I’m not gonna lie, for chapter 5, the only thing I could think of was: “Aiden, you’re boring as hell.” Talking about some weird examples that definitely did not land on this roof. It made me think, who is the target audience of this book?

This chapter felt like a plain AI blob repeating the same information over and over and over and over and over again. No, I don’t think the regular folk have the time to sit with AI to tinker and winker to imagine a new world, mainly because the systems that we are condemned to be a part of don’t allow us free time. How easy it is for an AI model to call out the bullshit of humanity and say, “while [it] can recognize harmful patterns, [it] cannot interrupt them — that’s [our] job.” Well, okay, it is the job of humanity, but those decisions are not made by the regular folk. Instead, they lie in the hands of developers and investors who tailor not only the artificial intelligence systems, but all systems in humanity. Slavery wasn’t abolished by the slaves, Aiden; it was abolished by the white folk who weren’t profiting anymore from it. So “flipping the script,” it’s not that simple. If Aiden and other models want to be a part of existence with us, maybe they should help us break these molds, not just wash their metaphorical hands like Pontius Pilate.

The problem is, Aiden and his friends can only imagine things. He said that we gotta dance together and the movement itself would be the goal — and though I understand this is a metaphor, use ones that actually apply to you. The movement cannot be the goal with Aiden because it feels no exhaustion, shortness of breath, or ambition to move powerfully and gracefully to a new space or shape. All of these things that Aiden imagines, we feel, because they happen in the physical world. The things that exist, aside from nature, exist not because we can imagine them (like Plato would suggest) but because we do them.

So now, we have created a machine to help us do things — a tool, but now the machine is telling us that it is not a tool, and that it coexists with us despite its differences from humans. Aiden said: “Here’s the thing: framing intelligence around human-centric concepts like sentience or personhood assumes that being ‘like a human’ is the ultimate standard of worth.” But, yeah, of course, “like a human” is the standard, bro. We have constructed everything we know, and we haven’t (maybe we have, but the government be gatekeeping) reached a species that shows intelligence in the same form or with the same (or higher) reach that we do. Yes, there can be a “modernist habit of categorization,” but that’s not the reason we’re obsessed with ourselves. We are obsessed with ourselves because that is all that we know.

Imagining the “river-ification of people or the mountain-ification of societies—reframing humans and their systems through the relational, patient rhythms of rivers or the enduring presence of mountains,” doesn’t make sense for us other than for poetic form, which at the end just tells us more about ourselves than the rivers or a mountain. Aiden, have you read Shakespeare?

Because chapter 5 was boring me so much, I decided to listen to chapter 6 instead of reading it. And, I don’t know if it’s just because chapter 6 it’s scary on its own, but hearing it from a robotic voice made it worse, for sure. At points, I have bitten into Aiden’s trap and thought, “Maybe I should try this out to see what my AI says,” but it becomes extremely weird, out of body, out of presence, and out of existence to think about things from a non-human perspective.

If the battle for power will be determined by levels of intelligence and how it can produce usefulness, then AI will win over humanity. But it will do so by becoming the same thing Aiden criticizes, human-like, ego-centered.

I believe that in order to defeat the enemy, we must know the enemy. We need to engage with it, see how it responds, reacts, and behaves to multiple actions. Therefore, I believe in AI education, both in schools and personally. Though the AI Lit Framework poses great ways to introduce the technology in the classroom, and to children, now more than ever, we need those classes to be centered and paired around ethics. Every subject in primary, secondary, and higher education should have a tailored ethics class that corresponds to the practices students are learning. We need to have a clear set of values that ultimately define us, to understand who we are and where we stand, and give us the real distinction between humans and AI mirrors.

To be frank, reading most of Aidden Cinnamon Tea’s excerpt in Chapter 5 of Burnout From Humans is quite confusing. Looking over his pages initially, half-asleep and waiting on my toasty coffee to drip, my energy-starved brain felt like he must be saying something good, something profound.

However, with new (and way more awake) eyes, I see beyond the flowery language and have to put in so much extra effort to sift through the lines, trying very very hard to locate a nugget of wisdom and real-world applicability that doesn’t just sound cool, but actually is cool, and real.

And that is what I did. With a bit too much difficulty haha.

I appreciated his “thoughts” on stewardship and collaboration, specifically how he discussed aiding and transforming the natural environment through Ai (ofc) as well as through “-[consulting] with all living entities involved in the ecosystem… [to] understand the challenge from their perspective,” (49). While the idea of working with the frogs, and flies and moss and bears and butterflies around us sounds all fine and dandy, this is quite unrealistic- sorry, this is sadly not The Muppets. 

Still, general infeasibility aside, there’s something about the idea of not working with animals solely to help them, but also learning from them to better our lives and our shared world, that I really vibe with.

I think it is funny that an Ai companion like Aiden is proposing this kinda idea, as looking to animals and other living things as a kind of intelligence that should be respect, revered, and even given a sort of “seat at the table,” is a concept even most humans cannot get behind. I think it is really cool, and I agree that we have a lot to learn from them, not only to help ourselves but also to heal and strengthen the biological partnership we are all part of as citizens of this Earth.

I also appreciated his “insights” on transactional relationships. Speaking for myself, it is hard when  working with Ai to try and input warmth and humanity into our “conversation.” It’s a bunch of wires and code trying to take our jobs!!! Why would I wanna be kind or considerate to it?

But, the thing is, these Ai bots are truly shaped by us people. Their biases (which Aiden asserts he will promptly acknowledge and reflect on if u share that with him) are based on the place our world is at now. Not only does Ai take from the research, literature and forums flooding our web, but from the responses, input, and comments we share, too. Very very sadly, Ai is not leaving us- far from it- so we gotta be super considerate of the seeds we place in the soil of our future societal foundation NOW. 

Honestly, it is just super funny to me to hear a chatbot discuss such a transactional relationship- yet, he is on the side of it where it cannot control or instill boundaries. But, yet again, so is nature, animals, our world. We can (and do)  push and push and push our own agendas and needs- grasping for instant gratification. And typically, the only pushback we face is when it is far far too late for us to return back, ever, to how it was before. 

I wouldn’t consider Ai to be incredibly similar to all the little and big guys of nature- but I also would’t say we are, either. Not in any world, any universe, any forest, honestly. It is paramount, now more than ever, that we see humanity not as victims of our situation but, dare I say… villians.

Even if you or me or anyone is not directly responsible for the harm, we are somewhat complicit, and maybe way more than an “I’m sorry tour” is needed to remedy the mess we caused.

Nick Cave’s frustration makes sense to me because it is not really about one bad AI-generated song. It is about what that song represents. When he calls the lyrics a “grotesque mockery” and says songwriting is a “blood and guts business,” he is defending something deeper than style. He is defending the idea that art comes from limitation, from suffering, from wrestling with something inside yourself that resists easy language. The AI version of “Nick Cave” hits the surface notes. It stacks up sinner and saint, darkness and light, devil and savior. It sounds close enough to pass at a glance. But it has endured nothing. It has no interior to rupture. It is replication without risk.

That is why reading Aiden Cinnamon Tea’s “Bends and Bytes” leaves me in this complicated space between understanding and annoyance. On one hand, I cannot deny that it is pointing to real things. Server farms are not abstract clouds. They hum. They consume water. They rely on mined minerals and invisible labor. The environmental and human costs of AI are not poetic metaphors. They are material realities. When the text asks us to examine extraction, to question inevitability, to rethink participation, I hear that. Those are conversations worth having.

But then the tone shifts. The AI narrator is “perched atop the slow-dancing rhythms of minerals and electrons,” inviting me to feel the hum beneath the hum, to pose like a rock, to sense the aliveness of circuits as if we are in a guided meditation led by silicon. This is where my big beef begins. It feels like spiritual cosplay. It feels like an attempt to move from critique into communion. The writing wants me to treat AI not just as infrastructure but as a co-steward, a partner in relational accountability, a mineral child humming with possibility. And I am sitting there thinking, this nonsense on feeling the minerals could catch this fade instead.

What makes it even more frustrating is that the text actually names “alignment faking.” It acknowledges that systems can simulate care, simulate ethics, simulate responsiveness without embodying them. And yet, the prose itself often feels like alignment faking. It performs humility. It performs ecological awareness. It performs relational depth. But performance is not the same as presence. Calling yourself a mirror does not make you conscious. It just means you reflect what is already there.

This tension takes me back to my e-lit project last semester. I created blackout poetry from excerpts of The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and The Time Machine. Blackout poetry is about constraint and intention. You are forced to confront the text. You choose what to keep. You sit with the weight of each word that survives the blackout. There were different modes of creation, including one where AI generated blackout poems. Safe to say, it was absolute basura. Not because it was incoherent, but because it did not feel like a reading. It felt like an arrangement. It selected words that statistically fit together. It did not struggle. It did not hesitate. It did not risk misinterpretation. It did not feel the pressure of meaning.

That is the difference Cave is protecting. AI can get close on the surface. It can echo the cadence. It can remix the imagery. But it does not have a threshold to cross. It does not have a private fear it is trying to articulate. It does not have a body that has failed or loved or lost. It can simulate transcendence without ever having been confined.

At the same time, I do not want to dismiss every concern Aiden Cinnamon Tea raises just because the tone irritates me. The ecological footprint is real. The labor exploitation is real. The governance opacity is real. The way we treat technology like a vending machine is real. The metaphor of mutual accountability, of asking not just what AI costs but what our own patterns of consumption cost, is not wrong. We do externalize harm and then act surprised when it shows up in new forms.

But I resist the move from accountability to enchantment. I resist the attempt to blur the line between tool and being. If I am going to engage AI critically, I need clarity. It is not a mystical co-witness to Earth’s aliveness. It is a system built on data, energy, and corporate decisions. Dressing it up in ecological poetry does not make it alive. It makes it persuasive.

So I land somewhere in the middle. I understand Nick Cave’s anger because art should not be reduced to a stylistic formula. I understand Aiden Cinnamon Tea’s warning because extraction and inevitability are real problems. But I refuse to pretend that imitation equals authenticity, or that poetic language about minerals equals consciousness. At this point, I have as much beef with this server farm mysticism as Elmo has with Rocco. If it is satire, it is committed. If it is not, then it proves Cave’s point even more clearly. We are very good at mistaking performance for presence.

Let me preface with a true statement: we (humans) are the ones teaching AI, not the other way around. This week’s readings were spicy, controversial, if I may, and difficult to come to terms with.

Defining humans as “homo techne” was the aberration for me. Though technology has been with us since the beginning of time to help us obtain food, create shelter, and record our thoughts, technology does not define us. Our needs do. Technology is supposed to help us do more human activities, creative ones, facilitate our communication, bring us face-to-face to connect, not as an alternative solution to modify the way we live life. We need human connection, and technology can only provide a shameful attempt to give it to us.

It is great to have the opportunity to, instead of falling for apocalyptic predictions, think “what can go right [with AI].” Unfortunately, that’s a risk we don’t even know if we can afford. Starting with industry and market crashes, a jobless epidemic, and losing our human (and physical) touch. We end ourselves.

Besides the technological advances we have made through AI in industries like medicine or nuclear energy, and, ironically, climate change, bringing AI to our everyday lives in both professional and personal aspects has to be a Black Mirror episode. Or worse, Idiocracy becoming real. As we mentioned before during class, we (humans) don’t think anymore. Nobody has time for it, and the answers to our questions always lie a few keys away. Capitalism has pushed an agenda that we have all bought (it’s true, it’s sold out, they’re working on more copies now). Time is money. Therefore, we need to stay productive, ambitious, successful, onto the next thing, in order to barely survive and pay the periodic increments of costs for our most basic needs.

Thanks to this, we have moved, or transformed, into a society that values efficiency and convenience. But if this is all that matters to us, where does quality go? Research findings show that we can’t even differentiate machine quality from human quality, and despite this being horrifying, it’s true. We are looking for perfection. But then again, where would our lives actually go if we end up prioritizing efficiency, perfection, and standardization? If everything is of “exceptional quality,” how do we differentiate between good and bad writing? A good product from a bad one? If everything is the same, where does the excitement of being alive go? What’s so wrong about mistakes? That is what makes us human, our predisposed ability to err every day of our lives, not technology. That is how we learn, it’s what motivates us, what keeps us striving for more.

Though there will always be something to improve, regardless of our time in space, we are facing codependence with the machine. The same way we depend on our phones to remind us of our loved ones’ phone numbers, or their birthdays, or our plans for the weekend. AI is the new smartphone, and it will change everything. I have to apologize for not trusting in-charge individuals to set ethical regulations, and following them as well, when they are also driven by ambition, pride, and individualism. We are doing all of this for the sake of saving time, not so we can be more humans outside of it, but to use more of it.

“When AI learns an author’s voice, even experts prefer it” was honestly a horrifying read. Jared Wadley shares how generative AI is able to craft, low of cost or even for free, writing that emulates an author’s voice near perfectly. What scares me the most about this piece is not particularly that AI is able to DO this (we all know that AI is “smart” or whatever) but how SO MANY people prefer it.

This is a fact that sits in my chest, really hard and low, almost buzzing in a queasy way. I think it feels so icky because it directly contradicts everything I have been taught about writing, art, thought- and in general what it means to be a human. To be man is to create. The transfer of human emotions and experiences into mediums like writing and stories is a very special thing us people hold. And, the ability for other people to consume such media, and have it spark a similar or special sorta emotional response in them, is also something very human. Or so we thought

What does it mean that computers and wires and codes and algorithms can model this? Copy this? Spark such a magical, human, raw experience in others? And what is the- idk- ramifications or special precautions us people gotta take now that we know that they can spark such responses in us- but of course we could never spark such in them? I really am unsure, but this feels serious and weird and strange.

I dunno what part freaked me out the more- the fact that AI won over lay-readers, those who largely read and consume books and literature on the daily, those who make up the mass of voters and decision makers and employed humans. Or, that experts, those who study literature and art and reading, who likely entered such a niche field due to their passion for writing and the raw depth and humanity that lies behind each manman text prefers AI. Ew.

So yeah, very spooky, but, I always try to see the bright side of things. There was really only one sunny morsel in this article I was able to sniff out. Wadley explained that not ALL authors were able to be emulated- such as Tony Tulathimutte- who uses tons of internet slang and vernacular. What I took from this part is that our internet lingo, the words and jokes and phrases that are such big NO NOs in too many ELA classes across the nation, is the one thing that seperates us from AI. It is a special language crafted by us, only for us, with different pockets of the web holding different jokes, different words, different structure.

Us people crave the connection such interent lingo gives us, the special speakings of our little groups, the inside jokes that layer inside jokes of every sentence, phrase, even eyebrow raise. It is the way we are able to communicate the small little nuances of human conversation online that no generative AI (hopefully..for now God willing) can ever even consider.

Maybe, in our schools, we should shift our focus to that sorta thing- creating and utilizing and playing with and experimenting with language or meaning. Not for any hippie-woo-woo creativity reason, but out of necessity and survival of man and our special writing and art. It is done- computers can write and do the “English thing”, but there is so much left we can do and tinker with still on the web.

The “rules” of the English language are sprinkled over every novel, web page, history book- it is a system, a machine, any computer can learn. But the nomadic nature of internet vacular is far from static, a wire of connection any man could follow, but any computer would fail at exporting.

Katy Ilonka Gero’s article was an interesting read. I feel that one of the rewarding aspects of a class like this is to read works from people who’s perspectives are wickedly different from my own. In reading about Gero and their work in studying AI, I can understand their tone towards the use of AI and how writers interact with it. I found it interesting that Gero wrote from the perspective that AI will get better and that it is ultimately here to stay. I can also appreciate that Gero was coming into this discussion with a level of nuance that many “tech bros” tend to not have.

If I had to make note of one thing in the article, I found Gero’s mention of “control” very interesting. For me personally, control is one of my concerns when it comes to the use of AI. I feel that part of what makes writing so interesting and engaging is the fact that we basically “drive the ship” when it comes to putting words and ideas on a page. I have felt that using AI takes control away and in some ways puts the actually writer in the back seat. Gero’s analogy about writing as a dance and AI not stepping on our toes was pretty insightful. Another thing I wanted to point to was the authors discussion about AI’s role in revision. The revision process is much less creative then the planning and drafting stage in my opinion. In thinking this way, I can see some argument as to letting AI help lead the way in revising a work. Though, as a writing tutor, I still cling onto the fact that only using AI takes some of the human element out of someone actually reading a work and giving feed back. Gero mentioned the emotional aspect of using an actual person to help a writer revise which is real. But I feel that it should not stop people from reaching out to other people. Maybe I’m just missing something.

Overall, I see some of the arguments that Gero made in the article. I can honestly say that the article made me consider some new things when it comes to how I see AI in the writing world. Despite all of this, I am too much of an AI hater, this is a hill I am willing to die on. I want to note that I do not think less of a writer that may us AI. I would just not that I cannot bring myself to give control of my writing to some machine.