Cinemorphosis

Tag: chatgpt

  • Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    In his essay for The New Yorker, “What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?”, Vinson Cunningham zeroes in on the unspoken premise of today’s AI hype: the dream of total disengagement. He poses the unsettling question: “If human workers don’t have to read, write, or even think, it’s unclear what’s left to do.” It’s a fair point. If ads are any indication, the only thing left for us is to stare blankly into our screens like mollusks waiting to be spoon-fed.

    These ads don’t sell a product; they sell a philosophy—one that flatters your laziness. Fix a leaky faucet? Too much trouble. Write a thank-you note? Are you kidding? Plan a meal, change a diaper, troubleshoot your noise-canceling headphones? Outrageous demands for a species that now views thinking as an optional activity. The machines will do it, and we’ll cheerfully slide into amoebic irrelevance.

    What’s most galling is the heroism layered into the pitch: You’re not shirking your responsibilities, you’re delegating. You’re optimizing your workflow. You’re buying back your precious time. You’re a genius. A disruptor. A life-hacking, boundary-pushing modern-day Prometheus who figured out how to get out of reading bedtime stories to your children.

    But Cunningham has a sharper take. The message behind the AI lovefest isn’t just about convenience—it’s about hollowing us out. As he puts it, “The preferred state, it seems, is a zoned-out semi-presence, the worker accounted for in body but absent in spirit.” That’s what the ads are pushing: a blissful vegetative state, where you’re physically upright but intellectually comatose.

    Why read to your kids when an AI avatar can do it in a soothing British accent? Why help them with their homework when a bot can explain algebra, write essays, correct their errors, and manage their grades—while you binge Breaking Bad for the third time? Why have a conversation with their teacher when your chatbot can send a perfectly passive-aggressive email on your behalf?

    This is not the frictionless future we were promised. It’s a slow lobotomy served on a platter of convenience. The ads imply that the life of the mind is outdated. And critical thinking? That’s for chumps with time to kill. Thinking takes bandwidth—something that would be better spent refining your custom coffee order via voice assistant.

    Cunningham sees the bitter punchline: In our rush to outsource everything, we’ve made ourselves obsolete. And the machines, coldly efficient and utterly indifferent, are more than happy to take it from here.

  • My Philosophy of Grading in the Age of ChatGPT and Other Open-AI Writing Platforms (a mini manifesto for my syllabus)

    My Philosophy of Grading in the Age of ChatGPT and Other Open-AI Writing Platforms (a mini manifesto for my syllabus)

    Let’s start with this uncomfortable truth: you’re living through a civilization-level rebrand.

    Your world is being reshaped—not gradually, but violently, by algorithms and digital prosthetics designed to make your life easier, faster, smoother… and emptier. The disruption didn’t knock politely. It kicked the damn door in. And now, whether you realize it or not, you’re standing in the debris, trying to figure out what part of your life still belongs to you.

    Take your education. Once upon a time, college was where minds were forged—through long nights, terrible drafts, humiliating feedback, and the occasional breakthrough that made it all worth it. Today? Let’s be honest. Higher ed is starting to look like an AI-driven Mad Libs exercise.

    Some of you are already doing it: you plug in a prompt, paste the results, and hit submit. What you turn in is technically fine—spelled correctly, structurally intact, coherent enough to pass. And your professors? We’re grading these Franken-essays on caffeine and resignation, knowing full well that originality has been replaced by passable mimicry.

    And it’s not just school. Out in the so-called “real world,” companies are churning out bloated, tone-deaf AI memos—soulless prose that reads like it was written by a robot with performance anxiety. Streaming services are pumping out shows written by predictive text. Whole industries are feeding you content that’s technically correct but spiritually dead.

    You are surrounded by polished mediocrity.

    But wait, we’re not just outsourcing our minds—we’re outsourcing our bodies, too. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are reshaping what it means to be “disciplined.” No more calorie counting. No more gym humiliation. You don’t change your habits. You inject your progress.

    So what does that make you? You’re becoming someone new: someone we might call Ozempified. A user, not a builder. A reactor, not a responder. A person who runs on borrowed intelligence and pharmaceutical willpower. And it works. You’ll be thinner. You’ll be productive. You’ll even succeed—on paper.

    But not as a human being.

    If you over rely on AI, you risk becoming what the gaming world calls a Non-Player Character (NPC)—a background figure, a functionary, a placeholder in your own life. You’ll do your job. You’ll attend your Zoom meetings. You’ll fill out your forms and tap your apps and check your likes. But you won’t have agency. You won’t have fingerprints on anything real.

    You’ll be living on autopilot, inside someone else’s system.

    So here’s the choice—and yes, it is a choice: You can be an NPC. Or you can be an Architect.

    The Architect doesn’t react. The Architect designs. They choose discomfort over sedation. They delay gratification. They don’t look for applause—they build systems that outlast feelings, trends, and cheap dopamine tricks.

    Where others scroll, the Architect shapes.
    Where others echo, they invent.
    Where others obey prompts, they write the code.

    Their values aren’t crowdsourced. Their discipline isn’t random. It’s engineered. They are not ruled by algorithm or panic. Their satisfaction comes not from feedback loops, but from the knowledge that they are building something only they could build.

    So yes, this class will ask more of you than typing a prompt and letting the machine do the rest. It will demand thought, effort, revision, frustration, clarity, and eventually—agency.

    If your writing smacks of AI–the kind of polished mediocrity that will lead you down a road of being a functionary or a Non-Player Character, the grade you receive will reflect that sad fact. On the other hand, if your writing is animated by a strong authorial presence, evidence of an Architect, a person who strives for a life of excellence, self-agency, and pride, your grade will reflect that fact as well. 

  • Ozempification and the Death of the Inner Architect

    Ozempification and the Death of the Inner Architect

    Let’s start with this uncomfortable truth: you’re living through a civilization-level rebrand.

    Your world is being reshaped—not gradually, but violently, by algorithms and digital prosthetics designed to make your life easier, faster, smoother… and emptier. The disruption didn’t knock politely. It kicked the damn door in. And now, whether you realize it or not, you’re standing in the debris, trying to figure out what part of your life still belongs to you.

    Take your education. Once upon a time, college was where minds were forged—through long nights, terrible drafts, humiliating feedback, and the occasional breakthrough that made it all worth it. Today? Let’s be honest. Higher ed is starting to look like an AI-driven Mad Libs exercise.

    Some of you are already doing it: you plug in a prompt, paste the results, and hit submit. What you turn in is technically fine—spelled correctly, structurally intact, coherent enough to pass. And your professors? We’re grading these Franken-essays on caffeine and resignation, knowing full well that originality has been replaced by passable mimicry.

    And it’s not just school. Out in the so-called “real world,” companies are churning out bloated, tone-deaf AI memos—soulless prose that reads like it was written by a robot with performance anxiety. Streaming services are pumping out shows written by predictive text. Whole industries are feeding you content that’s technically correct but spiritually dead.

    You are surrounded by polished mediocrity.

    But wait, we’re not just outsourcing our minds—we’re outsourcing our bodies, too. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are reshaping what it means to be “disciplined.” No more calorie counting. No more gym humiliation. You don’t change your habits. You inject your progress.

    So what does that make you? You’re becoming someone new: someone we might call Ozempified. A user, not a builder. A reactor, not a responder. A person who runs on borrowed intelligence and pharmaceutical willpower. And it works. You’ll be thinner. You’ll be productive. You’ll even succeed—on paper.

    But not as a human being.

    You risk becoming what the gaming world calls a Non-Player Character (NPC)—a background figure, a functionary, a placeholder in your own life. You’ll do your job. You’ll attend your Zoom meetings. You’ll fill out your forms and tap your apps and check your likes. But you won’t have agency. You won’t have fingerprints on anything real.

    You’ll be living on autopilot, inside someone else’s system.

    So here’s the choice—and yes, it is a choice: You can be an NPC. Or you can be an Architect.

    The Architect doesn’t react. The Architect designs. They choose discomfort over sedation. They delay gratification. They don’t look for applause—they build systems that outlast feelings, trends, and cheap dopamine tricks.

    Where others scroll, the Architect shapes.
    Where others echo, they invent.
    Where others obey prompts, they write the code.

    Their values aren’t crowdsourced. Their discipline isn’t random. It’s engineered. They are not ruled by algorithm or panic. Their satisfaction comes not from feedback loops, but from the knowledge that they are building something only they could build.

    So yes, this class will ask more of you than typing a prompt and letting the machine do the rest. It will demand thought, effort, revision, frustration, clarity, and eventually—agency.

    Because in the age of Ozempification, becoming an Architect isn’t a flex—it’s a survival strategy.

    There is no salvation in a life run on autopilot.

    You’re here. So start building.

  • ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    In Matteo Wong’s sharp little dispatch, “The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta,” he argues that AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t quite ready for daily life. Not unless your definition of “ready” includes faucets that sometimes dispense boiling water instead of cold or cars that occasionally floor the gas when you hit the brakes. It’s an apt metaphor: we’re being sold precision, but what we’re getting is unpredictability in a shiny interface.

    I was reminded of this just yesterday when ChatGPT gave me the wrong title for a Meghan Daum essay collection—an essay I had just read. I didn’t argue. You don’t correct a toaster when it burns your toast; you just sigh and start over. ChatGPT isn’t thinking. It’s a stochastic parrot with a spellchecker. Its genius is statistical, not epistemological.

    And yet people keep treating it like a digital oracle. One of my students recently declared—thanks to ChatGPT—that Lacie Pound, the protagonist of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive,” dies a “tragic death.” She doesn’t. She ends the episode in a prison cell, laughing—liberated, not lifeless. But the essay had already been turned in, the damage done, the grade in limbo.

    This sort of glitch isn’t rare. It’s not even surprising. And yet this technology is now embedded into classrooms, military systems, intelligence agencies, healthcare diagnostics—fields where hallucinations are not charming eccentricities, but potential disasters. We’re handing the scalpel to a robot that sometimes thinks the liver is in the leg.

    Why? Because we’re impatient. We crave novelty. We’re addicted to convenience. It’s the same impulse that led OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush to ignore engineers, cut corners on sub design, and plunge five people—including himself—into a carbon-fiber tomb. Rush wanted to revolutionize deep-sea tourism before the tech was seaworthy. Now he’s a cautionary tale with his own documentary.

    The stakes with AI may not involve crushing depths, but they do involve crushing volumes of misinformation. The question isn’t Can ChatGPT produce something useful? It clearly can. The real question is: Can it be trusted to do so reliably, and at scale?

    And if not, why aren’t we demanding better? Why haven’t tech companies built in rigorous self-vetting systems—a kind of epistemological fail-safe? If an AI can generate pages of text in seconds, can’t it also cross-reference a fact before confidently inventing a fictional death? Shouldn’t we be layering safety nets? Or have we already accepted the lie that speed is better than accuracy, that beta is good enough?

    Are we building tools that enhance our thinking, or are we building dependencies that quietly dismantle it?

  • The Handwriting Is on the Wall for Writing Instructors Like Myself

    The Handwriting Is on the Wall for Writing Instructors Like Myself

    There’s a cliché I’ve avoided all my life because I’m supposed to be offended by cliches. I teach college writing. But now, God help me, I must say it: I see the handwriting on the wall. And it’s blinking in algorithmic neon and blinding my eyes.

    I’ve taught college writing for forty years. My wife, a fellow lifer in the trenches, has clocked twenty-five teaching sixth and seventh graders. Like other teachers, we got caught off-guard by AI writing platforms. We’re now staring down the barrel of obsolescence while AI platforms give us an imperious smile and say, “We’ve got this now.”

    Try crafting an “AI-resistant” assignment. Go ahead. Ask students to conduct interviews, keep journals, write about memories. They’ll feed your prompt into ChatGPT and create an AI interview, journal entry, and personal reflection that has all the depth and soul of stale Pop-Tart. You squint your eyes at these AI responses, and you can tell something isn’t right. They look sort of real but have a robotic element about them. Your AI-detecting software isn’t reliable so you refrain from making accusations. 

    When I tell my wife I feel that my job is in danger, she shrugs and says there’s little we can do. The toothpaste is out of the tube. There’s no going back. 

    I suppose my wife will be a glorified camp counselor with grading software. For me, it will be different. I teach college. I’ll have to attend a re-education camp dressed up as “professional development.” I’ll have to learn how to teach students to prompt AI like Vegas magicians—how to trick it into coherence, how to interrogate its biases. Writing classes will be rebranded as Prompt Engineering.”

    At sixty-three, I’m no fool. I know what happens to tired draft horses when the carriage goes electric. I’ve seen the pasture. I can smell the industrial glue. And I’m not alone. My colleagues—bright, literate, and increasingly demoralized—mutter the same bitter mantra: “We are the AI police. And the criminals are always one jailbreak ahead.”

  • The Composition Apocalypse: How AI Ate the Syllabus

    The Composition Apocalypse: How AI Ate the Syllabus

    We’ve arrived at the third and final essay in this course, and the gloves are off.

    Just as GLP-1 drugs are transforming eating—from pleasure to optimization—AI is transforming writing. That’s not speculation; it’s the new syllabus. We’re witnessing the great extinction event of the traditional writing process. Drafting, revising, struggling with a paragraph like it’s a Rubik’s Cube in the dark? That’s quaint now. The machines are here, and they’re fast, fluent, and disarmingly coherent.

    Meanwhile, college writing programs are playing catch-up while the bots are already teaching themselves AP Composition. If we want writing instructors to remain relevant (i.e., not replaced by a glowing terminal that says “Rewrite?”), we’ll need to reimagine our role. The new instructor is less grammar cop, more rhetorical strategist. Part voice coach, part creative director, part ethicist.

    Your task:
    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay responding to this claim:
    To remain essential in the Age of AI, college writing instruction must evolve from teaching students how to write to teaching students how to think—critically, ethically, and strategically—alongside machines.

    Consider how AI is reprogramming the writing process and what we must do in response:

    • Should writing classes teach AI prompt-crafting instead of thesis statements?
    • Will rhetorical literacy and moral clarity become more important than knowing where to put a semicolon?
    • Should students learn to turn Blender into a rhetorical tool—visualizing arguments as 3D structures or spatial infographics?
    • Will gamification and multimodal projects replace the five-paragraph zombie essay?
    • Are writing studios the future—dynamic, collaborative AI-human spaces where “How well can you prompt?” becomes the new “How well can you argue?”

    In short, what must the writing classroom become when the act of writing itself is no longer uniquely human?

    This prompt doesn’t ask you to mourn the old ways. It demands that you architect the new ones. Push past nostalgia and imagine what a post-ChatGPT curriculum might look like—not just to survive the AI onslaught, but to lead it.

  • The Rebranding of College Writing Instructors as Prompt Engineers

    The Rebranding of College Writing Instructors as Prompt Engineers

    There’s a cliché I’ve sidestepped for decades, the kind of phrase I’ve red-penned into oblivion in freshman essays. But now, God help me, I must say it: I see the handwriting on the wall. And it’s written in 72-point sans serif, blinking in algorithmic neon.

    I’ve taught college writing for forty years. My wife, a fellow lifer in the trenches, has clocked twenty-five teaching sixth and seventh graders. Between us, we’ve marked enough essays to wallpaper the Taj Mahal. And yet here we are, staring down the barrel of obsolescence while AI platforms politely tap us on the shoulder and whisper, “We’ve got this now.”

    Try crafting an “AI-resistant” assignment. Go ahead. Ask students to conduct interviews, keep journals, write about memories. They’ll feed your prompt into ChatGPT with the finesse of a hedge fund trader moving capital offshore. The result? A flawlessly ghostwritten confession by a bot with a stunning grasp of emotional trauma and a suspicious lack of typos.

    Middle school teachers, my wife says, are on their way to becoming glorified camp counselors with grading software. As for us college instructors, we’ll be lucky to avoid re-education camps dressed up as “professional development.” The new job? Teaching students how to prompt AI like Vegas magicians—how to trick it into coherence, how to interrogate its biases, how to extract signal from synthetic noise. Critical thinking rebranded as Prompt Engineering.

    Gone are the days of unpacking the psychic inertia of J. Alfred Prufrock or peeling back the grim cultural criticism of Coetzee’s Disgrace. Now it’s Kahoot quizzes and real-time prompt battles. Welcome to Gamified Rhetoric 101. Your syllabus: Minecraft meets Brave New World.

    At sixty-three, I’m no fool. I know what happens to tired draft horses when the carriage goes electric. I’ve seen the pasture. I can smell the industrial glue. And I’m not alone. My colleagues—bright, literate, and increasingly demoralized—mutter the same bitter mantra: “We are the AI police. And the criminals are always one jailbreak ahead.”

    We keep saying we need to “stop the bleeding,” another cliché I’d normally bin. But here I am, bleeding clichés like a wounded soldier of the Enlightenment, fighting off the Age of Ozempification—a term I’ve coined to describe the creeping automation of everything from weight loss to wit. We’re not writing anymore; we’re curating prompts. We’re not thinking; we’re optimizing.

    This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity. And if clarity means leaning on a cliché, so be it.

  • Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    I’m typing this to the sound of Beethoven—1,868 MP3s of compressed genius streamed through the algorithmic convenience of a playlist. It’s a 41-hour-and-8-minute monument to compromise: a simulacrum of sonic excellence that can’t hold a candle to the warmth of an LP. But convenience wins. Always.

    I make Faustian bargains like this daily. Thirty-minute meals instead of slow-cooked transcendence. Athleisure instead of tailoring. A Honda instead of high horsepower. The good-enough over the sublime. Not because I’m lazy—because I’m functional. Efficient. Optimized.

    And now, writing.

    For a year, my students and I have been feeding prompts into ChatGPT like a pagan tribe tossing goats into the volcano—hoping for inspiration, maybe salvation. Sometimes it works. The AI outlines, brainstorms, even polishes. But the more we rely on it, the more I feel the need to write without it—just to remember what my own voice sounds like. Just as the vinyl snob craves the imperfections of real analog music or the home cook insists on peeling garlic by hand, I need to suffer through the process.

    We’re caught in a metaphysical tug-of-war. We crave convenience but revere authenticity. We binge AI-generated sludge by day, then go weep over a hand-made pie crust YouTube video at night. We want our lives frictionless, but our souls textured. It’s the new sacred vs. profane: What do we reserve for real, and what do we surrender to the machine?

    I can’t say where this goes. Maybe real food will be phased out, like Blockbuster or bookstores. Maybe we’ll subsist on GLP-1 drugs, AI-tailored nutrient paste, and the joyless certainty of perfect lab metrics.

    As for entertainment, I’m marginally more hopeful. Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman—these are voices, not products. AI can churn out sitcoms, but it can’t bleed. It can’t bomb. It can’t riff on childhood trauma with perfect timing. Humans know the difference between a story and a story-shaped thing.

    Still, writing is in trouble. Reading, too. AI erodes attention spans like waves on sandstone. Books? Optional. Original thought? Delegated. The more AI floods the language, the more we’ll acclimate to its sterile rhythm. And the more we acclimate, the less we’ll even remember what a real voice sounds like.

    Yes, there will always be the artisan holdouts—those who cook, write, read, and listen with intention. But they’ll be outliers. A boutique species. The rest of us will be lean, medicated, managed. Data-optimized units of productivity.

    And yet, there will be stories. There will always be stories. Because stories aren’t just culture—they’re our survival instinct dressed up as entertainment. When everything else is outsourced, commodified, and flattened, we’ll still need someone to stand up and tell us who we are.

  • College Essay Prompt: Performance, Collapse, and the Hunger for Validation

    College Essay Prompt: Performance, Collapse, and the Hunger for Validation

    In the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Lacie Pound carefully curates her public persona to climb the social ranking system, only to experience a spectacular breakdown when her performative identity collapses. Similarly, in the Netflix documentary Untold: The Liver King, Brian Johnson (aka the Liver King) constructs a hyper-masculine brand built on ancestral living and self-discipline, but his digital persona unravels after his steroid use is exposed—calling into question the authenticity of his entire identity.

    Drawing on insights from The Social Dilemma and Sherry Turkle’s TED Talk “Connected, but alone?”, write an 8-paragraph essay analyzing how both Lacie Pound and the Liver King experience breakdowns caused by the pressure to perform a marketable self online. Consider how their stories reveal broader truths about the emotional and psychological toll of living in a world where self-worth is measured through digital validation.

    Instructions:

    Your essay should have a clear thesis and be structured as follows:

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Briefly introduce Lacie Pound and the Liver King as case studies in digital performance.
    • State your thesis: What common psychological or social dynamic do their stories reveal about life in the attention economy?

    Paragraph 2 – The Rise of the Performed Self

    • Explain how Lacie and the Liver King construct public identities tailored for approval.
    • Use The Social Dilemma and/or Turkle to support your claim about the pressures of online self-curation.

    Paragraph 3 – The Collapse of Lacie Pound

    • Analyze the arc of Lacie’s breakdown.
    • Show how social scoring leads to isolation and emotional implosion.

    Paragraph 4 – The Unmasking of the Liver King

    • Describe how his confession undermines his brand.
    • Discuss the role of digital audiences in both elevating and dismantling him.

    Paragraph 5 – The Role of Tech Platforms

    • How do algorithms and platforms reward performance and punish authenticity?
    • Draw from The Social Dilemma for evidence.

    Paragraph 6 – The Illusion of Connection

    • Use Turkle’s TED Talk to explore how both characters are “connected, but alone.”
    • Consider their emotional lives behind the digital façade.

    Paragraph 7 – A Counterargument

    • Could it be argued that both Lacie and the Liver King benefited from their online identities, at least temporarily?
    • Briefly address and rebut this view.

    Paragraph 8 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm your thesis.
    • Reflect on what their stories warn us about the future of identity, performance, and mental health in the digital age.

    Requirements:

    • MLA format
    • 4 sources minimum (episode, documentary, TED Talk, and one external article or scholarly source of your choice)
    • Include a Works Cited page

    Here are 7 ways Lacie Pound (Black Mirror: Nosedive) and the Liver King (Untold: The Liver King) were manipulated by social media into self-sabotage, drawn through the lens of The Social Dilemma and Sherry Turkle’s TED Talk “Connected, but alone?”:

    1. They Mistook Validation for Connection

    Turkle argues we’ve “sacrificed conversation for connection,” replacing real intimacy with digital approval.

    • Lacie chases ratings instead of relationships, slowly alienating herself from authentic human bonds.
    • The Liver King builds a global audience but admits to loneliness and insecurity beneath the performative bravado.

    2. They Became Addicted to the Performance of Perfection

    The Social Dilemma explains how platforms reward idealized personas, not authenticity.

    • Lacie’s entire life becomes a curated highlight reel of fake smiles and forced gratitude.
    • The Liver King obsessively maintains his primal-man image, even risking credibility and health to keep the illusion intact.

    3. They Were Trapped in an Algorithmic Feedback Loop

    Algorithms feed users what keeps them engaged—usually content that reinforces their current identity.

    • Lacie’s feed reflects her desire to be liked, pushing her deeper into a phony aesthetic.
    • The Liver King is incentivized to keep escalating his primal stunts—eating raw organs, screaming workouts—not because it’s healthy, but because it gets clicks.

    4. They Confused Metrics with Meaning

    The Social Dilemma reveals how “likes,” views, and follower counts hijack the brain’s reward system.

    • Lacie sees her social score as a measure of human worth.
    • The Liver King sees followers as a proxy for legacy and success—until the steroid scandal exposes the hollowness behind the numbers.

    5. They Substituted Self-Reflection with Self-Branding

    Turkle notes that in digital spaces, we “edit, delete, retouch” our lives. But that comes at the cost of honest self-understanding.

    • Lacie never pauses to ask who she is outside the algorithm’s gaze.
    • The Liver King becomes his own brand, losing sight of the person beneath the loincloth and beard.

    6. They Were Driven by Fear of Being Forgotten

    Both characters fear digital invisibility more than real-world failure.

    • Lacie’s panic when her rating drops is existential; she’s no one without her score.
    • The Liver King’s confession comes only after public exposure threatens his empire—because relevance, not truth, is the ultimate currency.

    7. They Reached a Breaking Point in Private but Fell Apart in Public

    The Social Dilemma highlights how tech is designed to capture our attention, not care for our well-being.

    • Lacie breaks down in front of an audience, her worst moment recorded and shared.
    • The Liver King’s undoing is broadcast to the same crowd that once idolized him—turning shame into spectacle.

    Three Sample Thesis Statements

    1. Basic (Clear & Focused):

    Both Lacie Pound and the Liver King suffer emotional breakdowns because they become trapped by the very social media systems they believe will bring them success, as shown through their obsession with validation, performance, and visibility.

    2. Intermediate (More Insightful):

    Lacie Pound and the Liver King, though separated by fiction and reality, both represent victims of an attention economy that rewards curated identities over authentic living—ultimately leading them to sacrifice mental health, integrity, and human connection for the illusion of approval.

    3. Advanced (Nuanced & Sophisticated):

    As Lacie Pound and the Liver King spiral into public self-destruction, their stories expose the way digital platforms—backed by algorithmic manipulation and cultural hunger for spectacle—transform the self into a brand, connection into currency, and identity into a high-risk performance that inevitably collapses under its own artifice.

  • 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.