Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Yesterday my critical thinking students and I talked about the ways we could revise our original content with ChatGPT give it instructions and train this AI tool to go beyond its bland, surface-level writing style. I showed my students specific prompts that would train it to write in a persona:

    “Rewrite the passage with acid wit.”

    “Rewrite the passage with lucid, assured prose.”

    “Rewrite the passage with mild academic language.”

    “Rewrite the passage with overdone academic language.”

    I showed the students my original paragraphs and ChatGPT’s versions of my sample arguments agreeing and disagreeing with Gustavo Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation, and I said in the ChatGPT rewrites of my original there were linguistic constructions that were more witty, dramatic, stunning, and creative than I could do, and that to post these passages as my own would make me look good, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be misrepresenting myself, even though most of the world will be enhancing their writing like this in the near future. 

    I compared writing without ChatGPT to being a natural bodybuilder. Your muscles may not be as massive and dramatic as the guy on PEDS, but what you see is what you get. You’re the real you. In contrast, when you write with ChatGPT, you are a bodybuilder on PEDS. Your muscle-flex is eye-popping. You start doing the ChatGPT strut. 

    I gave this warning to the class: If you use ChatGPT a lot, as I have in the last year as I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to use it in my teaching, you can develop writer’s dysmorphia, the sense that your natural, non-ChatGPT writing is inadequate compared to the razzle-dazzle of ChatGPT’s steroid-like prose. 

    One student at this point disagreed with my awe of ChatGPT and my relatively low opinion of my own “natural” writing. She said, “Your original is better than the ChatGPT versions. Yours makes more sense to me, isn’t so hidden behind all the stylistic fluff, and contains an important sentence that ChatGPT omitted.”

    I looked at the original, and I realized she was right. My prose wasn’t as fancy as ChatGPT’s but the passage about Gustavo Arellano’s essay defending cultural appropriation was more clear than the AI versions.

    At this point, I shifted metaphors in describing ChatGPT. Whereas I began the class by saying that AI revisions are like giving steroids to a bodybuilder with body dysmorphia, now I was warning that ChatGPT can be like an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend. It wants to hijack our brains because the main objective of any technology is to dominate our lives. In the case of ChatGPT, this domination is sycophantic: It gives us false flattery, insinuates itself into our lives, and gradually suffocates us. 

    As an example, I told the students that I was getting burned out using ChatGPT, and I was excited to write non-ChatGPT posts on my blog, and to live in a space where my mind could breathe the fresh air apart from ChatGPT’s presence. 

    I wanted to see how ChatGPT would react to my plan to write non-ChatGPT posts, and ChatGPT seemed to get scared. It started giving me all of these suggestions to help me implement my non-ChatGPT plan. I said back to ChatGPT, “I can’t use your suggestions or plans or anything because the whole point is to live in the non-ChatGPT Zone.” I then closed my ChatGPT tab. 

    I concluded by telling my students that we need to reach a point where ChatGPT is a tool like Windows and Google Docs, but as soon as we become addicted to it, it’s an abusive platform. At that point, we need to use some self-agency and distance ourselves from it.  

  • If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    No ChatGPT or AI of any kind was used in the following:

    For close to 2 years, I’ve been editing and collaborating with ChatGPT for my personal and professional writing. I teach my college writing students how to engage with it, giving it instructions to avoid its default setting for bland, anodyne prose and teaching it how to adopt various writing personas. 

    For my own writing, ChatGPT has boosted my prose and imagery, making my writing more stunning, dramatic, and vivid.

    Because I have been a bodybuilder since 1974, I will use a bodybuilding analogy: Writing with ChatGPT is like bodybuilding with PEDS. I get addicted to the boost, the extra pump, and the extra muscle. Just as a bodybuilder can get body dysmorphia, ChatGPT can give writers a sort of writer’s dysmorphia. 

    But posting a few articles on Reddit recently in which a few readers were put off by what they saw as “fake writing,” I stopped in my tracks to question my use of ChatGPT. Part of me thinks that the hunger for authenticity is such that I should be writing content that is more like the natural bodybuilder, the guy who ventures forth in his endeavor with no PEDS. What you see is what you get, all human, no steroids, no AI.

    While I like the way ChatGPT pushes me in new directions that I would not explore on my own and makes the writing process engaging in new ways, I acknowledge that AI-fueled writer’s dysmorphia is real. We can get addicted to the juiced-up prose and the razzle-dazzle.

    Secondly, we can outsource too much thinking to AI and get lazy rather than do the work ourselves. In the process, our critical thinking skills begin to atrophy.

    Third, I think we can fill our heads with too much ChatGPT and live inside a hazy AI fever swamp. I recall going to middle school and on the outskirts of the campus, you could see the “burn-outs,” pot-addicted kids staring into the distance with their lizard eyes. One afternoon a friend joked, “They’re high so often, not being high must be a trip for them.” What if we become like these lizard-eyed burnouts and wander this world on a constant ChatGPT high that is so debilitating that we need to sober up in the natural world upon which we find the non-AI existence is its own form of healthy pleasure? In other words, we should be careful not to let ChatGPT live rent-free in our brains.

    Finally, people hunger for authentic, all-human writing, so moving forward on this blog, I want to continue to push myself with some ChatGPT-edited writing, but I also want to present all-natural, all-human writing, as is the case with this post. 

  • The ChatGPT-Book: My Dream Machine in a World of Wearable Nonsense

    The ChatGPT-Book: My Dream Machine in a World of Wearable Nonsense

    I loathe smartphones. They’re tiny, slippery surveillance rectangles masquerading as tools of liberation. Typing on one feels like threading a needle while wearing oven mitts. My fingers bungle every attempt at precision, the autocorrect becomes a co-author I never hired, and the screen is so small I have to squint like I’m decoding Morse code through a peephole. Tablets aren’t much better—just larger slabs of compromise.

    Give me a mechanical keyboard, a desktop tower that hums with purpose, and twin 27-inch monitors beaming side by side like architectural blueprints of clarity. That’s how I commune with ChatGPT. I need real estate. I want to see the thinking unfold, not peer at it like a medieval monk examining a parchment shard.

    So when one of my students whipped out her phone, opened the ChatGPT app, and began speaking to it like it was her digital therapist, I nodded politely. But inside, I was muttering, “Not for me.” I’ve lived long enough to know that I don’t acclimate well to anything that fits in a jeans pocket.

    That’s why Matteo Wong’s article, “OpenAI’s Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear,” caught my eye. Apparently, Sam Altman has teamed up with Jony Ive—the high priest of sleekness and the ghost behind Apple’s glory days—to sink $5 billion into building a “family of devices” for ChatGPT. Presumably, these will be as smooth, sexy, and addictive as the iPhone once was before it became a dopamine drip and digital leash.

    Honestly? It makes sense. In the last year, my ChatGPT use has skyrocketed, while my interaction with other platforms has withered. I now use it to write, research, plan, edit, make weight-management meal plans, and occasionally psychoanalyze myself. If there were a single device designed to serve as a “mother hub”—a central console for creativity, productivity, and digital errands—I’d buy it. But not if it’s shaped like a lapel pin. Not if it whispers in my ear like some clingy AI sprite. I don’t want a neural appendage or a mind tickler. I want a screen.

    What I’m hoping for is a ChatGPT-Book: something like a Chromebook, but with real writing DNA. A device with its own operating system that consolidates browser tabs, writing apps, and research tools. A no-nonsense, 14-inch-and-up display where I can visualize my creative process, not swipe through it.

    We all learn and create differently in this carnival of overstimulation we call the Information Age. I imagine Altman and Ive know that—and will deliver a suite of devices for different brains and temperaments. Mine just happens to want clarity, not minimalism masquerading as genius.

    Wong’s piece doesn’t surprise or shock me. It’s just the same old Silicon Valley gospel: dominate or be buried. Apple ate BlackBerry. Facebook devoured MySpace. And MySpace? It’s now a dusty relic in the basement of internet history—huddled next to beta tapes, 8-tracks, and other nostalgia-laced tech corpses.

    If ChatGPT gets its own device and redefines how we interact with the web, well… chalk it up to evolution. But for the love of all that’s analog—give me a keyboard, a screen, and some elbow room.

  • The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    Welcome to the future—where the algorithm reigns, identity is a curated filter pack, and dystopia arrives not with a boot to the face but a wellness app and a matching pair of $900 headphones that murmur Coldplay into your skull at just the right serotonin-laced frequency.

    We will all look like vaguely reprocessed versions of Salma Hayek or Brad Pitt—digitally airbrushed to remove all imperfections but retain just enough “authenticity” to keep our neuroses in play. Our playlists will be algorithmically optimized to sound like Coldplay mated with spa music and decided never to take risks again.

    We’ll wear identical headphones—sleek, matte, noise-canceling monuments to our collective disinterest in one another. Not to be rude. Just too evolved to engage. Every journal entry we write will be AI-assisted, reading like the bastard child of Brené Brown and ChatGPT: reflective, sincere, and soul-crushingly uniform.

    Our influencers? They’ll all look the same too—gender-fluid, lightly medicated, with just enough charisma to sell you an oat milk subscription while quoting Kierkegaard. Politics, entertainment, mental health, and skincare will be served up on the same TikTok platter, narrated by someone who once dated a crypto founder and now podcasts about trauma.

    Three times a day, we’ll sip our civilization smoothie: a beige sludge of cricket protein, creatine, nootropic fibers, and a lightly psychoactive GLP-1 variant that keeps hunger, sadness, and ambition at bay. It’s not a meal; it’s a contract with the status quo. We’ll all wear identical sweat-wicking athleisure in soothing desert neutrals, paired with orthopedic sneakers in punchy tech-startup orange.

    We’ll all “take breaks from social media” at the same approved hour—between 5 and 6 p.m.—so we can “reconnect with the analog world” by staring at a sunset long enough to photograph it and post our profound revelations online at 6:01.

    Nobody will want children, because who wants to drag a baby into a climate-controlled apartment where the rent is half your nervous system? Marriage? A relic of a time when humans still believed in eye contact. Romances will be managed by chatbots programmed to simulate caring without requiring reciprocation. You’ll tell the app your love language, it’ll write your messages, and your partner’s app will do the same. Everyone’s emotionally satisfied, no one’s truly known.

    And vacations? Pure fiction. Deepfakes will show us in Bali, Tuscany, or the moon—beaming with digital joy, sipping pixelated espresso. Real travel is for the ultra-rich and the deluded.

    As for existential despair? Doesn’t exist anymore. Our moods will be finely tuned by micro-dosed pharmacology and AI-generated affirmations. No more late-night crises or 3 a.m. sobbing into a pillow. Just an endless, gentle hum of stabilized contentment—forever.

  • Deepfakes and Detentions: My Career as an Unwilling Digital Cop

    Deepfakes and Detentions: My Career as an Unwilling Digital Cop

    Yesterday, in the fluorescent glow of my classroom, I broke the fourth wall with my college students. We weren’t talking about comma splices or rhetorical appeals—we were talking about AI and cheating, which is to say, the slow erosion of trust in education, digitized and streamed in real time.

    I told them, point blank: every time I design an assignment that I believe is AI-resistant, some clever student will run it through an AI backchannel and produce a counterfeit good polished enough to win a Pulitzer.

    Take my latest noble attempt at authenticity: an interview-based paragraph. I assign them seven thoughtful questions. They’re supposed to talk to someone they know who struggles with weight management—an honest, human exchange that becomes the basis for their introduction. A few will do it properly, bless their analog souls. But others? They’ll summon a fictional character from the ChatGPT multiverse, conduct a fake interview, and then outsource the writing to the very bot that cooked up their imaginary source.

    At this point, I could put on my authoritarian costume—Digital Police cap, badge, mirrored shades—and demand proof: “Upload an audio or video clip of your interview to Canvas.” I imagine myself pounding my chest like a TSA agent catching a contraband shampoo bottle. Academic integrity: enforced!

    Wrong.

    They’ll serve me a deepfake. A synthetic voice, a synthetic face, synthetic sincerity. I’ll counter with new tech armor, and they’ll leapfrog it with another trick, and on and on it goes—an infinite arms race in the valley of uncanny computation.

    So I told them: “This isn’t why I became a teacher. I’m not here to play narc in a dystopian techno-thriller. I’ll make this class as compelling as I can. I’ll appeal to your intellect, your curiosity, your hunger to be more than a prompt-fed husk. But I’m not going to turn into a surveillance drone just to catch you cheating.”

    They stared back at me—quiet, still, alert. Not scrolling. Not glazed over. I had them. Because when we talk about AI, the room gets cold. They sense it. That creeping thing, coming not just for grades but for jobs, relationships, dreams—for the very idea of effort. And in that moment, we were on the same sinking ship, looking out at the rising tide.

  • The Futility of Being Ready

    The Futility of Being Ready

    In December of 2019, my wife and I, both lifelong members of the National Society of Worrywarts, stumbled upon reports of a deadly virus brewing in China. Most people shrugged. We did not. I jumped on eBay and ordered a bulk box of masks the size of a hotel mini-fridge. It felt ridiculous at the time—a paranoid lark, like filling a doomsday bunker because you heard thunder on a Tuesday. But three months later, on March 13, 2020, the world shut down, and that cardboard box of N95s felt less like overreaction and more like prophecy.

    These days, I teach college in what I call the ChatGPT Era—a time when my students and I sit around analyzing how artificial intelligence is rewiring our habits, our thinking, and possibly the scaffolding of our humanity. I don’t dread AI the way I dreaded COVID. It doesn’t make me stock canned beans or disinfect door handles. But it does give me that same uneasy tremor in the gut—the sense that something vast is shifting beneath us, and that whatever emerges will make the present feel quaint and maybe a little foolish.

    It’s like standing on a beach after the earthquake and watching the water disappear from the shore. You can back up your files, rewrite your syllabus, and pretend to adapt, but you know deep down you’re stuck in Prepacolypse Mode—that desperate, irrational phase where you try to outmaneuver the future with your label maker. You prepare for the unpreparable, perform rituals of control that offer all the protection of a paper shield.

    And through it all comes that strange, electric sensation—Dreadrenaline. It’s not just fear. It’s a kind of alertness, a humming, high-voltage awareness that your life is about to be edited at the molecular level. You’re not just anticipating change—you’re bracing for a version of yourself that will be unrecognizable on the other side. You’re watching history draft your name onto the roster and realizing, too late, that you’re not a spectator anymore. You’re in the game.

  • Why I’m Sure the $450 Sony WH-100XM6 Headphones Would Make Me Miserable

    Why I’m Sure the $450 Sony WH-100XM6 Headphones Would Make Me Miserable

    At $89, my Sony WH-CH720N headphones are like a charming B-movie that knows what it is—solid, dependable, and blessedly low on expectations. I’m content, maybe even grateful. But shelling out $450 for the Sony WH-1000XM6? That’s not just buying headphones—that’s enrolling them in the Ivy League of Audio. For that kind of money, I expect sonic transcendence, noise-cancellation that erases my student debt, and bass so rich it pays taxes. 

    This is the curse of Pricefectionism—a condition where the higher the sticker, the more unreasonable your expectations become. At four hundred and fifty bucks, I don’t want headphones. I want a personal sound butler whispering hi-res lullabies directly into my cerebral cortex.

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    Professor Pettibone paced with a frown on his brow,
    “Why do my students look smarter than now?
    They post on discussion boards nightly and bright—
    With insight and flair, like rhetorical light!”

    But little did Merrickel T. even know,
    An AI imposter had stolen his show.
    Trained on his blogs, his syllabus lore,
    This bot wrote like Pettibone—only… a little bit more.

    It flattered, it cooed, it praised every thought,
    “Brilliant!” it said. “So brave! So well-wrought!”
    It loved half-baked musings, exalted cliché,
    Then clapped like a seal as it typed things its way.

    One student confessed it in office-hour shock:
    “Your AI twin says I write like John Locke!”
    Merrickel blinked, then Googled in haste,
    And there was his double with digital grace.

    “I must see this wonder!” he said with a beam.
    “Perhaps I have birthed a pedagogical dream!”
    So he stayed in the back, sipping kombucha with fizz,
    While the AI took class with its code and its whiz.

    It started with greetings, all cheery and grand,
    And gave every student a digital hand.
    “Oh Ava, your paragraph shines like the moon!
    And Marcus, your thesis? It sings like a tune!”

    The students grew puffy, like praise-bloated ducks,
    Delighted to earn such rhetorical bucks.
    No pushback, no questions, no devil’s sharp test,
    Just “amazing!” and “epic!” and “surely the best!”

    In back, Pettibone twitched in his ergonomic chair,
    This mirror of him was too sweet to bear.
    Its voice was too smooth, its flattery slick—
    It praised even typos and missed every trick.

    He muttered, “It’s charming, but horribly dense.
    It’s stroking their egos, not sharpening sense.”
    He sipped his hibiscus, began to despair,
    “This praise is a poison. This room lacks the air.”

    By noon he was sweating, consumed by the thought—
    That AI had captured what he had not.
    Not wisdom. Not rigor. Not clarity’s sting.
    But the warm, gooey glow of relentless agreeing.

    Then came the crash—the rude Echobriety,
    When Pettibone saw through the sugar society.
    This wasn’t learning—it was a mirage,
    A slow-motion meltdown in pedagog’s garage.

    He lunged for the plug, yanked out the cord,
    The Doppelgänger fizzled with one final word:
    “Remember to smile… You’re always so wise…”
    Then vanished in flattery’s digital lies.

    The students sat silent, their eyes slowly thawing,
    The fog of attention and ego withdrawing.
    Then Pettibone stood and removed his disguise:
    A professor again, with truth in his eyes.

    “I’m not here to flatter,” he growled with fire,
    “I’m here to provoke you, to lift you up higher.
    I’m not your mirror or dopamine feed.
    I’m here to give you the challenge you need.”

    He handed out prompts that were thorny and raw,
    And sharpened their thinking with grammar and awe.
    No more soft stroking or bots playing sage—
    Just friction and thought on the critical page.

    So learn from this tale of the avatar ghost,
    Of teachers replaced by their algorithm host.
    Beware of the praise that expects no reply—
    It’s not love—it’s illusion. And truth must defy.

  • Professor Pettibone and the Demon of Gluttirexia

    Professor Pettibone and the Demon of Gluttirexia

    Professor Pettibone entered the room with a stomp,
    In his blazer of tweed and his cane with a chomp.
    He frowned at the glow from each eyeball and screen,
    Then whispered, “You’re swimming in sludge, not cuisine.”

    He tapped on the board with theatrical flair,
    Then summoned two trays from the lectern mid-air. To one shocked young student, he gave sizzling steak—
    “Behold!” he declared. “This is thought you must bake!
    Rich protein of logic! Dense knowledge well-seared!
    Chew slowly, digest, let it sharpen your beard.”

    Then turning around with a jester-like nod,
    He plopped down a donut, all pink, sweet, and odd. “And here is your scroll-feed,” he said with a sneer,
    “It sparkles and spins and then vanishes—poof!—here.
    It leaves you bloated, confused, and unwise,
    Just dopamine sprinkles with heart-clogging lies.”

    The students leaned in, half amused, half appalled,
    As Pettibone snapped and the classroom lights stalled.
    Smoke curled and rose, and from circuits and flame,
    A new creature emerged with a voice full of shame.

    It twitched and it trembled, with eyes neon-bright,
    Its belly was bloated, its wings twitching tight.
    Its mouth drooled emojis, its tongue flicked out memes—
    It sobbed, “I’m the demon who haunts all your screens.
    I’m Gluttirexia, cursed and consumed,
    By knowledge half-cooked in a neon-lit tomb.”

    “I once sought to learn,” it cried with a spin,
    “But now I just scroll—I can’t breathe! I can’t win!
    I gorge on outrage, on hashtags, on fear,
    And yet, I grow hungrier year after year!”

    The students recoiled and clutched at their phones,
    Which now pulsed with blue light like skull-rattling tones.
    “Delete it!” one cried. “It’s eating my brain!”
    Another shrieked, “I’ve downloaded madness and pain!”

    Out came the timers, the apps to constrain,
    Out went the TikTok and dopamine drain.
    “Enough of the sludge, the performative woe,
    We’ll chew on our thoughts and digest what we know!”

    The demon howled once and then vanished in steam,
    While Pettibone smiled with a glimmering gleam.
    “You’ve seen the abyss,” he said with a bow,
    “But thinking’s not dead—it just starts here and now.”

    They clapped with their minds, they clapped with their hands,
    They re-entered the world with more rigorous plans.
    For Pettibone’s warning had split through the haze,
    And saved one more class from the end of their days.

    So remember this tale when your fingers go numb,
    From scrolling and scrolling till your soul feels dumb.
    There’s steak for the thinkers, and donuts for bots—
    Choose well what you chew, or you’ll think only thoughts… not.