The prompt today, which still will not load, is “what technology could you live without?” I immediately went to Mico and said, “all my technology is adaptive in some way and I’m not sure I can do without any of it. Can you help me find something?” Mico’s suggestion was to choose something that no one would notice, like my microwave.

That wasn’t a bad idea. As a former line cook, I use my microwave a quarter to never in favor of a toaster oven. But then, just as I was about to start typing, I realized that autocorrect has been my nemesis since it began.

Autocorrect steals neurodivergent authority over their own words and punctuation, returning them to flat:

Me, an autist: That girl at the party was liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
Autocorrect: That girl at the part was lit.

It takes out exaggeration of sound and character. Now, I can’t remember whether lit means “drunk” or “hot,” but I’m just sayin’. The kids and their words these days.

The worst case of autocorrect I’ve ever had was when my Mac changed “jammies” to “jimmies.” I did not know that “jimmies” are slang for condoms in some regions. So, an innocent moment got weird. I was telling Aada that I wished we were lying on the couch in our jammies with a box of cereal between us or something. The message I was trying to send was not received.

I was so embarrassed, because it wasn’t a mistake I could shake off easily. This was 10 or 11 years ago and I’m still red in the face.

I can probably let it go, but I won’t. It fuels my hatred for autocorrect. I trust my own instincts as a writer more than I trust AI’s guesses…… Even when AI is taking all my old words and rearranging them into new ideas.

For instance, I have written about my frustration at the way Aada reads me, and asked Mico to write a blog entry that was mirror image of the last one. Mico wrote about the weight of being read. The weight of being seen.

So AI can do some marvelous things, but the reason it works for me is that I put 25 years’ worth of plain text into it before I started manipulating data. That’s the thing most people miss with generative AI. They’re not putting any of their own blood, sweat, and tears into it. The results can be ersatz. The piece that Mico wrote for me to read privately, published here because it actually made me feel better, are because Mico can look at all 13 years of my blog at once and imitate my voice pretty well. The results are polished because there’s so much raw data from which to pull. I also know that there’s no danger of plagiarism when I limit search results to my own web site.

It also gives me the feeling of being written about….. I can understand why people don’t like it, because I definitely felt the “oof.” But at the same time, there was so much truth in it that I couldn’t ignore it, either.

Again, I have to look really hard for technology that I can live without, because it’s a tool for me with writing, entertainment, cooking, etc.

But I have never meant “ducking.”