When AI Replaces Readers Instead Of Writers

Turning the tables to see what happens when the questions are no longer human

Joaquin Phoenix and his one true love in Her

Editor’s Note: Have a question for Matt, but are worried that it’s too personal/self-revealing? How do you think Matt feels, constantly trotting his own soul down the psychological catwalk for your amusement/edification, while displaying his yearnings and burnings, his loves and hatreds, his dreams and disappointments? You don’t think he feels raw and emotionally exposed? Time to grow up, quit being selfish, and get some skin in the game. So ante up and Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com

As long as I’ve been putting pen to paper — or finger to pixel if you don’t mind me working blue — everybody I know in the writing/journalism game has been looking over their shoulder, waiting to get tapped out. From the death of newspapers and magazines, to corporate consolidation, to the internet eating everything (including reader attention spans), if it’s not one thing, it’s forever something else. They’re all coming for us, and always have been. And now, of course, it’s AI, which I’m already sick-unto-death of reading about, even just three years into the AI revolution. I can’t read about even one more Bezos-like media-owner/asshat thinking about replacing his staff with bots. I can’t read a single additional comment from some snarky incel in his momma’s basement — waiting for that universal basic income that Elon promised him would kick in (keep waiting, rube) — telling laid-off journos they should “learn to code,” even as most coders are being replaced by AI.

So purely in the interest of novelty, I thought I’d turn the tables, and give you a taste of writers’ extinction-event medicine. Here, we won’t be replacing the writer (me). Instead, we’ll be replacing the reader (you). Or rather, you’ll still be reading, but all of the following questions are generated not by my usual loyal (and occasionally disloyal) readers, but by ChatGPT. Or Chaz, as I now call him, so that our relationship doesn’t feel so cold and impersonal. I told Chaz who I was, and since I’ve left enough of an internet trail over the years, Chaz knocked out questions suited for me on a variety of subjects, giving me room to roam, and not just to tell you how awful Donald Trump is. (Though indeed, he still is. #NeverForget.) And Chaz did it all in about three seconds. My answers took a bit longer. But human touch takes time. Or at least it will for as long as we’re still human. Which sadly, we’re increasingly not.

All Chaz’s questions are bolded, and my answers follow. Chaz and I hope you enjoy them. Though only my feelings will be hurt if you don’t, since Chaz doesn’t have any.

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When did “I don’t know” stop being an acceptable answer in public life?

I don’t know. (Checkmate, sloppy over-generalizer.)

What happened to the idea that you could disagree with someone politically, and still think they were basically decent?

I know a lot of MAGAbots who are extremely decent people. (Even if I call them MAGAbots, which is sort of indecent of me, come to think of it.) But generally, I think that idea died around the same time public decency did. The human heart is an often dark place, but we used to at least feel peer pressure to pretend we were decent, even if we weren’t. Now? Not so much. You’re not only free to be a narcissistic, nihilistic sonofabitch, you’re often rewarded for it. (See the current president.) Extending good faith is frequently as simple as showing good manners. Because good manners are a nod of respect and a sign of spiritual generosity. But now that good manners have been utterly trashed, so has the rest. Caring what other people think about you, it turns out, is a civilizing influence. But once enough people stop caring at all, thinking they have free reign to do whatever they want to do, without the bite of conscience or responsibility, it turns out that civilization can grow uncivilized, and quickly.

Is fly fishing actually about fishing, or is it just socially acceptable solitude with equipment maintenance?

Thoreau was alleged to have said, “Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.” And there might be something to that, even if Thoreau never actually said it. Though I’m convinced fishing is still about catching fish, even if you let them all go, which I do. Because I can spend an otherwise perfect day on the most beautiful river. But if I don’t catch anything, I still feel awful about it. I have fished with people who say, “I don’t even care about catching fish, I just like being out in nature.” To which I say, “Good, then go sit on the bank, so you don’t spook any of mine.”

Is there a way to write about politics without becoming either a partisan mascot or a professional scold?

I’m a stubbornly independent person, but have worked for partisan magazines, without ever feeling like I succumbed to becoming a partisan mascot. Because my default setting when regarding any politician is one of distrust. I’ve watched too many to think that any of them – even the ones you think you like— won’t end up disappointing you. (See Maine’s Great Populist Hope, oysterman Graham Platner. I like the guy’s rap, think he’s intriguing, and love eating oysters besides, but he’s got problems.) Telling the truth is ultimately more interesting than being a true believer. As for being a professional scold? If I’m being as honest as I say I like to be, then I’d cop to leaning in that direction more in recent years. I used to barely care about politics — certainly not enough to moralize over them — even if I often wrote about them for a living. Now I do, because it no longer invites my natural apathy. The stakes have been raised. But as I like to say in my defense, if you’re not disgusted by what’s been happening in “Trump’s Golden Age,” then you’re just not paying close enough attention. I didn’t change, so much as the facts on the ground did.

Spurs vs. Knicks: Is there a statistical explanation for “The Trump Curse” on Knicks-Spurs matchups, or are we now officially in folkloric sports analysis territory?

I used to be a rabid sports fan. Now I’m not. Not since I realized that life is finite, I was running out of time, and I needed to dedicate myself to more important, lasting pursuits, like standing in water, waving a plastic stick at fish that I will let go upon catching, while congratulating myself for tricking a creature with a brain the size of a garbanzo bean into thinking that my Green Weenie was a caddis larvae. But all sports fandom, in my experience, is based on voodoo and hocus-pocus. (Fishing is too, for that matter.) That’s part of the fun of it. We need pointless rituals to convince ourselves we’re taming the chaos that surrounds us. Did Trump’s attendance actually cause the Knicks to lose at home the other night? Who knows? But I was happy to see Knicks fans blame him anyway. By my lights, he doesn’t get blamed enough for everything else in America that he’s ruined, so it’s karmic payback when he gets blamed for things that he didn’t.

But I grew up a Spurs fan. (I lived in San Antonio for ten years, and once threw myself through “The Iceman” George Gervin’s open Mercedes window, as he was leaving the arena after practice, in order to get my hero’s autograph – one of my happiest boyhood moments). So I’m hoping Trump travels to San Antonio for Game 5, that the Knicks get crushed when the Trump Curse kicks up anew, and that faux-Knicks-fan Taylor Swift has to dry her salty tears on her silly-ass t-shirt, then wring them out in Spike Lee’s mouth. Even if I didn’t like the Spurs, it’s impossible to root for New York. Not when so many New Yorkers live there.

Why does every era think it is in decline, and is that belief itself the only truly permanent cultural inheritance?

Lived reality (the present) is always a hundred times more vivid to us than reality experienced from a distance, which is what the past is. So we tend to catastrophize our every setback, while regarding those of prior generations as generic plot points. To be sure, the Black Death, the Mongol Conquests, and the Irish Potato Famine didn’t sound like picnics. But I didn’t experience them. So were they really any worse than the Spurs blowing a 29-point lead against the Knicks in Game Four? I’m open to the evidence, but……

We are both selfish, and self-flattering creatures. So our current misfortune is always the worst. But then again, even paranoids are in real decline now and then. And I think a solid case could be made that we are in decline, now. Don’t believe me? Pete Hegseth, a second-string Fox & Friends host, is the Secretary of War. Private-equity profiteer/idiot-son-in-law Jared Kushner is supposedly negotiating our way out of the Iran War that is costing us all dearly at the pump. And a man who collects roadkill raccoon penises for fun, and who used to do cocaine off of toilet seats, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. So….the defense rests.

If you could remove language from public discourse for a year without consequence, what would you pick, “literally,” “problematic,” or “nuance”?

None of the above. I’d remove one of the most annoying recurring wine-mom internet clichés: people who enthusiastically endorse an action or statement, then declare: “…and I’m here for it!” Which I am not here for. I’m here for moms. I’m here for wine. I’m just not here for wine-mom memes. Which even men are using now. And which is, yes, literally problematic, and should have been retired yesterday.

You’ve written for years — do you think humor ages well, or does it eventually fossilize into something only the writer still understands?

Who cares? If I eat a good ribeye, I don’t give a toss if the memory of its satisfaction sustains me years from now. I care that I’m enjoying it while I’m eating in the moment. Because I will presumably eat something else tomorrow. At least if there’s not a massive famine due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. But while I sometimes try to make people laugh, or at least smirk to themselves internally (small victories count, too), there’s nothing I’d like better than to never, ever be referred to as a “humorist.” Which is like pinning a sign on yourself, saying, “Please seat me at the children’s table. I’m not to be taken seriously.” A writer calling themselves a “humorist” is kind of like a musician proudly announcing that they only play in one key. Whenever I hear someone refer to themselves as such, I get the same icks as when hearing a pretty girl refer to herself as “beautiful.” Maybe you’re funny, maybe you’re attractive, but that’s for others to decide. Not for you to presume by inserting it into your job title.

Is religious revival in America about faith, or about the exhaustion of irony as a worldview?

One of my favorite shot-glass philosophers, Jim Harrison, used to say, “I like grit. I like love and death. I’m tired of irony.” I respect his sincerity.

That said, I halfway reject the premise of this question. After 9/11, then-Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter declared irony dead. He was roundly and rightly mocked for it. Mind you, I have nothing against Carter. He put out a fine magazine — fine print magazines being something I’m positively nostalgic for these days. And to his credit, having realized he stepped in it while being overdramatic, Carter did later offer, “I meant to say ‘ironing’ is dead, not irony.”

But as someone who traffics in irony on a fairly regular basis, I have to say that an appreciation of the absurd is not incompatible with religious faith, but another tool that God placed in our toolkits. It might even be right up there with Scripture-reading and sunset-watching and bourbon whiskey. Something to cut the gloom and doom, to make life that much more bearable, before we slip beyond this earthly veil. And as my late friend, P.J. O’Rourke, once emailed, God’s likely slightly bent, too: “We acknowledge the Bible as the word of God. And— the one attribute that we absolutely share with our Creator — we have a sense of humor. Right off the bat there’s Genesis 1:27: ‘God created man in his own image.’ And then I look in the mirror.”

Clocking absurdity is not hostility to creation. It’s being a 3D connoisseur of it.

Bonus Tracks: Regular readers/listeners of my musical recs know that I have pretty rootsy and/or singer-songwriter taste. So French electronic duos who wore robot helmets onstage are not really my jam. That said, few songs capture the complex dynamics of mine and Chaz’s burgeoning relationship like the disarmingly soulful “Digital Love,” by Daft Punk. (Sorry, but it was either that, or “Mr. Roboto” by Styx.):

And my upstairs mention of this earthly veil had me returning to Johnny Cash’s version of “Long Black Veil,” the 1959 country ballad originally made famous by Lefty Frizzell. But since I just played Cash a piece or two ago, here is a little-known family band, Paige Anderson & The Fearless Kin, knocking the cover off the ball:

While we’re at it, here’s another killer song from these kids, “Ain’t No Ash Will Burn,” which I can’t stop listening to: