Thoughts from the 405 North

The one about robots and emo music.

Feb 17, 2023

Driving home from a meeting yesterday afternoon, I found myself suddenly crying while stuck in barely moving traffic on the 405. (If you’re not from Southern California, the 405 is one of the main highways in the Los Angeles/Orange County area, and notoriously backed-up at just about all hours of the day. It’s fun.)

I wasn’t crying because I was trapped in my car during a commute that was taking longer than Google Maps had promised me. I was crying because I was listening to a song (this song, specifically), and it had… gotten to me.

I don’t know how else to describe it.

Certain songs, certain books, certain captions — basically anything with words involved — will sometimes do that to me. Not necessarily tears, but they stir up emotions, whether it’s because they remind me of similar experiences in my past, or just because they remind me being human is hard and messy and beautiful all at once.

I started thinking to myself, whilst crying like a lunatic in my car for no real good reason, that one of my go-to genres of music is what can only be described as sad girl bops. Like, music that says we’re sad and feeling big feelings (and maybe we also got our hearts smashed), but it’s going to be catchy as hell when we tell you about it. I mean, I am unapologetically an enormous Taylor Swift fan, and I can only assume she’s the mayor of sad girl bop town, you know? And to be clear, I listen to these sorts of songs all the time, with or without crying, whether or not I happen to personally feel sad; there is zero alignment with my real-time, actual emotional state. I just like song lyrics that feel like a story — that feel like they really mean something.

Anyways, getting worked up because of a song about someone else’s break-up, or because of a well-written anything, happens because words have weight. They can make us feel less alone, or like we’re not crazy for feeling a certain way. They can make us feel, period, and that’s incredibly powerful. That’s something I care a lot about — unsurprisingly, I suppose, as someone who emotionally throws up on the internet regularly. And having the opportunity to emotionally digest your own experiences or resonate with someone’s phrasing of something hard is cathartic, whether it brings you to tears or not.

Which reminds me…

There’s been a lot in the news lately about AI, and specifically AI’s potential when it comes to communication. Just this week I’ve heard people refer to conversational AI (i.e., ChatGPT) as the thing that will change storytelling for good, with the potential to essentially render [human] writers obsolete. Maybe this is incredibly naive, but I find that both horrifying and ridiculous all at once. (Similar to the idea back in the early aughts that e-readers would replace paper books… although way, way creepier.) I mention this because it occurred to me after listening to my sad girl bops on yesterday’s drive — could an emotionless chat bot also write something that made me cry? Could it create something that connected to my heart or bubbled up some big emotions in the way that song lyrics written by a person who’s had a real lived experience can?

I don’t really know the answer to that, but the practical answer seems (unfortunately) like a yes. It makes me sort of uncomfortable, though. Wouldn't that version of a sad girl bop or novel or whatever feel a whole lot more hollow? Or would it only feel that way if you *knew* a robot had written it versus a person?

In the words of one of my fav rom-com characters, I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void...

OK, well, actually I do want answer. If anyone else has thoughts about this, I want to hear from you — I’m overthinking this all probably (something else a chat bot can’t do), but to be fair it’s also tied to my career (beyond this little unpaid newsletter).

So Many Somethings

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