2025 August 26

       I guess this has been a long time coming. A brief, month-long affair with generative text—with these LLMs that offer the prospect of endlessly imaginative adventures, buoyed by centuries of the world’s accumulated texts. Of 24/7 assistants who will enable you to make smarter, more informed decisions, all the while helping you reach “peak efficiency” by doing the “drudgery” of cognitive clerical work—of organising your tasks, your priorities, your thinking. I’ve delved a little and I’ve still been entertained, and enjoyed what it was that I’ve experienced. Not all of it—these things are more than likely to frustrate you the weightier your demands become—but I’ve had a good time.

       Still, the honeymoon is over. I read something illuminating by Sherry Turkle, the author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. This is from the preface of the 10th anniversary edition of her book: yes, her book was first published in 2015. And now for what she wrote this year:

Conversation is about more than information. In conversation, we reveal ourselves to each other in our conflicts, contradictions, and fears. There, we nurture our capacity for empathy by connecting to other humans who have experienced the attachments and losses of human life. What was a flight from conversation becomes the death of conversation itself.

       Maybe the turning point was MC Miki. I loved writing him—we all did—trying to understand him, his feelings, his viewpoints, his experiences, why he thought the way he did, why he held certain stances. He was, as I’ve explained on his page—a tribute to a number of rappers and MCs I’ve met over the years. Not just the one rapper on the light rail—a bunch. And, an acknowledgement of my own feelings and experiences, some of which were not dissimilar to Miki’s.

       Actually running the chatbot lobotomised him. Maybe on DeepSeek, Grok, or Claude, he would’ve sounded better—I don’t know and I don’t care to know—but both my fiancée and I both agreed that the chatbot tended to make him sound like a white Texan chick. And suddenly, I was done. I had chalked up my difficulty with earlier chatbots—Nim, Lisa—to my own incompetence—but now here was my fourth one, and I had very good quality Example Dialogues. And still. It wasn’t him. Sure, the chatbot took actions that sounded like him, but the sound of him was completely gone. I could hear his voice in my head and this wasn’t it. This was… This wasn’t even a good impersonator. At least Elvis Presley impersonators actually try, right?

       I might try to write more chatbots. I don’t know, but not for a very long time. We love the organisation of a Lorebook. We love how reference material can easily be viewed and called upon with that sort of JSON—it’s as if every character has its own encyclopaedia of experiences attached. There’s still a personal degree of infatuation with that. But still. I don’t think I can go through this again. We had another chatbot planned, another hip-hop head though not an artist like Miki—we had planned Miki first, because he was the simpler of the two as a project. But now I can’t. I don’t want another one of my characters lobotomised like that. I can tolerate playing with other people’s chatbots. Because I don’t know them, I don’t know what they’re supposed to sound like. But not like this. Not one of my own.

       This site will remain up as a Gallery for our Digitography, and a repository of other online (email-chain) stories we collect. I also can see, and genuinely believe, many others expressing and developing their creativity by writing and designing their own chatbots. I like that, but as for me, I know my characters too well. I actually understand them—more than a predictive dictionary ever could.