Taking Note

On random language worth saving

Surprise: I read a lot. And I have all these sentences all over my life, in random notebooks, in my notes app, sometimes scribbled on my hand, sometimes a quick pic of a page of a book on my lap. Later, when I go through these, there’s no context, no author names, no dates, nothing that would help me remember where I found them or why I saved them; just language I couldn’t leave behind.

A very rousing scene, I repeated.
Yes, he said, a very rousing scene. A very rousing scene in the life of Bogdan Trunov.
Klaus and I had got drunk the night before and were trying not to die.

I’ve been doing this for years, and it actually stemmed from poetry practice. The point is to have no memory where it came from, to treat it like standalone language that sounds like something worth saving. The sentence just exists on its own now, freed from whatever argument it was originally serving, living like a stray thought I had once except someone else had it first and said it better. I’m preserving moments when someone managed to make the illogical sound perfectly reasonable, or when they noticed something everyone sees but nobody says, or when they captured a feeling so precisely it’s almost uncomfortable. It sits and simmers and later, I can find my own way to say it, or let it keep living without interference.

Since I started working on AI, this habit has taken on a different weight. I’ve realized that I have never, not once, saved a sentence generated by AI.

Once it is time to open the container, the mechanics of the lock system will be found to be fairly simple. Individuals opening the container by prying or striking are destroyed by the container’s protectors through the use of a power unknown to us.

Compartmentalize

As Work Danielle, I’m obsessing over whether a phrase sounds natural or manipulative or just slightly off in a way I can’t quite name. I care deeply about what the AI says when I’m working on it. I’ll spend an hour debating whether a response should end with a period or a question mark because the punctuation changes the entire tone and suddenly we’re in a philosophical argument about whether the model should seem curious or authoritative and what that means for how people will use it. It’s all AI all the time, and I feel it.

I have worn the fur of a wolf and the shepherd’s dogs have run me to earth…

And then I close my laptop and apparently my brain just rejects the whole thing like a failed organ transplant. Nothing I read from a model ever makes it into my Other Danielle collection. The fortress I’m building in taking note is entirely, exclusively, obsessively human. The excerpts I save aren’t always profound. What they have in common is that someone made them. Someone sat there revising, crossing out the first version, the second version, the tenth version, trying to get it exactly right. You can feel the effort even in the shortest fragment.

Sure, AI can produce competent sentences. Even ones that sound nice. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve helped make it happen. But there’s a difference between AI language and language that someone fought to make true. There’s no autobiography in it, no evidence that a person was here trying to capture something they actually experienced, even if what they experienced was just a weird thought about how staplers look vaguely threatening.

I was delirious, as though someone had ladled a gallon of double cream all down me.

This matters more than it should, maybe. I work in an industry that’s trying very hard to make the distinction irrelevant. The whole pitch is that AI language is getting so good you won’t be able to tell the difference, and in a lot of contexts that’s already true. But I can tell. I can always tell! Not because I’m special or particularly perceptive, but because I think AI is quite clearly walking around with a disguise mustache.

And as the years go on and AI gets aggressively better at natural language, the more protective I become of human language. It’s like working in a factory that makes synthetic fabric makes you treasure your one wool sweater. You know exactly how the knockoff is constructed, which means you can feel the difference even when other people can’t.

If you dream of fog, people are coming who are sad and ill. 
If you dream you know something, you do not know it.
If you dream of a halo around the moon, the end of the world is coming. 
That which is thin in a dream will be thick.
That which is certain in a dream won’t happen.

Collect

I sense that this practice of collecting fragments has become a way of maintaining standards. When I scroll through my notes and rediscover something I’d completely forgotten, it hits differently because it arrives decontextualized. Out of its original structure it means something new, or it means the same thing but I’m different now and hear it differently. That rediscovery is part of why I save them without attribution. I want to meet the language on its own terms, stripped of the authority of knowing who wrote it or what they were originally arguing. Just the sentence, doing its work.

Hal elbowed Able and pointed to the podium: Your turn. Able looked at the podium as if he’d never seen such a thing.

For a linguist, this practice does something purposeful. It keeps me calibrated to what language can do when it’s actually trying to capture reality. There’s a way AI language wants to explain everything, wants to be comprehensive and clear and helpful, and those are good qualities in a tool. But they’re not the only qualities that matter in language. Sometimes you need language that trusts you to do half the work. Sometimes you need language that notices something slant, approaches an idea from an angle, or leaves space for you to arrive at the insight yourself. They make the familiar strange. They assume you’re smart enough to get it, and if you’re not, that’s fine, come back later when you are.

There had to be more to the story, and I had to know what it was and, when I did, I, too, would be unmasked and the curse of the turtleneck-undershirts would be lifted.

I think about what it means that I’m building this written fortress while working inside the industry that’s ostensibly trying to make it obsolete. I know that no matter how good the output gets, I’ll never save it to my personal archive. There’s a line I’m drawing that I can’t quite articulate but also can’t ignore.

Maybe it’s about curation in an age of infinite generation. Every platform is optimizing for volume, engagement, and the appearance of substance whether substance is actually there. AI makes this worse by an order of magnitude because now you can generate plausible-sounding everything at scale. The flood is just going to get worse, and I’m grasping at ways to build a sand wall.

“I attribute it to the purple. I recently repainted the walls, do you see, and I knew the instant I was finished I had him. It was a knife blade of energy that penetrated his filthy heart. It’s a powerful color, perfectly in accord with my purposes. Virgil said it was the color of the soul. Do you know who invented the soul? Pindar. A Greek. Centuries before.”

Invented, Khristen marveled.

Do you do this, in some way? Do you do some kind of feral collecting where you just grab what resonates? Is there a random file on your desktop called “good lines” that you keep meaning to organize but never do because the disorganization is part of the point? What’s the last thing you saved and why? What I’m really wondering is: have we stopped being stopped in our tracks?

Resist

In an environment where AI can generate endless variations on any theme, where content is cheap and getting cheaper, where the barrier to producing language has dropped to basically zero, the things we actually save become a kind of resistance. I always end up in this strange position where I’m basically thinking about AI all the time, and actively resisting it with all my heart.

I sneaked down the grand staircase and walked to the bus depot a few blocks away. There were only three other passengers on the bus, so I racked my bags and nestled in with two seats to myself. Before I dozed off somewhere around the Petaluma, I watched the darkness roll past the windows and wondered how long I would have to go on knowing nothing about art, or women, or my country.

The practice keeps me honest about what I’m building and what I’m not. It’s a daily reminder that there’s a difference between language that sounds good and language that is good.

So tell me: what’s in your collection? What made you stop scrolling or turn down a page corner or reach for your phone before the thought disappeared? Does it matter to you whether a person made it? And if you don’t collect anything, if this whole practice seems pointless or precious or like something only insufferable people do, I want to know that too. What are you taking note of instead? What’s worth preserving when everything is already preserved somewhere, when the archive is infinite and also somehow empty?

Perhaps she would die this moment here of a massive insult to the brain, the way that poets did.