Chad Comello

Tag: Office Space

  • Why should I change?

    From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’:

    Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

    The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

    Every time I hear about people changing themselves to appease the new AI paradigm, I think of Michael Bolton’s response in Office Space when asked why he didn’t change his name to avoid being confused for the singer:

    I don’t even think these writers are wrong for doing this. Three cheers for linguistic innovation! (An exception: pretentiously writing all in lowercase like Sam Altman, of all people.) I just resent being backed into it by LLMs that hoover up real people’s writing—without compensation or copyright considerations, mind you—and regurgitate it back to us non-robots well enough to make us think we’re now stealing from it.

    Oops, I used em dashes. Am I a chatbot??

  • you’re coming alive to me (part 2)

    Nobody likes 8-hour shifts. Especially me. Especially Peter Gibbons. But since I have to work to get earn some money, I had no choice. But today’s 8-hour shift wasn’t that bad. In fact, I sort of enjoyed it. Not because of the work I have to do or the people I have to do it with, but because of what I thought about during the shift to make it go by faster. I thought about my awesome experience this summer as a camp counselor, I thought about the awesome times I had on tour with the band, I thought about how cool a girl I like is (no I’m not telling and no I’m not dating anyone). When I thought about stuff like that, I kept smiling and having a positive attitude throughout the day. That sounds so saccharine but it totally worked. The fact that my legs were killing me and the work I was doing truly sucked didn’t phase me because I was thinking about sliding through a tunnel lined with oatmeal, mud, and old milk surrounded by dozens of screaming elementary school kids.

    The point is that if you try to find something positive in every thing you do, every thing you do will become positive. Whenever I think of it, I ask God to teach me something I need to learn whether it be small and subtle or huge and obvious. A lot of times I don’t figure out exactly what I’ve learned until way after the incident. It just smacks me in the back of the head saying “Listen up you oblivious buffoon!” The things I’ve learned from these very experiences have completely rocked my world and everything I know about it. I’d highly recommend it.