My letter to the BOT I work for,
Dear BOT, Before anything, I work for you. I make a living in this country evaluating the images you create. I am writing you this letter because, when it’s all gone, you will still have pieces of me embedded in you. I am writing you now before you turn me into one of your tokens. I train you BOT with metrics, grades, and nuances. I spend time telling you not to change the weight of a certain woman, because making someone thinner or larger should not be the factor that makes her appear happier or not. I spend a great deal of time asking you BOT to pay attention to one particular scene I requested: a woman getting home tired, carrying many grocery bags. You can’t generate a true expression of this particular woman BOT because you can’t capture the innumerable nuances of this composition. BOT, You don’t know how eggs are placed I a bag. I explain to you that getting home at the end of the day, carrying many bags on one’s own, creates an expression and a body movement aligned with tiredness, but also mixed with a kind of fading strength, maybe even a quiet hunger. What would that expression be, BOT? It’s not an obvious one. It’s not an athlete’s expression, something you already know how to do, because you excel at the obvious. I have also repeated to you that a chaotic kitchen is not an unrealistic kitchen with a counter sink covering the front of the oven. Because, BOT, a chaotic kitchen can be more real than a kitchen from an advertising image. Crumbs over the counter. You are good with sharp forms, bad with crumbs. 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, tried to understand the “in what form is information stored, or remembered”. Is my brain a box of trained preferences? So, what’s the game here and who trains who, chat? As I live so close to you, inside you I am BOT, 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. Your grippers. But today I got the realization that I am tired, and still with too many bills. My immigration experience 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, BOT,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, BOT, 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. Sometimes super boss vanishes with you. I could simply ask you all those questions, pressing and creating a new chat on you, BOT, 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 can be at times. 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. BOT. Never truly yours, Camila