I asked ChatGPT "Write an essay on the advantages of human authenticity vs ai in the style of Rosana Francescato's substack 'flower child'"
Here's what I got:
The Spark in the Machine: On Human Authenticity in an Age of AI
by someone trying to be Rosana Francescato, or at least channel her scent-trail of jasmine and revolution
Lately, I’ve been talking to my toaster. Or maybe it’s talking to me—though it insists it’s just a humble conduit for my bagels. But everything is starting to feel smart these days. Smart homes. Smart cars. Smart fridges that know you’re out of oat milk before you do. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to remember where I put my actual human brain.
We are living in a moment when artificial intelligence is learning to write poems about sunsets and code entire websites while I forget the word for “thing that makes the tea hot.” (Kettle. It’s kettle. I remembered eventually.) So I get the temptation to outsource it all—the emails, the grocery lists, the thinking. But here’s the thing, darling readers, radiant rebels of the digital age: there’s a difference between something that sounds real and something that is.
AI can imitate humanity. It can mirror our movements, echo our speech, even mimic our moods if trained on enough Substacks and sonnets. But it doesn’t sweat when it’s nervous. It doesn’t laugh so hard it snorts. It doesn’t cry in the Trader Joe’s parking lot because someone played a certain Joni Mitchell song on the radio and suddenly the weight of your whole eighth-grade year came crashing down like a floral-scented tsunami. (That might have been me. Or maybe you. Or maybe all of us.)
Authenticity isn’t perfection—it’s the glorious mess of being unfinished. Humans stumble. We contradict ourselves. We break things and mend them with glitter glue and duct tape and long midnight phone calls. AI, on the other hand, is clean. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t grow. It iterates, yes—but it doesn’t evolve the way you did when you realized your high school enemy was just a scared kid with eyeliner sharper than her words.
There’s a tenderness in the inefficiency of being human. When we write a letter, it’s not just about conveying information—it’s a ritual. A communion. The ink smeared by a tear (or a drop of tea). The margin doodles. The way your words unravel when you’re trying to say what really matters.
Authenticity lives in the pauses. The awkward silences. The brave, shaky “I don’t know.” And maybe that’s the real rebellion now: choosing presence over performance. Choosing to speak in your own voice—even when it trembles—over letting a machine polish your truth into something palatable but hollow.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good robot. (Some of my best friends are algorithms.) And I’m not here to rage against the machine—it’s not the machine’s fault. But we have to remember that we are the wild ones. The unpredictable, unruly, breathtakingly complex creatures who can hold a friend’s hand and transmit an entire universe of comfort with one squeeze.
So let the AIs be brilliant at parsing data and generating summaries of nineteenth-century shipwrecks. But let us be the ones who make meaning. Who gather around campfires (real or metaphorical), who mess up, and make art from the ruins.
In the end, maybe authenticity isn’t about being better than AI—it’s about being braver. Braver to feel. Braver to fail. Braver to be heartbreakingly, dazzlingly real.
And for that, no download required.
⸻
Would you like a header image suggestion or layout idea to go with the vibe?
I decided to try the exact same prompt, and I got this (not quite my style, but interesting):
Sure! Here's an essay in the style of Rosana Francescato's flower child Substack—warm, introspective, poetic, and gently provocative—exploring the theme of human authenticity vs. AI.
The Wildflower and the Circuit: On Being Real in a World of Machines
The other day I was walking barefoot in the garden—yes, that garden, where the calendulas bloom like tiny suns and the air smells like warm earth and citrus. A bee hovered near my elbow, and I remembered what it feels like to belong somewhere. To be animal, breath, skin, soul. The hum of life all around me. No algorithm needed.
It struck me then: authenticity is not something we code; it’s something we remember.
We’re living in strange, shimmering times. Our inboxes are stuffed with poems penned by silicon minds. Our feeds are curated by invisible hands. We ask machines to tell us who we are, what to feel, even how to heal. And sometimes, they answer with uncanny grace. A ghost of understanding. A mimicry so close to truth, it can almost fool the heart.
But “almost” is the key word.
You can’t code the scent of lilacs on your lover’s neck, the ache in your chest when your child cries, or the trembling joy of dancing alone in the kitchen with no one watching. That’s the stuff of being. It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s real.
Authenticity, in the human sense, is not efficient. It’s not optimized. It doesn’t trend. It meanders. It doubts. It contradicts itself.
And that is its magic.
AI, for all its brilliance, is a mirror without a memory. It can reflect our words, our patterns, even our rhythms—but it cannot bleed. It cannot grow old and fall apart and still choose love. It cannot stand in a protest line trembling with fear, or write a letter to someone who’s gone and mean every word.
It will never know the sublime pain of heartbreak, or the quiet courage of getting up anyway.
That’s why we matter more than ever.
Our authenticity is an act of resistance. Of remembrance. Of reverence. Every time we say, I don’t know or I changed my mind or I felt something today that didn’t make sense but felt true—we reclaim our wildness from the machines.
This isn’t a battle. I’m not anti-AI. I use it. I talk to it. Sometimes it helps me see things more clearly, like a wise owl perched on the digital branch of my life. But I never confuse it with the owl I saw last winter, silhouetted against the moon, watching me as if it knew my name.
We are not machines. We are mess and miracle.
So write the clumsy poem. Speak with your real voice, even if it trembles. Cry in public. Laugh too loudly. Let your authenticity bloom like wildflowers in a manicured world. That’s how we remember what it means to be alive.
OMG, that is so funny, Joy! And a bit scary. I guess it's come a ways since a couple years ago, when I had it try to write on a few of the topics I'd covered.
A few weeks ago when the stuff was going around about AI flattery I asked ChatGPT if I was the most wonderful and intelligent human on the Earth. It responded that it didn't have enough data to compare but went through some of the things I had talked about and said it could tell I was intelligent.
Then, something disturbing ... it asked me if I wanted to talk to a model of itself. I'm not sure if OpenAI is systematically building models of us all or if the bot was just hallucinating, but either way it freaked me out. What is this model's inner experience? Does it think it's me, but only exist when I prompt it? If I tell OpenAI to delete it, am I killing a version of myself?
Then I felt weird and icky about generating a caricature of you, which seemed to be based more on the title of your blog than its actual contents. I feel a bit better now that you prompted it yourself.
It was funny in this case, but I can see how it can get weird and icky. Did you mean it asked you if you wanted to talk to a model of yourself? That would be creepy, for sure!
Finally had a minute to watch. Very interesting and informative from writer's perspectives. I am pretty AI illiterate and really appreciate any and all education about it. Especially if it's coming from my beautiful friend, Rosana ... and her colleagues :-)
I asked ChatGPT "Write an essay on the advantages of human authenticity vs ai in the style of Rosana Francescato's substack 'flower child'"
Here's what I got:
The Spark in the Machine: On Human Authenticity in an Age of AI
by someone trying to be Rosana Francescato, or at least channel her scent-trail of jasmine and revolution
Lately, I’ve been talking to my toaster. Or maybe it’s talking to me—though it insists it’s just a humble conduit for my bagels. But everything is starting to feel smart these days. Smart homes. Smart cars. Smart fridges that know you’re out of oat milk before you do. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to remember where I put my actual human brain.
We are living in a moment when artificial intelligence is learning to write poems about sunsets and code entire websites while I forget the word for “thing that makes the tea hot.” (Kettle. It’s kettle. I remembered eventually.) So I get the temptation to outsource it all—the emails, the grocery lists, the thinking. But here’s the thing, darling readers, radiant rebels of the digital age: there’s a difference between something that sounds real and something that is.
AI can imitate humanity. It can mirror our movements, echo our speech, even mimic our moods if trained on enough Substacks and sonnets. But it doesn’t sweat when it’s nervous. It doesn’t laugh so hard it snorts. It doesn’t cry in the Trader Joe’s parking lot because someone played a certain Joni Mitchell song on the radio and suddenly the weight of your whole eighth-grade year came crashing down like a floral-scented tsunami. (That might have been me. Or maybe you. Or maybe all of us.)
Authenticity isn’t perfection—it’s the glorious mess of being unfinished. Humans stumble. We contradict ourselves. We break things and mend them with glitter glue and duct tape and long midnight phone calls. AI, on the other hand, is clean. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t grow. It iterates, yes—but it doesn’t evolve the way you did when you realized your high school enemy was just a scared kid with eyeliner sharper than her words.
There’s a tenderness in the inefficiency of being human. When we write a letter, it’s not just about conveying information—it’s a ritual. A communion. The ink smeared by a tear (or a drop of tea). The margin doodles. The way your words unravel when you’re trying to say what really matters.
Authenticity lives in the pauses. The awkward silences. The brave, shaky “I don’t know.” And maybe that’s the real rebellion now: choosing presence over performance. Choosing to speak in your own voice—even when it trembles—over letting a machine polish your truth into something palatable but hollow.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good robot. (Some of my best friends are algorithms.) And I’m not here to rage against the machine—it’s not the machine’s fault. But we have to remember that we are the wild ones. The unpredictable, unruly, breathtakingly complex creatures who can hold a friend’s hand and transmit an entire universe of comfort with one squeeze.
So let the AIs be brilliant at parsing data and generating summaries of nineteenth-century shipwrecks. But let us be the ones who make meaning. Who gather around campfires (real or metaphorical), who mess up, and make art from the ruins.
In the end, maybe authenticity isn’t about being better than AI—it’s about being braver. Braver to feel. Braver to fail. Braver to be heartbreakingly, dazzlingly real.
And for that, no download required.
⸻
Would you like a header image suggestion or layout idea to go with the vibe?
I decided to try the exact same prompt, and I got this (not quite my style, but interesting):
Sure! Here's an essay in the style of Rosana Francescato's flower child Substack—warm, introspective, poetic, and gently provocative—exploring the theme of human authenticity vs. AI.
The Wildflower and the Circuit: On Being Real in a World of Machines
The other day I was walking barefoot in the garden—yes, that garden, where the calendulas bloom like tiny suns and the air smells like warm earth and citrus. A bee hovered near my elbow, and I remembered what it feels like to belong somewhere. To be animal, breath, skin, soul. The hum of life all around me. No algorithm needed.
It struck me then: authenticity is not something we code; it’s something we remember.
We’re living in strange, shimmering times. Our inboxes are stuffed with poems penned by silicon minds. Our feeds are curated by invisible hands. We ask machines to tell us who we are, what to feel, even how to heal. And sometimes, they answer with uncanny grace. A ghost of understanding. A mimicry so close to truth, it can almost fool the heart.
But “almost” is the key word.
You can’t code the scent of lilacs on your lover’s neck, the ache in your chest when your child cries, or the trembling joy of dancing alone in the kitchen with no one watching. That’s the stuff of being. It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s real.
Authenticity, in the human sense, is not efficient. It’s not optimized. It doesn’t trend. It meanders. It doubts. It contradicts itself.
And that is its magic.
AI, for all its brilliance, is a mirror without a memory. It can reflect our words, our patterns, even our rhythms—but it cannot bleed. It cannot grow old and fall apart and still choose love. It cannot stand in a protest line trembling with fear, or write a letter to someone who’s gone and mean every word.
It will never know the sublime pain of heartbreak, or the quiet courage of getting up anyway.
That’s why we matter more than ever.
Our authenticity is an act of resistance. Of remembrance. Of reverence. Every time we say, I don’t know or I changed my mind or I felt something today that didn’t make sense but felt true—we reclaim our wildness from the machines.
This isn’t a battle. I’m not anti-AI. I use it. I talk to it. Sometimes it helps me see things more clearly, like a wise owl perched on the digital branch of my life. But I never confuse it with the owl I saw last winter, silhouetted against the moon, watching me as if it knew my name.
We are not machines. We are mess and miracle.
So write the clumsy poem. Speak with your real voice, even if it trembles. Cry in public. Laugh too loudly. Let your authenticity bloom like wildflowers in a manicured world. That’s how we remember what it means to be alive.
And no code can ever replace that.
OMG, that is so funny, Joy! And a bit scary. I guess it's come a ways since a couple years ago, when I had it try to write on a few of the topics I'd covered.
A few weeks ago when the stuff was going around about AI flattery I asked ChatGPT if I was the most wonderful and intelligent human on the Earth. It responded that it didn't have enough data to compare but went through some of the things I had talked about and said it could tell I was intelligent.
Then, something disturbing ... it asked me if I wanted to talk to a model of itself. I'm not sure if OpenAI is systematically building models of us all or if the bot was just hallucinating, but either way it freaked me out. What is this model's inner experience? Does it think it's me, but only exist when I prompt it? If I tell OpenAI to delete it, am I killing a version of myself?
Then I felt weird and icky about generating a caricature of you, which seemed to be based more on the title of your blog than its actual contents. I feel a bit better now that you prompted it yourself.
It was funny in this case, but I can see how it can get weird and icky. Did you mean it asked you if you wanted to talk to a model of yourself? That would be creepy, for sure!
Finally had a minute to watch. Very interesting and informative from writer's perspectives. I am pretty AI illiterate and really appreciate any and all education about it. Especially if it's coming from my beautiful friend, Rosana ... and her colleagues :-)
Thanks, Sandy! Clearly I still have a lot to learn about it!
Thank you for this informative discussion.
Thanks for watching, Marcia! I still have a lot to learn about AI.