Isn’t It Romantic?

It’s not often that I followup on an immediately-preceding post with an entirely new one rather than just tacking it onto the original as an addendum, but I felt this was worth bringing somewhat front and center, continuing yesterday’s subject of blogging and romanticism.

During this period of repopulating my feed reader with blogs, I ran across Keenan on fluctuating back in June, which specifically had come about due to an intriguing sort of person-to-person blog challenge:

Zach poked his head into my inbox the other day to offer a suggestion: What if we traded blog post titles? Included in the email was a link to a post he had read that inspired the idea.

Linked there is Kami on that idea:

I just read this post. Basically, the idea was to give someone just the title of your next blogpost and then have them write the whole thing based on that. And i think, honestly, that could've been really cool. Thing is, the person running that blog decided to just ask chatgpt to be the one to write the post.

Linked there is Lloyd on consciousness—except it isn’t really Lloyd on anything at all, as he merely engaged in this idea as a prompt to a large language model. Kami is right that this “defeats the whole point” of doing this, although Lloyd presumably would disagree because it doesn’t appear to have been his point to do anything more than prompt a chatbot as part of an ongoing conversation.

I’m bringing this up here because Kami’s version of the idea, the one with which Zack prompted Keenan, is romantic in both the senses Ava discussed, while Lloyd’s very much is not—if for no other reason than the fact that large language models have no interiority. There’s no such thing as hollow romanticism: if it’s hollow, it cannot be romantic.

(Tangentially, and coincidentally, Ava’s latest post is on AI psychosis, in response to someone suggesting that it Isn’t a real thing.)

These sorts of writer-to-writer exchanges between and among bloggers via the safety (coziness?) of their own homes on the web represent precisely the sort of romance to which the modern blogosphere should aspire.