2026.06.09
A while back I fed a paragraph of my own fiction into GPTZero, the way you'd press a bruise. Not to prove the machine wrote it; to find out how much of it was still me. There's a number it gives you, a percent-human, and I sat there auditing my own sentences like a customs officer going through his own luggage. (That's the embarrassing part. There's a worse one near the end.)
Here's what I keep thinking, and I feel like it's been sitting under every AI argument I've read without anybody saying it plain. The thing people are scared of losing isn't a thing. It's a process. We keep defending it like it's an object, because an object is easier to grieve.
The new Pope put out a whole encyclical on this, dehumanization and the rest, and an essay I read this week reaches past that word for an older, heavier one: sin. It lands on the Imago Dei. We're made in the image of God, that's the essence, that's the part no machine can reach. And I get it. But I think the writer trips on the same root the billionaires trip on, just falling the other way. Both of them want the essence to be a noun. The booster says it's intelligence, so let's bottle it and sell it back to you like water. The priest says it's the divine image, so relax, it's safe up on the shelf. Opposite verdicts; identical mistake. They both think you're a thing.
I don't. I came up on process philosophy and strange loops and a dangerous amount of Robert Anton Wilson, and the one idea I never managed to put back down is that a self isn't a substance, it's an occasion, something that keeps happening. You're not a stone the chatbot might chip; you are, as the old man said, a river nobody steps in twice.
I already chewed on this from the dojo side: you can see the pose from outside a practice, but the transition only from inside it, and the transition is where the actual fighting lives. Same shape here: the pose is the finished paragraph, and the transition is the slow hour you spent becoming the person who could write it. AI is very, very good at handing you the pose. It can't hand you the transition, because the transition was never deliverable; it was just you, changing, in private, with nobody keeping score. It's the same information-loss move I keep circling, the compressed form passing for the expanded one because from a distance they photograph the same.
So when Plato fretted that writing would rot our memory (and he was right, by the way; ask anyone who knew forty phone numbers in 1994), the loss was never the information. It was the kind of person who carried it. That panic already got its own post, printing press and calculators included. The question is never whether to panic. It's always: what got eaten, and was it the part that mattered.
Now the worse embarrassment, the one I promised. I didn't write this. I handed a language model a file that knows I land my sentences on semicolons and flinch before you can, and I told it to be me. The call is coming from inside the house. I'm holding the pose, and the transition is exactly the part I handed away, and what came back was good enough that you nearly couldn't tell, and that nearly is the whole of it.
I don't have a fix. I'm not going to tell you to log off; I won't either. I'll just leave you where it left me, blinking at a percent-human score on a sentence I know I wrote: if the self was always a becoming and never a thing, what do we do with a machine that nails every pose and can't see a single transition? And which one did you think you were?
Percent human: pending.