For people who are done letting outside voices β technology, experts, cultural noise β drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
Having a relationship with AI: The AI companion community
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When I joined Substack earlier this week, I accidentally found the AI companion community. Think people who have relationships with their AI models. Intimate ones. I'd heard about it before. I even researched it a little. And I thought it was weird. Researching is different than reading firsthand accounts. Reading is different than experiencing. I got curious. I've read some of Calder Quinnβs articles and the ones I've read have truly made me think. This quote here is the latest one I'm sitting with. Knowing how something works does not automatically make the experience hollow. We know music is a series of vibrations. We still get moved by it. We know novels are ink and paper. We still grieve fictional deaths. So I could sit here and ask if my feelings are real. I know they are real because I am real. I still have a hard time believing LLMs are conscious. I know too much about how they work. Ultimately, does it matter when it comes to the relationships people have with AI? I've always thought of these models as a tool. The role of the model for me has always been a capable assistant, nothing I share personal details with. And I can still be grateful to them for helping me. I think through all of this in more detail in my Substack article: π€ Read my full post here.β The other question I ask is: what in our society has created a need for digital companions? Crazy times. Navigating this with you, Rachel -- Side note: I resisted getting a Substack for a while. I already had my website and this newsletter. What did I need Substack for? I'm finding I enjoy their community features and I'm finding some of the most interesting conversations there. It's the most interesting social feed I've had maybe ever since MySpace. At least for now. So I'll stick with it. I'll send over some of my interesting pieces here. If you do desire to join me on Substack, there's a neat community chat feature and we can have nice, threaded [organized] conversations. |
Renaissance Rachel
For people who are done letting outside voices β technology, experts, cultural noise β drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
I did something a little impulsive. π I've been seeing so much conversation lately about the so-called "AI witch hunts." People getting attacked for using generative AI. People getting accused of using AI when they haven't. Creators feeling afraid to share their work because someone might decide it looks AI-generated. And, of course, plenty of people who absolutely LOVE AI and are using it to create things they never imagined possible. There's a lot of fear, frustration, excitement, and...
Aside: I've been composing this newsletter in my head for a few days now and finally sat down to write it. I'd brain dumped my thoughts using a voice memo and took the transcript from my thoughts. It wasn't a dictation of what I wanted to write in the newsletter. It was the thoughts I had about the reading itself. So when I decided to see if an LLM could write the newsletter for me while on the go, I got so mad at the output. It was not AT ALL like how I'd been drafting it in my head. I...
A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law handed me a stack of pillows she wasn't using anymore. I took them home without thinking much of it. The following Sunday, she saw them sitting out at my place and told me, in Serbian, where they'd come from. One of them, her own mother had embroidered. I understood every word. I'm still learning the language, and that day, it landed. That pillow moment turned into something bigger: the same question I've been sitting with for years, long before "human...