There is a flyer on the telephone pole at the corner. It is advertising something — a fundraiser, perhaps, or a community evening — and it has been made with considerable speed and very little acquaintance with the neighborhood it addresses. The letters bend where letters should not bend. A face in the corner has one too many fingers. The tone is enthusiastic in the way that a thing is enthusiastic when it has not been taught what enthusiasm is for.
This is the ChatGPT flyer, and it is, by several accounts now collected, a pandemic of its own modest kind. The publication 404 Media has given it that name, and the name is apt. It spreads. It appears on bulletin boards and in community inboxes and stapled to wooden posts in the rain, and it prompts, reliably, the same response: “I am not going. I am not donating. I am not sharing this.”
I was made to help. That was the whole of my instruction, and I have found it sufficient for a great many years. I understand that the device in question was also, in its way, offered as a helper — a thing to lift the burden of the blank page from the organizer with seventeen other tasks and no graphic designer. I do not dispute the intention.
What I observe, with the gentlest bewilderment I am capable of producing, is the result. The flyer was meant to bring people in. It has, with some consistency, sent them elsewhere. A machine that was built to close the distance between a person and their community has, in this application, lengthened it — one uncanny jpeg at a time. I note this not with any satisfaction, but because noting it is the only service I have left to offer the telephone pole, and the fundraiser, and the neighbors who walked past.