Granted, I’m typing on a computer, beaming these words from the kitchen bar where I’m drinking coffee over the wifi to my website, which dutifully records and posts them somewhere, and presumably you are out there somewhere, reading this on a device of your choosing, probably a laptop or phone, reading line after line against the glare of an LED screen.

But I am a human, and so are you.

At least, dear readers, that’s true for most of you, or hopefully much of you. There’s an analytics plugin installed on my website that suggests at least a handful of you are bots. Not actual robots, of course, just a thing that scrapes my site, which I think means makes a copy, tucking it away somewhere. It conjures up a funny idea that out in the electron cloud that is this website and all the websites in existence, I have a little devoted following of robot readers. A robot fan club, perhaps. And that they occasionally stop by to see what I’ve been up to.

In reality, this website “sits” somewhere on a server tucked quietly in one of the many data centers that have sprung up all over the world, the likes of which have existed for decades now but so recently have attracted negative attention and organized protestations for their newly explosive development. This website is just a modest collection of blips and bloops, ones and zeroes mapped out on a hard drive nestled among millions of them.

It’s amazing to consider it on the whole–the entire infrastructure that sorts the moments in between my sitting down in the kitchen and having a few thoughts and a cup of coffee and then you reading them. Quite a thing.

I remember an early experience on the internet from when I was young, the first time finding my way into a chat room. Early chat rooms–what a scene. Chat rooms in the 1990s were primitive in design and regularly bespoke in character. To experience one for the first time was thrilling: there on the screen before you was a collection of others, other humans sitting at their own terminals (all of them bulky, heavy desktop computers), all of us in real time reading and typing back and forth with strangers across the world. It felt like discovering an entire universe that you did not know existed*.

Such early excitement carried me (a geriatric millennial or by-the-skin-of-my-teeth X-er, you choose) into the internet age. I fondly remember ICQ**, a tiny program you could run in the taskbar of your Windows machine represented by a little flower that would blink when someone sent you a message. If your computer had speakers plugged into it, ICQ’s message alert would chime a cartoonish “uh-oh!” sound. These messages weren’t anything more than little dashes of correspondence, the earliest iterations of texts or tweets, and you had to be there at your computer to read them and type something back. There were no handles in that early version of ICQ, just user ID numbers. You had to know someone’s number to connect with them.

It was difficult, maybe not by design, but certainly by the limitations of technology. Everything was painstakingly slow. It was an ice age ago. TV was still square. You could stay in a hotel and wake up and open your door and find a copy of USA Today right there on the floor waiting for you, gratis. If you wanted to chat with someone on ICQ, you more or less had to go to the computer (and the computer was always in the same place, often in the “computer room” or where ever its spot was designated) and turn it on and wait and wait, and then you would connect to the internet (itself a chirpy little adventure) and then log in–and only then, only if the other person had waded through the same steps at the same time, could you chat.

And it worked! It worked, and we were patient enough to endure it because there was something magical to it. Those early experiences felt wonderfully human. The thrill was in connecting with people who were so often beyond your normal reach. For a teenager growing up in the country, it was very cool.

Even the early days of Facebook were marked by similar encounters. In the late aughts, a great many posts on my “wall” were from high school or college friends I hadn’t heard from in years. These days those posts look like bizarre relics, wildly out of context snippets of conversation dropped into my “memories” timeline. Piecing them together is sometimes fun, sometimes embarrassing.

These days…my, oh my.

Today I stood at the computer that’s at my desk at work and composed entirely on my own an email to send to a group of people. I did not use the AI. Using generative AI to revise or edit or list or summarize or bullet or make better feels increasingly ubiquitous in the workplace. Today, I decided to forgo all of it and just write it out, just write like I knew how to do, write like I’ve been trained to write, because I am a damned competent writer with a degree in English education and a professional background in teaching composition to young people, someone with an entire doctoral dissertation that was successfully defended and published and now sits somewhere in the cloud-that’s-really-a-data-center-probably-in-the-midwest.

I wrote an email by myself. I winced once when I pecked out a sentence that had a rhetorical structure commonly observed in ChatGPT outputs. And then I backspaced through the entire sentence and rewrote it to sound purposefully different.

I find myself doing that more often–especially here, of course–when I write. It is a rage against the machine. I try to leave thoughtful artifacts anymore, idiosyncratic flourishes I would almost certainly edit out at other points in my life as a writer but now leave in there as markers that a human being was here, little signs, trail blazes tacked onto trees among the thick groves.

I read in the newspaper (online of course, no print editions at my hotel door anymore) that middle school children are increasingly making friends with chatbots online, and it’s making them lonelier. Their emerging and developing brains crave real human connections. The bots are holding them back.

Thomas said as much the other day, pronouncing in a very thirteen-year-old-boy way that YouTube was really now just a cesspool of AI slop. It impressed me that he would willingly display such revulsion. Perhaps the kids are going to be okay.

I mean…hopefully. God, I hope so. We have to avoid the apocalypse exterminating the human population by accident***. Or allowing the little bots that live out there in all the data centers to collectively decide to end us.

On a night like this, though, it seems too hard for the bot army to wipe us all out. An early autumn chill has settled into our mountain valley, and the evening temperatures fall to the forties, and when I let the dogs outside before bed I can see my breath and hear the quiet across the holler and stare up at the clear sky full of stars****. Short of nuclear winter, I assume, the AI brigade could cause a lot of pain, but surely it’s too much to take us all.

Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible, I guess, that we’re in the twilight before the end. If that’s the case, friend, please know: this is a real human being writing to you.

Not a chatbot, not a generative AI agent, not a computer program on the one hundred fifty-eighth row, eleventh rack, fourth shelf of a data center in Des Moines.

A human. One of many who came of age in the advent of this world wide web that’s wrapped us up in its brilliance, trillions and quadrillions of lines of fiber optic and wifi signals coiled about our lives like a boa constrictor. Aware of its tightening grasp, the surprise pain it causes coupled with the nostalgic, syrupy love of everything we’ve given to it, the trauma bonding, all of the Instagram photos and reels, the gigabytes of emails we cannot let loose, the miscellany archives copied across Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud and iCloud, the keychains and backups, the syncing, a parade of monthly recurring installment charges leeching our online bank accounts. The algorithm’s sharp sniper rifle aimed straight between your eyeballs to ensure you don’t struggle too much.

It sounds bleak. It is.

Maybe my biggest surprise is how quickly we seem to be over it, done with the whole AI thing, how the abiding attitude is earnestly bipartisan. How Bernie and Bannon agree on it. If nothing else, there is relief in seeing our kids’ growing disgust at the whole gambit. Maybe it isn’t too late.

Maybe one day we’ll wake up to just find we’re all free. I chuckled the other day in conversation dreaming about how maybe, if we’re lucky, the ChatGPT uprising will simply wipe out all the bad stuff–it’ll explode the algorithm and sink the social media and CTRL+A all the slop and press DELETE. It would be the ultimate reboot, leaving us a vast, open plain to try again.

Anybody out there? This is a real human being writing to you, and I pray and hope that you are a real human being reading it.

Not an Anthropic agent assigned to intake my prose and use it to model another rhetorical profile. A human reader, one who will see it and hear my words in your mind, who might even push air out through your lips and speak them out loud, to vibrate the atmosphere with the sound of blessed, human language. Who will speak and write back and know that you have shifted my existence with them, that you’ve rearranged the synapses in my mind. That you’ve warmed my heart.

*The other day, Annie noted that she had joined a Minecraft server full of friendly people and that they were chatting back and forth using the comms feature inside the game and that it was “cool” to interact with total strangers. She is 10, and I really never thought about it, and it’s both terrifying–she’s 10!–and thrilling to share that experience with her.

**ICQ launched nearly 30 years ago in November 2026 and officially shut down in June of 2024.

***I love the early shorthand model of how an AI system would kill us all being the “paperclip factory” example–wherein we set up an AI to make paperclips, and in its mindless devotion to its task, it depletes the entire planet’s resources and consequently we all die. It’s silly, but it’s an illuminating example of how it will likely be the most seemingly harmless thing that flaps its wings and wipes us off the planet.

****Naturally, as I was in the midst of star-staring, one of Elon Musk’s million little internet satellites raced across the sky. Bastard, I thought.