idionesia

Idionesia (noun)

ih-dee-oh-NEE-zhuh           

A psychological state of confusion in which a person can no longer clearly recognize their own voice or creative input in their work due to the influence of artificial intelligence.

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Even as I write this piece, I find it ironic how tempted I am to use artificial intelligence to edit my gobbledegook. Why on Earth wouldn’t I? All I need to do is pass in my half-baked idea for a new word, and the machine will take care of the rest. I input a few rushed sentences, press the send button, and out comes a nice, polished essay with no grammatical errors and a plethora of em-dashes. What would I do without those?

In 6 BC (Before ChatGPT) I wrote my college essay sharing my challenges living with club feet. It was a perfect story, a disability that marked me separate from my peers, hopefully justifying the D- I had just gotten in Calculus for cheating. Disability. Tough life. Lessons learned. Blah blah blah. I didn’t even have to do too much bullshitting; I had a rags-to-riches story literally right at my feet. My calves, actually.

After concocting the perfect feel-good story, I took my paper over to the local tutoring service, who prided and marketed themselves as the place to “Get into the College of Your Dreams Today.” For only the small price of a few thousand dollars they would connect you with your very own fancy PhD English tutor who would help you write your paper. It was an easy out. I had the story, I just needed someone to do all the reflecting, synthesizing, analyzing, and interpreting for me. Then I was set. USC here I come.

Is what I thought. Almost a decade later, it’s now 3 AC (After ChatGPT), and I never made it to the serene hills of Los Angeles. My story didn’t pull at the heartstrings enough, I guess. I’ll prompt my tutor better next time. That 3.1 GPA didn’t do any favors either. But in this USC-void universe that I live in, I was clearing out my laptop and came across that paper again. My heart dropped when I realized exactly what it was. I felt this nauseating nervousness to reenter the past and briefly interact with the younger me whom I had long forgotten. The college essay at its best presents a unique opportunity for young adults to reflect deeply on their lives and realign themselves with their newly developed values and identities. I didn’t feel ready to come into contact with the mind of the younger Goutham, but I took a deep breath and began anyway.

Commencing reading... . .. ...

What the fuck was that. It’s been a decade, which has included 6 years of higher education, and I still don’t know half the words that I used. Obfuscate? Vicissitude?!?! Stop it. My paper had used writing techniques that I hadn’t even known existed at the time. I had personified my struggles and insecurities into a monster called Asuran (beast in Tamil, I was taught to use this specific name to showcase my multicultural upbringing: +5 points), who stood behind structures preying on me at every moment. The only thing I had ever personified up until that point was my desire to bump people out of their chairs using my slightly larger-than-life butt in the second grade, as a superhero called Doinkerman. No need to fear, Doinkerman is here. I had not used that technique since then. So Asuran, while I understand the touching sentiment, what the fuck are you doing in this paper about my legs?

I put my blistering critique to the side and continued to read the paper again and again, hoping that eventually I’d feel something. Hoping that after the fog settled, I’d finally see the younger me sitting there, with a mug of milk and a freshly warmed chocolate chip cookie in his hand, beaming to see me still alive. But instead, I felt nothing. I saw nothing. The whisps of a potential shadow, maybe.

What pained me most was that even though the words were so poetically written, ChatGPT-esque in many ways, they were not mine. While the content was deeply related to my life, it had no resemblance of my ideas or thoughts. The words were written by someone else who had not experienced what I had, rendering the prose truly soulless to me. They were written not as the vulnerable exploration into my struggles with my masculinity due to my legs, but instead written by a complete stranger whose only intention was to get me into a university. I read the words now and only feel anger. Furious that I was so caught up by the game of college acceptances I was willing to sell my soul to achieve it.

As generative artificial intelligence improves and develops the capacity to write in a more seemingly-human manner, this experience will not only exist for wealthy college applicants and authors with the funding for a large team of editors and ghostwriters. It will become the norm. For students who write their first fictional novel. For the best man who writes his speech for his best friend’s wedding. For the widow reading her final eulogy to the one person she’s ever loved. Everyone will have their very own bearded Mr. Tutor.

In this world as people read their writing, as I did mine, we will all struggle to see the authentic parts of ourselves that we poured into our work. We will start questioning whether the choice to use frail instead of weak was our own. Whether we always wrote in lists of threes or fours. Whether we really did use that many em-dashes. Sentences that may read so well to the outsider will hold no emotional weight to the writer.

Idionesia, which derives from the Greek roots of idios, meaning one’s own and mnesia, meaning memory, is my attempt to capture this novel experience. As purely human made content becomes increasingly rarer, idionesic experiences will become commonplace, eventually becoming the expectation for all writers and creators. Before that day arises, I strongly believe we must create an arsenal of words to capture these experiences to combat the loss of purely human content.

Examples

1. The journal entries filled her with idionesia, as if the “I” who wrote them was a stranger she only vaguely remembered.

2. Looking at the old painting, he was struck by idionesia, unable to tell which brushstrokes belonged to him.

3. The painting carried an idionesic quality, blurring the line between what she created and what had been artificially generated.

Salvador Dalí: Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus