This was not supposed to be about AI

Last week, I saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor live on Tuesday, for what was the sixth or seventh time, watched the new movie 28 Years Later on Thursday, for what was the first of what will probably be many times and watched 85% of Grizzly Man on Saturday, for the first time since it was released in 2005. If any movie seemed to defy a rewatch, it was the one where a man lived among bears for a few months every year, until one of the bears ripped his body apart. But Johanna hadn't seen Grizzly Man, so we spent part of Saturday night watching that and part of the night trying to get our toddler to go to sleep, until he was so hyped up I had to go sit in his room for a while. The world was chaos, hostility and a documentary about a man eaten by a bear.

I dislike the shared meme of Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog as a Colonel Kurtz-like madman scowling through doom and gloom prognoses. For one, when you watch or read an interview with him, Herzog is often very funny and warm. He acted as a version of that dude– the one people do impressions of on social media– in the actually pretty good Tom Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher, but he's never been that guy. I think that impression of Herzog comes primarily from Grizzly Man and Les Blank's Burden of Dreams. As far as his documentary work goes, it certainly doesn't come from something like The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. His films, fiction and nonfiction, are often bleak, but it drives me crazy when bleak is equated with cynical. He is, perhaps, cynical in Burden of Dreams, but that has to be put into context. He's being filmed during the worst few months of his professional life.

To really zoom in on the provenance of the social media impression of Herzog, it probably comes from the bit of Grizzly Man narration I paraphrased in the first paragraph here:

"I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."

Again, context: He says this to contrast his thoughts on the world's resting state with that of his subject, Timothy Treadwell, who ended up a head and spinal column and so many partially-digested pieces of meat inside the bear that killed him. The bear also killed Amie Huguenard, Treadwell's girlfriend, whose death even the film's most Treadwell-averse subjects acknowledge as a true tragedy. Herzog marvels at the natural world, here and in most of his other films, while also failing to find any humanity in these bears which, he continually points out, are not human.

All of this is obvious to anybody who has actually watched Grizzly Man, to the point of not even really being analysis, but I do not think it is pessimistic to acknowledge the dangers of living among bears and the narcissistic foolishness of crowning yourself their protector. It is not pessimistic to think you will die if you jump out of a plane with no parachute. I do not think it is pessimistic to think laying down on train tracks will eventually lead to you being crushed by a train.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor have a reputation like Herzog's, in that people critical of the project can see it as dour, self-important defeatism: The world is bad and that's sad, here are some drones. But every time I have watched Godspeed, I have felt a true connection to the future. Live, the band is nine people on a stage and one projectionist in the middle of the venue, playing and manipulating film loops onto a backdrop behind the musicians. Since the band's return from a hiatus in 2010, every Godspeed show has opened with a drone that slowly builds as members come on stage and pick up their instruments. After a few minutes, the word "hope" is projected behind them.

This is not the kind of cloying hope that just instills more hopelessness– I'm talking here about, for example, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "War is Over (If You Want It)" campaign. It's the real hope, that assesses the state of things– there are bears and genocide and we still have to work together to push against these things.

I realize I just typed two em dashes in that last paragraph. I had a couple earlier, too. I would have edited at least one of them out to improve that paragraph's readability, but they'll stay for now and I won't get deeper into Godspeed or how this all ties into 28 Years Later. Because this keeps happening to me.

Apparently em dash use is telltale sign somebody's using AI. Supposedly, you can see em dashes as evidence the writer plugged a prompt into ChatGPT or whatever let that thing do their work. I've never used AI and I never will. This newsletter goes out to a small enough circle that I know you know that about me. I hope. I hope you have faith in me as a person who wouldn't use ChatGPT, or at least have heard me complaining enough about AI that you assume I'm writing all of this stuff myself.

It's a fucking drag, though, on either side of the writin' and readin' conversation. If the thing I'm reading was published in the past year or so, I can't know it was written by a person. And everything I send out here could potentially have little signs that it was written by AI, even if it wasn't, which could make you doubt it came from a genuine place.

I hate that. That's shit I'm hopeless about. I want to know the things I'm reading came from a person's brain. Full stop, no qualifiers. AI writing, music, imagery is a plague.

And I'm not cynical about it, because it is a real threat. And I'm not hopeful about it because that would require a solution to exist, and (here's a cliche that might scan as being written by AI in 2025) the toothpaste is out of the tube. The only way for me to feel secure about any of this anymore would be for AI to be uncreated.

I struggle to write anything while AI is out here. I can't even put in the work here, now, without knowing a large language model could gobble everything I put out up, take the way these words are structured and the thoughts I'm trying to convey with them and turn them into .00000000000001% of a thing that helps some dopey real estate or tech bro write an Instagram caption they're too stupid to put together themselves.

What do we do now? How are you escaping this feeling? Please don't say you're accepting it. I'd rather find out you voted Trump than find out you think Chat GPT is a good thing.