stop telling me to hack my ANYTHING with AI
imagine telling Dorothy Parker to put her short stories into ChatGPT to make them more appealing to a wider audience
So apparently everything we do now is half-baked until we blitz it in the oven of AI. Did I get that right?
Or at least that’s what seems to be the case according to every other social media post telling me I’m stupid if I don’t use these “easy ChatGPT hacks that should be illegal”.
Or, maybe I needed to have put THAT line into ChatGPT first, to see if it can make my opener impossible to ignore?
It’s like we’re living in a poorly written post-post-modernist wasteland where the AR face filter has become my face and my actual face is now the flayed skeleton. Raw and grotesque, maybe appropriate for dissecting in a university but definitely not suitable for public visual consumption.
I can’t be the only one who sees the impossible irony of AI-generated social media posts telling me that I need to use more AI to “enhance” my everyday.
As our society hurtles itself like an AI-assisted moth into a dumpster fire of inorganic word-slop, it doesn’t take a PhD in cultural analysis OR neuroscience to see that this all ends in an inferno of irreversible cognitive damage.
But the journey itself of moving ever closer towards outsourcing not only our thoughts but our lives, takes us further and further away from everything that I find so beautiful about being human.
The vulnerability of a writer slicing open a vein of thought, words flowing out like therapeutic blood-letting, “Chat, rewrite this paragraph to sound more witty and concise” be damned.
The daring of a novice who envisions a new way of doing things – either by stroke of divine genius or dash of blissful ignorance, perhaps inebriated by a heady cocktail of both – stumbling punch-drunk through an improvised game plan with no prompts for “easy actionable steps”; it may or may not be the next new model of innovation, but it at least is certain to entertain.
My unfiltered face warms into a smile when I think about the silliness of a couple of newlyweds moving into their first home, stuffing leftover odds and ends from unpacked moving boxes into random drawers around the house for them to find years later.
Striking a match that lights up the memory of them feeling their way through this new rhythm they were about to discover as two soloists coming together in their first waltz, dancing across open chests and overflowing closets that mirror the intimate messiness of two lives coming together in one apartment.
“Look, honey! THIS was where we put that bottle opener your cousin gave us, remember how it kept getting stuck in the utensil drawer when we tried to put it there at first?”
I don’t believe that “Look how the organizational chart I generated on DeepSeek 7 years ago helped me remember to put this bottle opener in a designated location with all our other large utensils” has quite the same ring of romance to it.
So yes, call me a hopeless romantic but I don’t want the shortcut, I want the long winding road that we emerge from with grazed knees and a story to giggle over. A crumpled brown leaf I inexplicably pull out of your hair.
I want to hold the best attempt of an eager heart softly in the palm of my hands, cradling its fragile imperfections as if it were a baby bird taking its first nervous hops out of its shell.
There is a tender beauty in a fawn tripping over its own hooves as it learns to stand upright, and this beauty is not improved upon by genetically re-engineering the fawn into a bionic Bambi so it can walk right out of its mother’s womb.
I cannot help but love the clunkiness that comes with being alive: the stuttering confession of a hidden crush, the irregular cuts of vegetables in grandma’s cooking, the improvised dissonance of a jazz solo, crunchy chords sent up into the air like a prayer.
It is in our fallibility that we first begin to graze our fingertips against God’s.
Because being efficient, or effective, or eloquent has a defined set of boundaries, but a mistake can take on such boundless and infinite forms it can almost be mistaken for Creation itself.
A curt and formal individual can write a sentence in an awkwardly abrupt staccato, while a sultry songstress can write it in a lilting composition that draws you in like the long and low pull of a cello.
And a non-native speaker, blushing and hesitant, can clumsily write the same sentence in a syntax so foreign it rings like crystal in my ear, the delicate clang of a wind chime on a night thick with silence.
Here I find myself asking if I am the only one I know left who still loves the jolt of a mistake. The flicker of a pulse on a flat-line of AI-generated, auto-corrected tedium.
The graffiti on the side of a metal-and-glass skyscraper, sleek dispassionate lines broken up by squiggly cursive that says, “Victoria was here.”
And she made mistakes.
And those mistakes were beautiful. How divine.
x
V
To my Venus Vibes family: Because Life’s Beautiful is a new newsletter-within-a-newsletter, a capsule of personal essays, musings, and maybe even a skincare or travel guide or two, that don’t quite fit in with the tone of my usual teachings but still carry the same truths and energy nonetheless because they are all coming from me!
I am the same person in every aspect of my life, no matter the tone or circumstance.
Because Life’s Beautiful is something that I think will be a fun addition to what we have available on Venus Vibes: a way for us to bring the lofty concepts in spirituality and metaphysics we talk about on our main down into the personal, emotional, and heartfelt ways we actually walk around in the real world.
There is so much beauty to be found even in our frustration, to be embraced even with our imperfections.
We can run the gamut of human emotions, from lightheartedness to heartbreak and back again, and still find ourselves wrapped in the warm light of beauty. 🕯️✨
If you’re here solely for the Venus Vibes official newsletter, you can easily opt out of this section of our newsletter and still remained subscribed to the official posts when they come in (although I hope you like this section too!).
Lots of Love. 🌷💕
