’s identity that was changing.

What got me so heated about reading the “mourning” posts from straight and queer partners alike was that

a) their partner wasn’t dead. The framing of it as “mourning” grated on me because the person isn’t dead and a change of gender is a loss in any way, shape, or form.

b) they were INCREDIBLY self-centered

The vast majority of these posts were about how their lives were changing, how their partner was doing this to them, that they were struggling, how would they be perceived, how their identity was changing. I remember blinking at these posts like, “This isn’t about you??”

Here’s the thing, you are allowed to have feelings. You are allowed to feel things, BUT I think sometimes we have to look at our feelings and say to ourselves, “Does this feeling make sense/is proportional to what’s going on or am I being a little over the top?” As someone with autism, I am keenly aware that sometimes I am having big feelings over something that is not a big deal in the big scheme of things, and I often take a time out, figure out why I am feeling such big feelings, and readjust that feeling into something that’s more reasonable. It’s perfectly fine to have big feelings, but they aren’t always logical. And they definitely do not need to be shared with everyone or get vomited at your partner.

Maybe it’s because I’m nonbinary and have a trans woman as a partner, but I immediately put myself into the partner’s shoes and wonder how it would feel if my partner made a big deal of me wanting to be perceived differently and made it all about them. People don’t transition to spite you. More than likely you aren’t even part of the equation because it’s their identity, not yours. I’m sure some people are upset specifically because they are not part of the equation, and how dare they do it without consulting them. That isn’t valid. That’s shitty.

I have a hypothesis that a lot of people, especially cis het people but also some monosexual queer people, treat their identity as a mirror. Their identity is influenced by what is around them, and they merely reflect it back. An example- a cis heterosexual woman might see her identity as wife of a lawyer, teacher, and mother of a son because those are the roles reflected back on her by those around her. A gay man might do the same thing by surrounding himself with the trappings of US gay society and by being with gay men. In both cases, the people in the example are gaining these important aspects of their identities by those around them rather than within.

When I think of myself, I am very cognizant of who I am and self-aware of my shortcomings. I am someone who is queer because after doing a lot of questioning and poking around, I realized I was attracted to lots of kinds of people and that I am not cis. I am a writer or storyteller because that’s what I like to do and feel compelled to do. More broadly, I am creative, intense, thoughtful, etc. My identity is not dependent upon my job or the people around me; it’s the intrinsic bits that live inside me and have for most of my life. None of the aspects I mentioned are dependent upon who my partner is.

What I suspect is happening with a lot of these “mourning” posts is that people who get their identities by what’s reflected back on them are having crises about who they are. If my partner is now a woman, am I gay? Am I still a lesbian if my partner is now a man? If you were secure in your identity and who you are, that wouldn’t be something you had to ask yourself.

My partner considers herself a lesbian as she is primarily attracted to women, but I’m nonbinary and not particularly feminine. We’ve had this discussion before, and she has stressed that me being nonbinary and masculine-ish doesn’t change that she is attracted mainly to women. These are not mutually exclusive statements. It seems that a lot of people don’t understand how multiple things can be true at once or that your partner might be an exception to your general attraction rule. On one hand, I think it’s good at these people are potentially thinking about their identities more thoroughly. On the other, calling it “mourning” is a bad look, and they should feel bad about it.

There’s a part of me that wants to lead with kindness, but the trans and autistic side of me says that we need to be meaner to nip this shit in the bud.

The problem with “mourning” a change in identity is that you are burying someone who is still alive, someone who still needs you. It is an empty coffin you’re crying over when you could be celebrating the rebirth of the person you love.

I get particularly pissy about this behavior because back in the day on autism groups on FB, I saw so many parents “mourning” their children when they were diagnosed with autism. I would sit there as an autistic adult and be like uhhhh, I’m not dead, your kid didn’t die, and your kid is literally the same as they were yesterday but with a new label. “Mourning” the “death” of an idealized version of the person they had in their mind is not a valid feeling because that person didn’t exist outside your head.

There’s a big difference between change is hard in that it’s taking me a bit of time to adjust to my partner being a different gender and having a new name and “my partner as I knew them is dead.” What often happens with this sort of post is that Terfs will swoop in and try to turn the trans partner into someone selfish and evil who is punishing the other person and how their relationship is doomed. These transphobes use this “mourning” language to spread transphobia. The sky is falling “how will my relationship survive??” posts are generally overblown and stoked by transphobia. More obviously, comparing a change in gender to death is directly linking transitioning to something to inherently negative in our society rather than a neutral act.

I often have to stop myself from going onto these posts and asking, “Do you actually love your partner or do you love their gender/status?” Gender, to me, is like a beard or hair. It’s a piece of their identity, but it can change and that change doesn’t change who I am. All pieces of your identity or your partner’s identity are subject to change. At any moment, you or your partner could become disabled, and that is a major change of identity. Would you go onto Reddit and act like your partner becoming disabled was some plot to stick it to you? Sadly, I know some would.

What was the point of this ramble? I’m not 100% sure, but I want to put this into perspective because I have seen it way too much lately. As someone who is a trans person and someone with a trans partner, I find it offensive, and I hope that as a society, we can become better by actually being introspective about our identities and realize that we aren’t a mirror for others. We are who we are on the inside, for better or worse.

Tag: reddit

Writer Rambles #4

Your Feelings Aren’t Valid