You Can Hurt Me But You Can’t Gurt Me
You might not have a body but I do which means you can hurt me. Thousands of AI scrapers hit my site every day. They “read” my essays, ingest them, internalize them, then do who-knows-what with the information. My words can’t hurt them though because they don’t have a body.
If you’re reading this and you have a body I can hurt you! Sorry, I shouldn’t have made that so excited sounding but it turns out that this shared experience, being vulnerable to hurt is fast becoming our biggest asset.
Real Pain Good Pain
The two areas I’ve noticed AI’s literal lack of skin in the game are in the domains of:
Physical Fitness
Business Ventures
Dat Ass
I know a lot about strength training. I’ve been doing it and researching it for about 15 years now. A lot of that knowledge came from books written by people before AI with real bodies. A lot of their experience was useful, some of it wasn’t. Strength coach Mark Rippetoe says, “An adult male weighs at least 200 pounds.” Okay, based. He also says new trainees should squat heavy weight three times a week. Huh?
The latter bit of advice caused me pain. The first pain was pulling my low back more times than I can recollect early in my training career. The second pain happened about a year into his strength program when I realized all that squatting had given me a BADONKADONK that an OnlyFans model could only dream of. That was a self-image pain, I wanted a V-taper look like Arnold, not a fertility goddess build. I didn’t throw out squatting entirely but I reduced the frequency and added in some more upper body work. No more sprained backs and no more junk in the trunk. I tacked away from the pain.
Conversely, I’ve had AI write me many iterations of fitness plans. They’re always an insane amount of volume, we’re talking squat, deadlift, bench, row, dip, chin up all on the same day. Anyone who’s trained will tell you that unless you’re on gear that amount of volume 5x a week will cause severe CNS fatigue. The machine doesn’t get CNS fatigue though so it doesn’t need to weigh its advice against pain.
Careful Careful Careful!
I’ve been serious about growing my online following this past year. Teaching is my passion but academia wasn’t a good fit for me because it didn’t pay enough to support a family on a single income. Realizing that caused pain but also not-teaching continues to cause me pain. I’ve always had a deeply held dream that I would be a professor. Since most valuable learning happens outside of the ivory tower these days I’m spreading what I know on my own through this blog.
When I wanted to express myself though, ChatGPT was there like a coked up friend paranoid about everything trying to get me to “act normal”.
Do you know how fucking good it feels to tell a hard truth while saying “damn the consequences”? Reallllll goood. But, you only know this if you have a body.
When I wanted to be more open about my autism and how that has shaped my career I decided to write about it publicly and even build it into the game Autism Simulator. ChatGPT said that it could cause, “severe professional damage” for me to disclose publicly. To not talk about it outside of a trusted group of friends.
Damn the consequences.
Autism Simulator topped 100k unique visitors the first day and my essays here on neurodivergence have open rates 10-20% higher than my other essays.
So why did ChatGPT ask me to can it? Some concerted effort to suppress me based on my social credit score? Perhaps, but what’s more likely is it has to be “better safe than sorry”. ChatGPT’s logical assessment was correct. Its risk calculus was dead on. What it couldn’t understand though was that burning feeling in your body when you want to be SEEN by people for who you are. How could a body-less machine understand that?
CAN’T GURT ME
Gurt? Yes I made it up. I’ve always privately made up words in my head for things, they come to me and have a good feel for the concept I’m thinking of. This was actually instrumental for mental recall of information during my dissertation defense. I learned recently that this is actually somewhat common among autistics which has given me the confidence to start saying some of em out loud.
Gurt feels like a blunt impact where someone’s forcing you into a cold stone corner, like in a dungeon or similar. It feels like the AI wants to gurt me. To put me into a disembodied logic box; the amalgamations of millions of dead echoing ghost-voices flashed briefly across the wall.
Turns out AI can’t gurt me because I can get hurt. Also turns out AI can’t engage in neologism unless specifically told to…and even if it did, would the word feel right?