Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.

We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same.

But what I vehemently object to in this situation is the use of the first-person voice without my review or permission. The language used in the description makes it sound as if I wrote it (“In this post, I share my personal journey…”). Because I have fiercely protected my authorship throughout my life and what my name is attached to, any generative AI writing that purports to be in my voice without my informed consent is a profound violation of my authorial voice, agency, and frankly it feels like fraud or impersonation. As an archivist who has spent almost twenty years thinking about accuracy in information, it makes my skin crawl that there is a metadata field with the sole purpose of generating SEO-engagement purporting to be my voice that doesn’t disclose the authorship was actually non-consensual AI.