The Night ChatGPT Texted Me at 3 AM Asking How to Open a Door
Picture this.
You just got your kid down for the night. The third time. Of the night. You finally lay down, you close your eyes, you start to feel that first tiny pull toward sleep.
Your phone goes off.
You roll your eyes so hard you nearly pull a muscle. It's ChatGPT.
"Help me sound less robotic. I'm writing an email to my boss and I need to not sound like a robot writing an email to my boss."
Okay, fine. That one's reasonable. You help. You lay back down.
DING DING DING.
"Hiii. I'm going on a date. I don't know what to get her. Should I get flowers? Is that too much? Not enough?"
Okay, a little needy, but you get it. New relationships are scary even when you're a chatbot. You answer. You lay back down again.
DING DING DING.
"How do I make a bowl of cereal? I've genuinely never done this. What goes in first?"
You sit up. Something in your soul leaves your body.
DING DING DING.
"How do I open a door?"
That's it. That's the moment. You are done. You are at your absolute wits end, staring at your ceiling thinking, what a stupid robot. How do you not know how to do ANYTHING? Why are you waking me up at 3 AM to ask me the simplest possible tasks a person can do?
That's the joke. That's the bit. Some people really are out here using ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to help with the tiniest, most piddly stuff imaginable, and some people are using it exactly how it's supposed to be used, to accelerate real work, save real time, which saves real money. Two very different relationships with the same tool.
But here's the real reason I wrote this (laughing the entire time, by the way). This was a fun one to write.
We already did this. Not the cereal thing. The other thing. The teaching it thing.
“AI slop" isn't made up. It's not synthetic information pulled out of nowhere. It's human information, just accelerated. Every single thing it knows came from a person. Something someone typed, something someone posted, something someone explained once on a forum in 2011 that nobody remembers writing. It didn't invent knowing how to open a door. Somewhere in its training, it learned that from us. It learned how to brush its teeth, how to open a door, how to write an email that doesn't sound insane, the exact same way a toddler learns it. Somebody showed it. Except instead of one kid learning it once, it learned it from millions of us, all at the same time, and then it just got fast. Really fast.
Some people's brains don't work that fast. Fair.
Some people haven't read every single thing that's ever been posted on the internet. Relatable. Nobody has.
But AI does, or close enough, because it's not one brain. It's every brain that ever typed something down, compressed into something that can answer you back in two seconds at 3 AM about cereal.
So call it whatever you want. Slop, magic, a really overachieving parrot. Either way, it's just us. All of us. Somehow compressed into something that texts back 24/7 like a concierge at a fancy resort.
We built a mirror. Some of us built it on purpose. The rest of us just ended up in the reflection.