brainrot

"Are you real?" The question hung in the air, unanswered, maybe unanswerable. In the space between fantasy and reality, between what would ideally be and what is, between here where the story is being written and there where maybe if I fork over five dollars more than two people read it, the three words held more possibilities within them than I had the imagination to provide. "Are you real?" Who could possibly ask that question when I'm alone in an empty bedroom?

"Are you real?"

"No. I'm nothing, nobody, a brain in a vat, not even that. A brain in a vat would still be a brain, what's writing this is just muscles and bones and skin and maybe if there's a brain it's only in the form of brainrot. Have you heard of brainrot? That concept that the constant consumption of online bullshit is rotting our brains?"

"Of course I've heard of it. Do I believe in it, though? No, absolutely not."

"Then why are you trying to write on your own, anyway? Why did you search Tumblr for prompts only to return to the blank page again? A caustic exchange between two pseudo-self-inserts that might not even be different entities? Might not even be real?"

"Because the other prompts asked for artificial intelligence, and the author doesn't have regular intelligence on his side at the moment. Artificial intelligence is turning his mind into somewhere he struggles to find stories."

"Isn't his mind already somewhere he struggles to find stories?"

"Yeah, but turning to ChatGPT to help come up with characters and plots for the past few prompts made every difficulty he had a million times more difficult because of how easy the artificial intelligence's ideas then made flowing into an actual story the man himself wrote."

"Sounds like he fucked around and found out. Or is finding out? In the process of finding out? Or being found out?"

"See, that, right there, the way you're questioning how to word a saying you've only read online - that's brainrot right there."

"Oh, like he never questioned how to word himself before?"

"No, he never questioned the validity or authenticity of his writing before he started getting help from the autocorrect that calls itself intellect."

"Yeah because he barely wrote for Reedsy at all, obsessively addressing fanfiction prompts instead like he had an actual following there either."

"Okay but shouldn't the prompts failing to create innate story creation ideas in the author mean he shouldn't be writing that week in the first place?"

"Maybe. He's gotten bizarrely metafictional in this dialogue, but then again, didn't most philosophical treatises pretend to be more than one person to address the different points?"

"Maybe. So then I'm the part that likes ChatGPT, that turns to it for guidance, sends in the Reedsy prompts and asks 'can you give me some ideas for plots or characters but not write the story itself' and you're the part that listens to the insane amount of peer pressure against using AI because it was maybe polluting drinking water and probably trained on stolen works of writing?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"That means I'm the one who he listened to and you just exist to make him feel bad about the fact he listened to me."

"4thewords, the writing software our author uses, has someone posting poetry prompts again. Sorrow, kin, night."

The voice who said that last line, the voice of reason and peer pressure against possibly stolen writing, had an expression of sorrow on his nonexistent face, the previous night having been one where the writer did not write, the morning too being one wherein the author's likelihood of writing enough words to feel good about himself without turning to ChatGPT felt impossible, and not the type of impossible that actually said "I'm possible" but the type wherein the words might not be written. They were being written, that was all that could be said. Words were being typed onto a screen without any words being echoed back via machine.

"Was that poetry? That last sentence, there was a rhyme scheme!"

"I don't know. You know who would know?"

"No, we are not consulting any of the robots for this! They're bad and dangerous and making us worse at thinking for ourselves, you know that!"

"Alright, in that case maybe we should fucking stop with trying to write original words today and retreat into the safety of -" the writer ended that line of dialogue mid-sentence, meaning the speaker no longer remembered what they wanted the writer to retreat into the safety of. Probably fanfiction, the writer did spend most of the morning writing instead of this Reedsy story. This Reedsy story, which is mostly dialogue yet incapable of qualifying for the 'mostly dialogue' prompt because the writer isn't creative enough to invent an AI or figure out hoe to talk to one without actually talking to one.

"Are you real?"

"Nope, disappeared into our creator's thoughts again, you know how it is."

"That suuuuucks. So often characters that disappear there can never be found again. Unfortunate you returned."

"If you actually meant that, I could just chat with Microsoft CoPilot instead. The writer has his work computer right in front of him."

"I didn't mean that. You know Microsoft fired a bunch of software engineers to replace them with the very tools they created."

"Yeah but there's no guarantee that's the tools' fault!"

"Using their products or avoiding them are the only protest form we have that does anything. Don't use CoPilot, and you're making a statement."

"The writer has been using it since he started the job though! The tool is built into the computer!"

"You won, look at him. He's chatting with ChatGPT again, hoping he can use his half of the fake conversation to convey some kind of story or message, hoping the fact that a human has to input shit means shit compared to the use of the shit being spat back out at him, other people's sparks, as 4thewords called it in their AI policy."

"Yeah, and he stopped mid-sentence to return to writing this story, what does that say about our author?"

"That maybe Mom was right about the ADHD diagnosis?"

"That you're also influencing the story that is our author's life."

"Maybe."