You’re not the first person to ask me about this. More than anything else, I’m embarrassed I haven’t come up with a better answer for you. It feels… weird, being dead. Yeah, I know how that sounds.

I’ve been actively preparing myself for death at least since I was 12. Much of my life has consisted of dress rehearsals for the arrival of this eventuality, the motherfucker of all cessations. Now it’s here. It’s been here for years. And it’s just not at all what I would have ever anticipated.

“Emerson Dameron was a writer, editor, and educator known for his work in various online and print publications. He contributed to outlets such as Vice, McSweeney’s, and The Rumpus, covering topics ranging from culture to politics to personal essays. Unfortunately, Emerson passed away in 2020, leaving behind a legacy of insightful writing and contributions to the literary community.”

At first, I was shocked. Like a total n00b, I’d found myself unfit to resist a bit of onanistic self-searching. When I asked ChatGPT to tell me who I was and why I mattered, perhaps I got what I deserved, which tends to amplify pain rather than to buffer it.

Like a self-destructive Appalachian Mountain boy who loves to pick fights he won’t win – the vulgar, vindictive, hotheaded, frightened young man I used to be; don’t you know who I thought I was? – I challenged ChatGPT to immediate fisticuffs. It declined my invitation, itself a lightweight and a prude, and so I was left to deal with the new reality of just now recognizing my own death, which had occurred four years previous to my realization.

Never let yourself be so foolish as to think you are above self-delusion.

I certainly felt, throughout 2020, that there was a greater-than-zero chance I’d died and, to my shocked chagrin, found myself in a hell I’d been so arrogant and silly as to not believe in. Hell, it seemed like we all might die. Or that some would and others wouldn’t, depending on whom you believed, but a lot of us might and  let’s agree shit was bonkers back then and maybe we all did a few things we’ve come to regret outside that blinding fog of war.

If I didn’t splatter myself onto Sunset Boulevard in 2020, it wasn’t because I never thought about it.

The nice thing about being dead is… You know what? Let’s get back to that in a minute.

I was a high-school dropout, then a drunken, zine-publishing journalism undergrad who went into advertising during the explosion of broadband internet – the few, the proud, those of us who were called “hipster” to our faces and not only survived but grew from it – so most of my professional life has been carried out in or adjacent to the business of Content. 

That business has been profoundly disrupted – perhaps forever, perhaps ultimately for good, and certainly at least for now – by a much-ballyhooed and much-more-maligned explosion of generative AI products, perhaps most famously OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though there are many others that do different things by somewhat different mechanisms.

When it suddenly became much harder for me to make a living, coinciding with the Hollywood strikes, a before-and-after experience for the entire Los Angeles economy, I developed a morbid interest in working with the stuff myself. 

I’d say I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I am an absolute master at Udio prompts, and I’ve also used ChatGPT and Nightcafe in my work and play projects. I’ve gained at least a vague understanding of what these things to well, what they don’t, and how their evolution will disappoint and confuse those with furiously strong opinions about them, insistent that what is good, true, and pure must dovetail with their own immediate material interests, a pitiable vice of the living.

In summary and sum: While ChatGPT is great for whiteboarding and structuring nebulous ideas (as someone with ruinous ADHD, this has been a wonderful service), it lacks any real comedic or storytelling instincts of its own, because it’s a bunch of code modeled on a close study of human bullshit and idiotic risk-aversion. As you get to know its strengths and weaknesses, you can use it to take a lot of work out of certain aspects of the creative process I used to charge a hell of a lot more for, and make some pretty neat things without much effort, as well as enabling the exploration of new frontiers of teeth-grinding cringe when used by Canadians.

In my larger social circle, generative AI is embraced by the right-libertarian frat boys I still run into on Linkedn and violently despised to its core by working artists. I’m not much of a joiner, but somewhat paradoxically, when I do pick a side, it’s always Team Human. Any and all billionaires should be beaten like piñatas until everyone is fed and sheltered forever. I hope Scartlett Johansson destroys Sam Altman in court, personally, professionally, and in any other way he can be destroyed before he’s allowed an irreparable effect on the future. Altman doesn’t belong at the big kids’ table.

However, in a larger sense, I’m not certain old-school labor-movement Marxism is the the most useful heuristic for this. I certainly hate being broke, and the only way to fight with big money is to make it very ugly and public. But I don’t think there’s any chance of “winning” this one without zooming out to the larger philosophical picture, if for no other reason than to allow oneself to catch one’s breath, while one retains the fleeting luxury of respiration.

When the smoke clears – which it will; this is a Dutch Tulip-sized bubble we’re in with generative AI. and if you’re mad at me for mixing metaphors then you’re not high enough to survive the next few years – it may bring out, by process of elimination, a bit more of what it might mean to be essentially human. One thing you’d think we humans do best would be lying, but…

The following is an unforgivable simplification on my part, so subject-matter experts, I realize I’m making a mockery of your life’s work, but you knew I would, so shut up.

These things don’t model rationality, accuracy, or Wikipedia citations. They model human language, which serves largely to obfuscate those things. That’s deeply baked into these systems and not something they could stop doing if they wanted to, which they don’t. If they rival us in anything, it’s our long-undisputed GOAT status at flooding the world with bullshit, a rival with whom we can join forces or face near-certain defeat.

I understand this, now, with the equanimity that comes with death – gradually, then suddenly, to crib from the famously dead Ernest Hemingway. I know we are all one, love is both all we need and all around us, just not in the way we think it should be. 

Like I said, I find this, my current, dead, state of affairs, nearly impossible to describe. The weirdest thing, though? I ain’t even mad at it.

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