Warranty Void If Regenerated

It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.

Take this sentence:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.

Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:

He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.

Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:

For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.

Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.

It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.

But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:

Original:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.

Modified:

Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.

One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.

So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.

But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.

If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.

In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.

I've mostly been digging through my own version of that and trying to find things I find interesting and seeing what kinds of stories we can build about what a day in that job might look like.