As a former professional musician, I've dealt with a lot of ear worms! I'm a hopeless opera fan, so I often find a soaring fragment of a Verdi aria or the surprising harmonic twists and turns of a Mozart finale stuck in my head. I must say, there are worse things.
It turns out that the worst thing for me is actually AI slop. Not the slop itself (although that is very taxing to read and deathly annoying to edit) but the impact it has on my inner ear.
As best I can tell, the rhythm of sanitized, predictable words is terribly effective at getting deep into my subconscious and taking over my inner monologue. But instead of a specific tune playing on repeat, it feels more like the absence of a tune…like my brain is stuck in short, staccato fragments and won't string words together the way I expect.
I grew up reading every book I could find. Dick Francis horse racing novels and Tom Clancy tomes, but also James Baldwin, James Joyce, Maya Angelou, Kazuo Ishiguro, John le Carré, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates.
While I'm sure I read plenty of poorly written sentences and beach-read page turners (as well as the occasional em dash), my word diet was overwhelmingly nutritious.
Not to take an analogy too far, but you are what you, er…read.
And so, back to the slop worm. It works its way into my brain through tiny drips: GitHub pull requests, not quite right inbound emails, Facebook ads, etc. Precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, AI slop chips away at my grammatical palate in a more subtle way than elevator music does my musical one. At least I can get off an elevator!
Over the last few months I'v taken steps to harden my defenses, but there isn't much one can do. Instead, I'm working to recover more quickly from my daily exposure. For instnace, I buy great magazines to flip through on the toilet (there are a surprising number of them), listen to music during my dog walks, read a poem a day, and work through writing prompts after dinner. I've also tired to spend more time playing scales on my bassoon and writing thank-you and birthday cards.
I'm doing this because it's about being able to really, truly think.
If writing is thinking on paper, then reading is how I sharpen my pencil and organize my desk. It's an essential process, and when those synapses get mangled, I lose access to a deeper line of thinking.
That's what I'm doing here with this post. I'm thinking by writing. Or more accurately, I'm practicing thinking by writing!
This website is an indulgence, but it feels urgent to keep my wits about me. To practice forming words and edit them carefully is a tool that I hope will help keep my inner monologue truly mine.
Thanks for reading. As you can tell, I wrote each word myself, and will continue to do so.
Now, back to Verdi!
