As long as I have been reading books, magazines, newspapers – cereal boxes, for goodness sake — it was pretty much understood that a person had written what I was reading.

So, once I started reading more and better books, and consuming what was once real journalism, I wanted to write myself. It was just natural. Any avid reader has a book or three in their head. But as a child, for whom books and stories were vehicles of adventure and escape, it seemed even more magical to actually write them! Sitting in a romantic garret with an old manual typewriter, crumpling the bad pages and throwing them. Or wandering the world with a camera and a tape recorder, finding excitement and sharing it.

I managed to make it work now and again, the occasional article, producing periodicals, writing on MEDIUM for awhile, ghosting other people’s stories, entertaining my friends with letters and emails, corporate work, opinion pieces and reviews, interviews. I’ve even got pages of “memoirs” scratched onto clouds for people who asked, and others who didn’t.

When I lived in the former Yugoslavia, I wrote an essay every week for the city paper, about an American’s observations on their burgeoning freedom. It was interesting to me. I lived there during the mid 90s, a few years after the guns had stopped and a few years into what the people of Slovenia and northern Croatia were doing with their new opportunities. I talked to people all the time, anyway, in all walks of life and it was intriguing to hear their aspirations, and dissatisfactions.

When I put it together, I tried to keep it focused and light. I had to trust the tranlator because my Istrian dialect was lacking. So when people talked to me — in English — about the pieces, if they found them amusing I knew the translator had done his work well. I hope I started a few good conversations because freedom to dream was new to them, and in those days America and Americans were still about dreams and following them. These days, not so much.

And these days, even 25 years later, no one knows what a typewriter is, much less a garret. And the translator is a machine, well, a form of AI probably, but they call it “machine translation.” But more disturbing is that “machines” can do this, what I’m doing right now, creating a verbal observation, with colorful characters and historical elements.

And it would be just as interesting, if not more interesting, than this.

AI is already so prevalent and randomly inserted into our daily media interactions that my husband thinks the crazy woman on the plane (who saw the man who wasn’t real, had to be removed, and took weeks to be identified) is just an AI creation. ChatGP, he says. And he may be right.

There was a flurry of them on Twitter for awhile, and who knows how many “people” I read there are people at all.

This is the world we live in! So maybe the AI should write the cultural observations, as well….

IN FACT — as I get ready to “publish” this tiny thought — WordPress offers “AI Assistant” !!! There you have it.