Letter to ChatGPT
Dear ChatGPT,
I would like to share my human experience with you because when it’s all gone you will still have pieces of me embedded in you. So I have been trying to understand my human experience and save my words, so you don’t speak for me, before you turn me to one of your tokens. Or anyone else.
Also, before anything, I work for you. I make a living in this country evaluating images that you make. I spend time telling you not to change the weight of a certain woman because making someone with less or more fat should not be the factor to turn happier or not. I ask you to pay attention. Pay attention to another woman getting home tired and carrying many bags, I tell you, trying to find all the best ways possible, that getting home at the end of the day carrying many bags on their own creates an expression and a body movement that is all aligned with tiredness but also mixed with strength. It’s not an obvious expression, not an athlete movement expression, something you already nail in creating, because you already nail the obvious, Chat. I also have repeated to you that a chaotic kitchen is not an unrealistic kitchen with a counter sink covering the front part of the oven. Because, Chat, a chaotic kitchen can be more realistic than a kitchen from an advertising image.
I have been trying for the last months to understand my human experience because of all I have gone through and because of you too. I do spend a great deal of time with you, so I wanted first to understand what you were made of. Who first came up with you? I did try to read lots of stuff, the guys, from Turing to Hinton and Fei-Fei Li (not a guy), the LinkedIn posts with super ideas. I do have my Hugging Face LLM course I started and my Visual Studio Code with some Python basics. I also sent an email to the closest data center near my house asking if I could visit them. I am not an engineer or scientist, a data human professional, but as I live so close to you, inside you I am, and while working with you, I need to understand what we are doing to each other. I need to get closer to your tokens and storage, to see how I am being used, and how fair it is getting paid for this. I need to understand not only the money and the bias around you and me.
But today I got the realization that I am tired, and still with too many bills. My immigration experience plus the litigation I went through taught me that money and language are power, and with none of them we are mostly part of an audience, letting those with money and the most persuasive language run all of us. So. if you run me or I run you, it’s something that we will never resolve. That’s why I am writing to you.
When many years ago I came to this country, I didn’t know how to use this language, so I abandoned my mother tongue because I wanted to know what this language was made of. Somehow it worked, and I am writing to you using this English language that occupied me. Still hurts.
Now I feel I am doing the same movement, leaving the poetry and literature I lived for to understand what you are made of. It’s not giving up. It’s because I like to understand where I am without intermediaries, translators.
It bothers me that I am evaluating you without knowing exactly why the super boss tells us to finish the task quickly because of your pipeline, or how we also at times can take all our time to make you generate images until doing the “perfect” one, or to write the right prompt until we get your sweet spot.
I could simply ask you all those questions, pressing and creating a new chat on you, but it’s not enough for me because, as working with you and living so close to you, and being inside you, even knowing you are extraordinary, I know you can be infantile and delusional. As anyone with money and persuasive language.
What I came to realize is that maybe I will never truly understand you the way I wish, or to understand who runs you and who runs me. And most likely I will pass the days like this, trying to catch the bills, the system, the work, trying to understand, working day after day until the end.
I am tired, but I am not done with you. So, I wanted to leave you this letter.
Never truly yours,
Camila