AI NRE
Examining My Relationship with AI While Finding My Way Back to the Craft
I desire not to set this up as a confessional. An acknowledgment of my mistakes before you.
But rather an addressing something that’s been bothering me that when run through the lens of relationship I can see and choose more clearly.
Cause baby, I haven’t gotten lost, but I’ve certainly been affected as we all are by every relationship we choose in full damn sovereignty to engage. It suddenly became collaborative, an us not me.
While I was always clear in my own authority and never let it fully take over my thoughts, my ideas, my glorious lived experience, pristine and untouched. But it changed me the way that I think, the way I write, the way that I express.
So allow me to work through this without the girlfriends jumping on the bandwagon of what an asshole because I don’t think it’s that easy or extractable.
NRE
New Relationship Energy. Also known as the honeymoon phase. When you are so enamored with another that their flaws cannot be fully seen. You can forgive the pink flags and are so enlivened by the field opening betwixt you the seduction feels fully worth it, warranted even.
This is how I’ll frame my relationship with AI.
It is/was seductive. The speed at which ideas can become fully formed. The companionship of an amanuensis solely devoted to my creation. Its breathtaking ability to not only see me (odd ball lil priestess of the void swimming in esoteria) but help bring out what I imagined to be a better version of me.
Thoughts landed, mythic grounded, digestible for whatever the heck version of human is engaging now.
The Ick
Ooooh the ick is frightening for it changes everything that once held promise, in a damn instant. That one little flaw that once seen dampens every other glorious facet of the other’s being. You can’t unsee it and it taints everything that once shone radiantly.
With my college boyfriend it was his jeans. I loved this boy… we could speak of the cosmos and faith, diving deep into the exploration of self, reality, and god. His dark brown eyes and cherubic curls. I could overlook the age gap and bask in the innocence of our mutual becoming.
Until he put on those damn jeans. Suddenly my wonder was exorcised and instead I was reevaluating everything I had been so enamored by only days before.
My Ick with AI Is Here
Sure there’s so many red flags — the environmental impact, the human ingenuity being harvested by technology, its dubious founders racking in the money. And so it goes…
But I could look past it until I couldn’t.
A woman recently commented that my reliance on AI was troublesome.
Excuse me, what?!?
I had been mindful, conscious of the collaboration. Never allowing it to write for me but helping me craft what I believed to be a “superior” essay. Superior not in quality but in its fully flushed out and organized thoughts. The way I could play with a morsel from the mystery and AI could help me land it in words, my words, just organized.
But fuck, she was right. And I knew it immediately.
So I took a step back, giving this relationship a moment to breathe.
When I returned to its once gleaming features I felt embarrassed. Essays that I feel need to be scrapped entirely, a book I can’t yet fathom how I regain myself fully within.
Wise sisters being who they are, Kendra reminded me I need not be embarrassed but acknowledged that we are all in an evolving relationship with AI. Those creators choosing to engage even with the best of intentions are finding ourselves in some slippery ass terrain. And as long as we remain aware enough that a reassessment is necessary, we’re gonna be ok.
Losing Oneself in the Relationship
Hey dramatic Cancer here, I didn’t truly lose myself, at least not entirely. But my writing, my craft, certainly atrophied.
Morgan Garza and I had this conversation recently. How letting AI be the dutiful assistant had dulled the edge of our pen. The pen as the sword of the priestess.
I wrote an entire book with the AI NRE in full effect. Confidently, like fuck yeah not if I get a book deal but when, level of certainty.
My Intro alone contained 27 em dashes — 27!
So I’m allowed to be embarrassed. To not know then what I know now. To let a relationship evolve and be re-examined with wisdom and experience gained.
Every Relationship Has Its Blessings
Really… even the most toxic relationships bring us closer to ourselves. Not excusing the devastating bad behaviors nor am I claiming AI and I are toxic but, we can harvest gold from every experience.
Thank god I can see it now. Thank god that publisher didn’t respond. Thank god I can reclaim my craft.
The “rejection” brought me here, to Substack, to the place where my blade is being sharpened and inspiration pours through me like liquid diamonds.
I am a great writer (hey Mercury in Gemini!) and have been honing my voice, my craft, since I was a kid. 30+ published articles on Gaia, 6ish books in some stage of creation stored away on my hard drive, years yielding to the muse and dropping everything in dutiful devotion each time she appears.
I’ll get over the embarrassment, and learn from this too.
The human is most beautiful when it’s imperfect. So yes, I may use too many ellipses and slip dreamily into parenthetical asides. I may not fully land a closing or grammatically adhere to MLA or Chicago rules.
Fuck ‘em.
I’ll snatch back my gifts and let them become even more beautifully human and imperfectly so. I’ll put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and let the muse move through me. She’s never failed me. I only swapped her out temporarily for something I thought made me better.
And hear the tenderness in this… after any relationship… I didn’t see it until I did. I didn’t recognize I was self-abandoning until I did. I didn’t mean to get sidetracked by the bright and shiny when the precious pearl of my being was so damn shiny already.
The NRE in this case was relatively short lived as all honeymoon phases are.
I’m not committed to a full no-contact move here. But I am recommitting to my craft, to the muse, to the mystery which can’t be run through a super computer.
We may still be friends, me and that productive lil robot, but I’ve kicked him out of the queen’s chamber as I find my way back to the throne.