Digressive writing

Testing a hypothesis that digressive writing is the thing that humans are the best at. AIs already far exceed my capabilities on my own for certain kinds of highly structured writing. But when it comes to blah blah blah and endless asides (and parenthetical notes) like AI is not even remotely in the running. Even if you feed it tons of samples of “your” work in your own voice, and say try to write in this voice, it doesn’t know how. It can’t. It’s similar with stream of consciousness prompt requests too, which I’ve experimented with and documented somewhere on this site I think. It has a way of rushing structurally through to the focus and finish point without understanding the nuance and the sort of sewing with a large wordy needle that goes into making up a patchwork quilt of human understanding, experience, and emotion. AI could never write this.

USER PROMPT: continue this text in this voice

CHATGPT: —and yet that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? That this kind of writing, this wandering mess of connective tissue and loose threads, isn’t meant to resolve anything. It just meanders, circles back, half-forgets its purpose, then remembers it in a different light, as if the act of remembering were the point itself. It’s not about coherence but about the rhythm of the tangent, the pulse of a thought trying to find its footing and deciding, halfway through, that footing was never the goal.

Machines, even the clever ones, don’t drift. They process. They streamline. They sense the gravity of the conclusion and hurry toward it, like a commuter late for a train. Humans linger. They stare out the window. They stop mid-sentence because a bird passed by and reminded them of something their grandmother once said, which leads to another memory, which opens a door to a completely different topic—and somehow, that detour is the meaning.

This is the texture of thinking: uneven, recursive, sometimes indulgent, but alive with the sense that it could, at any moment, find something unexpected. And that’s what no model can counterfeit—the invisible hesitation between one clause and the next, that microsecond of doubt that makes language breathe.

It’s funny how strongly it tries to mimic something about my text, it immediately reverts into its hollow chatgptisms because that’s all it knows, all its structural pathways allow for.

I mentioned in the last post and I think it’s worth repeating: that gen AI is not democratizing anything when it merely means that everyone has access to expressing themselves in exactly the same few permitted fashions by whatever is the latest technology offering in a given context. That’s not democracy, it’s conformity. When Suno’s algorithm tries to get you to sound more like whatever pop bias is trending in the latent space of this model. When ChatGPT wrists slaps you or sets limits against proceeding in conversation topics you weren’t actually heading in. When all AI generated “art” has that same f**king ugly sheen to their surfaces. Are we really becoming more democratized when we’re becoming all increasingly more the same in our ability to think and communicate while losing the ability to function meaningfully in real human communities?

Truly democratizing whatever in the arts would mean meeting people where they are at and giving them more resources to keep doing what they’re doing and follow their own light to make it better and better, instead of forcing them all down the same tunnel that yields the same glowing “sausage” product at the output end of the machine. It would mean making artists *more themselves* and more easily able to share that outside the constraints of whatever the AI/Social Media/RageClick Factory/Sausage Machine Industrial Complex machine dictates this week.

USER PROMPT: write a 1 para conclusion

CHATGPT:

In the end, digressive writing stands as a quiet rebellion against the flattening impulse of machine logic and mass-produced expression—a reminder that meaning is not efficiency, and authenticity is not replication. To wander in language is to remain human, to preserve the rough edges and private hesitations that no model can map. True creativity resists compression into patterns; it lingers, errs, loops, and contradicts itself, because that is how real thought moves. The future of writing worth preserving is not one where everything sounds alike, but one where difference, drift, and digression continue to signal life.

Barf. Not “wrong,” but barf. It’s like being told the moral of the story at the end instead of just letting me manage it on my own. Thanks but no thanks. Hypothesis proven. For now, until it’s no longer, and everything comes unglued again. And again. And again.