I Am Not A Robot

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It used to be pretty self-evident how someone writes something. These days that is not necessarily always the case. Let me tell you how I write these posts…

First I sit down at a keyboard, like I am doing now, and I just write. Right off the top of my dome. Then when I get to the end, I’ll read it back and maybe move a few things around. Delete one sentence, move a paragraph from here to there, maybe rephrase a couple of things. Basically just make sure that it reads well and I am getting across something close to what I was trying to say.

Then I will feed the whole thing into ChatGPT and ask it to check for grammar and spelling errors, and maybe give some suggestions on how I might improve the flow. My partner Nicole asked me why I need ChatGPT and why I don’t just use the red and blue squiggly lines that Word offers up. Why do I need Chatty when I’ve got his little brother Clippy? One reason really, I am prone to repeating myself and ChatGPT can pick that kind of thing up way better than Word ever could.

ChatGPT offers its suggestions, and sometimes I like what it has to say and I make the recommended changes. Then I go back to the start and read it again, just to make sure that none of my important points got broken during all of that editing. If I’m happy with everything, I post it to Substack.

Lately, before I make a post, I have been copy and pasting everything into ZeroGPT, which is essentially an AI detector. It itself is an AI that reads a chunk of text and then gives a percentage likelihood of whether a passage was composed by another AI. I have done this on the last three posts I have made, and despite doing exactly the same thing each time, the results have been wildly different.

On the first one, I put my raw text in and it gave me a 32% chance that it was written by an AI. Then I put my final text in, with minor changes made by ChatGPT, and the percentage increased from 32% to 36%. All that seemed pretty reasonable. A low chance of AI intervention, with a slightly higher chance after AI was actually involved. The next chunk of text gave me a 0% chance of it being written by AI, which might sound good but it actually made me quite self-conscious. What’s wrong with my writing? What makes it so sure that it wasn’t written by a chatbot? Is it really that bad? Then the most recent one gave me a 76% chance it was written by AI.

Each time I did exactly the same thing, and each time got wildly different results.

So what does all this mean? Well, what I think it means is that when Skynet finally does come online and the robot uprising begins in earnest, the machines are still going to have a hard time working out which ones are the humans and which are the other robots. Maybe if the robots show each other pictures of pedestrian crossings, motorcycles, and staircases it might make it a bit easier. For the time being at least, I think we are still safe.

UPDATE: According to ZeroGPT, there was a 21% chance that the raw text for this post was AI, which then climbed to 23% after ChatGPT had given it a bit of a polish.

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I don’t know if you remember, but a little while back I took myself into the city to walk around side streets and back alleyways, taking photos of layers of torn and weathered posters. 6th of October, to be precise. Well, I did what I tend to normally do after that. I spent the day walking around taking photos, then forgot about the photos entirely for over a month.

The last couple of days I have been going through some of these pictures and editing them to post on my Instagram page. As it turns out, there are some pretty good ones amongst them, and it seems only right that I should share some of them here as well.

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Some more musical suggestions, from my speakers to yours…

Doga - Juana Molina
I suppose you’d call it neo-psychedelic folktronica glitch-pop. Whatever it is, I love it. It makes me regret never learning to speak Spanish. Do yourself a favour and check this one out.

The Dead Have Come (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows
This is great. If you like spooky sci-fi synth vibes, with perhaps a theremin or two thrown in for good measure, then this is definitely for you.

Wherever You Are - John Foxx
Totally not what I was expecting. Tranquil piano music. Quite beautiful, even if it is a bit of a weird U-turn for Mr. Foxx.

My Anti-Aircraft Friend - Julie
What if Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine had a baby? I guess they’d call it Julie…

Knife The Ally - Lead Into Gold
Lead Into Gold was the side project of long-time Al Jourgensen collaborator Paul Ion Barker, but the last few years it seems to have become his main gig.

In The Name Of Blood - Sierra Veins
If you just happen to be in the middle of making a movie, and you’ve been thinking about what music to use in the vampire nightclub scene, maybe give this one a listen.