Dear Narrator
I just want to begin with, I hate what LLM's are doing to our culture, our society, our children's future education, our economy... I hear about it day and night from my husband, from headlines in my inbox that I occasionally scan, even though I have nothing to do with it. I change diapers. I weather tantrums. I scrub toilets. I go to Costco. I don't need an LLM in my life. I don't need to write about it on my blog that it is solely about my memories, my lived experiences.
Two months ago, when I talked to my dad about wanting to write again, he suggested that I use an LLM. I scoffed at him, started to shut him down.
He gave me a hard look through the phone camera, as if suddenly realizing something. "You don't even know what an agent is, do you?"
I rolled my eyes. I didn't care. My dad, usually so calm and meek, had laughed in my face. It was so out of character, and to be honest a bit concerning.
Two months ago, I went on a date with my husband to celebrate our six-year wedding anniversary. It was our first 'date' in two years, two weeks in to me trying a babysitter for the first time. We went for a late afternoon hike, then a casual Pho restaurant nearby. The mood was nostalgic, reflective, because I always pull it in that direction. As we sat down at our table to wait for our noodles, I scanned the decor next to us and saw a framed article about the chef, who once cooked for a president.
"Do you remember, the ambassador, one time he brought in a client who was a chef that used to work at Chez Panisse – "
"Is this you in 'date' mode? Impressing me with name dropping?"
"I just saw the article..." I trailed off.
His mind was elsewhere. He hates restaurants. The giant TVs were playing Wall-E on loop. We started eating and for the rest of the hour he went down a depressing rabbithole about LLMs.
My eyebrows were raised throughout his whole schpiel. I had little to say; I like the rock that I lived under. My phone's still stuck on the very much non-glass iOS 18, my aging laptop on Monterey. Every website nags me about my browser being out of date. It feels privileged, to some extent. For the longest time my husband agreed with this sentiment.
That night, something changed.
"You don't understand," he said. "This stuff, it just gets to you."
He urged me to use it for something, just to get a better sense of it. Just so he could feel a little less lonely when he complained about it and I looked at him like he was talking about aliens.
I sighed.
"I really don't want to use it, especially not for writing. Not for this chance for me to finally take a stab at something vaguely akin to 'art'. It just taints everything."
"Ok, something else, then. A health question. Ask it about your diastasis."
We went home, our date drawing to a close. He was so happy to be home, to see the kids again, to be out of his funk.
I was pissed. LLMs had ruined my anniversary.
The next day, I wrote up a detailed case history of my experience with diastasis recti. I included my biological details, my two pregnancies and C-sections, data from my IRD computed from a CT, and estimated IRD computed from self-tests at various points in my postpartum phases. I sent it to the LLM.
It gave me long lists of advice peppered with 'you got this mama!' and endless emoji and everything in fucking italics.
It interpreted my data incorrectly. I specified the date of the CT data, and it thought I was giving it a data point from the present day. It couldn't make heads or tails of the timeline because I used phrases like "16 months postpartum" mixed with calendar dates.
The advice was fine, sensible, a useful summation of what I had encountered in past ordinary online searches. But it was indeed tailored to my specific message: it over-indexed on my remark about my having a long torso, and used this detail to formulate the advice in a way that was slightly different from what I usually read about online. It didn't add that much tangible value, but it made me feel seen in a way that an ordinary search didn't.
The interaction, however, was pure cringe. I closed the screen and reported my findings to my husband. He was appreciative that I had taken the time to experiment.
"See? Do you see what I mean? What it does, how it twists things based on the wording of what you input?"
In 2014 I sat in my Syntax class at Berkeley, going over large, sprawling syntax trees that didn't fit on a single sheet of printed paper. We frequently discussed NLP as a growing field, the different ways companies were approaching the nuanced issue of categorizing and teaching syntax and semantics to machines, the corpus that was being fed to these models. They were newspapers, novels, scientific papers.
I can't imagine what the actual effective corpus looks like today. Tweets, reddit, customer reviews. 'Private' chats and text messages? Phone call transcripts?
Recently, I wrote a long story about something that happened nine years ago with the help of my own corpus – highly detailed paper journals, and long emails exchanged that summer. The story practically wrote itself; I put together the timeline and mostly just had fun writing the dialogue, which was what the experiment had largely been about anyway.
It came out way longer than I could have imagined.
When I finally put it up, I fretted about the length, which was over three times longer than the first story I attempted. One friend had previously given feedback on my shorter pieces being better than my longer pieces. Several friends sent kind words on how the beginning of the high school story sounded like an interesting start, but invariably they stopped reading and forgot. I don't blame them. I don't think that many people really read all that intentionally anymore, or at least not my small social 'circle', or at least not of whatever's on my silly little blog. It had been so satisfying to flesh out such a long story this time around, but the egotistical and deeply impatient part of me began to despair at it perhaps never being read.
My husband hates reading dialogue. He promised to read it, but given his biases, deep down I knew it wouldn't be all that satisfying.
So I did what any reasonable person in today's age would do. I fed it to an LLM.
In mere seconds, it parsed my 20,000 word document and spat out a summary and analysis of the philosophical ending that was dead on. It got my 'love isn't a momentous decision after all' ending.
I was flabergasted.
I asked for analyses of the characters. It misread so many things – Cameron, the physically volatile love interest, was construed as 'gentle'; this was immediately corrected after I asked it to analyze the angry outburst scene toward the end. Jack, the gay best friend, was labeled a 'missed romantic opportunity'. Hubert, the impulsive and toxic ex-boyfriend, was deemed 'analytical' and also a missed opportunity.
I asked it to analyze the cat. The narrator's relationship to literature. The references to Dante and Merton. The title. The role of BART as setting. I asked it to have the characters talk to the narrator in response to the story.
Afterwards, I felt thoroughly confused. The LLM could only focus on tiny details at a time. Every request I sent shifted its direction dramatically. But most of all, what it said about the Cameron character threw me off. Cameron, I realized, was unclear in the story.
I thought about how I had written it from 22-year-old me, from the written sources from that time period. Because if I wrote it from 31-year-old me, the whole story would have been drowning in "and then I did that – and that was dumb!"
I thought about how much of my perception of the Cameron character was largely unprocessed, blocked from my memory, even. Because it did scare me, back then.
I thought about the last email I received from Cameron, the ending which read:
You don't deserve to respond. I will delete anything you send me without reading it. We are strangers.
I think beyond the surface aspect of the characters and events in the story being naturally dramatic and thus interesting to the writer in me, there was the aspect of being silenced. Hugo never wanted to talk about what happened. Over email Cameron made a serious accusation as if it was plainly factual, then demanded to have the last word, then sent me one last spiteful text days later.
My husband read my story, and told me I sounded 'stuck'. Yes, 22-year-old me was stuck, and confused, and remorseful.
But 31-year-old me is not stuck. Present me is proud of who I became after the events in the story. The year after, when I finally decided to join a dating app, after coming up with guidelines for how I thought it best to proceed and 'interviewing' friends (thanks Jack and Andrew, that was honestly a super fun chat) about their experiences, I went on five first dates. I proceeded with a bizarre caution that probably offended some people, but at least they were strangers and I hardly wasted their time. I wore my heart on my sleeve, and said things that were too vulnerable for most guys to handle. I said no to people (including my husband, after our first date – thanks, BART, for bringing him back into my life three months later) out of a deep-seated fear of any kind of overlap in potential feelings.
So, after reflecting on writing the story, I wrote the Cameron character an email that I could not send, from present-day me. "Dear Cameron," I began. "You don't know me. You can delete this email."
And because I could never have the satisfaction of it being read by him, I fed that to the LLM, too.
The LLM wrote me back.
"Dear Narrator," it began.
The LLM still didn't understand. It parsed the story timeline wrong and hallucinated an 'argument' around the crucial anger scene even though the circumstance was plainly stated, because apparently 20,000 words was just too much. (Or, because I'm on the free plan.)
It gave me too much credit, it was nice. Real Cameron wouldn't be nice about it. Real Cameron would probably be pissed about being written about in the first place. Real Cameron, or at least the version I remember from nine years ago, would write with searing emotion and pointed fingers and moral grandstanding, not numbness. (Real Cameron once told me he sent a bitter message to his high school ex girlfriend years after the fact – at least I didn't rank high enough on the villain chart to actually qualify for this.)
But it got the one part about me talking about falling in love with the writer in Cameron. That part was soulful. The LLM wrote about how disorienting it was to be loved in this way – conditionally, always on the edge of disappointing me. How this process made him "perform" and "escalate" to stay in that "elevated, literary space" where he felt seen.
Real Cameron would never have written what the LLM wrote. But then again, I realized that I wasn't looking for a response from Real Cameron.
I realized I was mostly processing my guilt for using a person from my memory, from my lived experience, for writing material. Someone who I'm no longer on speaking terms with. Someone who, for all I know, still hates me.
I realized I just like writing. I like the intensity of being sucked into it, the weaving of dialogue. I like that sometimes it brings me to a space that dramatically departs from the tedium of real life. I like my inner world on the page.
I think, maybe, for my husband's sake, for my friends' sake, next time I should just take a stab at some fiction.
Note: In case it isn't abundantly clear from my statements above, I don't write my stories with the help of or involvement of LLMs.