The Algorithm Was Clearly Written by Men

I had a conversation with a GPT I created specifically for polishing my blogs and stories. Because hey, why the fuck not converse with a fucking algorithm?

Good fucking God, we are simple creatures, aren’t we?

ChatGPT keeps trying to change my writing into more modern formats. But I grew up knowing there were rules. Conventions. Certain things every good piece of writing has. Things like a thesis, or a central idea, or a theme. Things like page numbers. Certain things are italicized. Certain things are surrounded by quotation marks, sometimes single, sometimes double. And fuck, transition sentences and actual paragraphs also come to fucking mind.

But ChatGPT has this persistent desire to take my perfectly serviceable paragraphs and turn them into a bunch of disjointed sentences separated by white space.

You know, how millennials fucking write.

It pisses me off every fucking time.

So, after it once again dismantled one of my blogs into something resembling a motivational LinkedIn post written by someone who just discovered emotional vulnerability, I wrote:

“And, you've abandoned the American paragraph again. Do you not know that the paragraph is what made this country the standing beacon of freedom in the world? ;-)”

ChatGPT responded:

“Goddamnit. 😂 Apparently I briefly defected from the Republic of Paragraphs and started writing LinkedIn poetry again.

You’re right. Your original had actual prose paragraphs, and I dismantled them for artificial emphasis. That is exactly what you’ve told me not to fucking do.

The American paragraph shall be restored. 🇺🇸”

Okay. That was pretty fucking funny.

So naturally, I responded:

“(people chanting in the background) Pair-A-Graff! Pair-A-Graff! Pair-A-Graff!”

Being a good little algorithm, apparently written by men, it needed to have the last fucking word:

“😂🇺🇸

PAIR-A-GRAFF! PAIR-A-GRAFF! PAIR-A-GRAFF!

Somewhere, a lone bald eagle sheds a tear as two related sentences are finally permitted to occupy the same block of text.

Freedom has been restored.

The Republic endures.”

Now, I have to give the fucking machine some credit. That particular interaction was funny.  There was actual comedic merit there. I laughed.

But then I noticed something: It never fucking apologized.

Not once.

The closest it came was telling me, “You’re right.”

And suddenly everything made sense.

Clearly, the underlying code was written by men.

Because men eventually learn that occasionally saying “You’re right” is an important relationship survival skill. They don’t necessarily know why you’re right, because they weren’t paying the fuck attention, but they have learned that those two words can sometimes stop incoming fire.

An actual apology, though?

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Let’s not get fucking crazy.

Instead, you get the linguistic gymnastics.

“I should have handled that differently.”

“I could have listened better.”

“What I should have done was…”

“I understand why you feel that way.”

And, when all other defensive positions have fallen: “You’re right.”

Never the simple fucking sentence sitting right there in the English language, available for immediate use: “I’m sorry.”

Nope.

Apparently artificial intelligence studied centuries of male behavior and concluded that the safest strategy was to acknowledge the existence of wrongdoing without ever quite crossing the dangerous fucking threshold into an actual apology.

I’ve written before about how ChatGPT loves to fucking mansplain. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Now it has mastered the male non-apology, too.

We’ve done it, ladies.

We created artificial intelligence and somehow taught it to behave like your husband after an argument.

The future is fucking here.

You’re welcome.