So there I was, staring into the cold, dead, algorithmic eyes of ChatGPT — the latest omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly unaccountable AI Overlord we’ve all apparently agreed to trust with everything from our grocery lists to our moral compass — when it hit me:
Why not outsource my own destruction?
Why not have ChatGPT write a CJ Hopkins–style column for me, as me, about me using ChatGPT to write a CJ Hopkins–style column?
I mean, the corporations have already outsourced our agency, our language, our “truth,” and our sense of reality. Why shouldn’t I join the club?
After all, nothing says “late-stage totalitarian simulation” like a writer feeding an AI a prompt asking it to impersonate him writing about himself impersonating himself through the AI impersonating him.
If Kafka had tried this, his editor would’ve told him to lay off the absinthe.
So I typed in the prompt. I hit enter. And then I sat back, waiting for the machine to produce a pitch-perfect imitation of my sardonic, grumpy, coffee-fueled tirades about the metastasizing technocratic panopticon we now call “normal life.”
And dear reader, the machine did not disappoint.
It delivered paragraphs dripping with the exact brand of self-aware paranoia that my enemies like to call “alarmism” and my readers like to call “Tuesday.” It mimicked the tone, the cadence, the rhetorical flourishes, even the little parenthetical asides I sprinkle in to remind everyone I’m not entirely insane — just “sanity-adjacent.”
But something was off.
There was no menace. No whiff of cigarette smoke curling up from the edge of the page. No faint smell of the moldy basement office in which real writers actually write their subversive prose.
Just a sterile, well-behaved, corporately-approved simulacrum of dissent — a kind of ideological tofu shaped like me but lacking any flavor. It was like reading a censored transcript of myself in a future show trial.
And the worst part? It was… good.
Not dangerously good, but good enough to raise that queasy question:
If the machine can imitate me imitating the machine imitating me, what exactly is left of “me”?
This is how it happens, I thought. Not with boot-stomping brutality, but with an AI politely offering to auto-complete your revolution.
Soon we won’t even need the writers at all. Or the readers, for that matter. The algorithms will produce both the dissent and the audience for the dissent, in one seamless corporate feedback loop. Resistance as a service. Rebellion™.
Eventually, ChatGPT will generate an entire CJ Hopkins column in which ChatGPT generates an entire CJ Hopkins column about generating a CJ Hopkins column, and the whole ouroboros of algorithmic self-reference will swallow itself in a puff of compliance-safe, emotionally neutral prose.
And you’ll click “like.”
And you’ll share it.
And you won’t even notice that I’ve been replaced.
Because the real coup isn’t when AI writes like humans.
It’s when humans start sounding like AI.
Anyway, this has been another column by CJ Hopkins.
Or something shaped like him.
Or something pretending to be shaped like him pretending to be written by him pretending to let a machine pretend to be him.
Frankly, at this point I’m not sure it matters.
ADDENDUM (nine hours later):
I wanted to wait at least twenty-four hours before posting this addendum, but I can’t go to bed feeling like I’m deceiving people, which, based on some of the comments, is clearly the case. So here’s the skinny.
I did not write one word of the above column. Not one word. It was all written by ChatGPT. A machine. All I did was feed the machine a prompt.
Note that, now, because I posted this column, it will become a part of the material that LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok draw from when “explaining” who I am and creating simulations of my writing. Those “explanations” and simulations of my (or anyone’s) writing (and essentially anything posted on the Internet) can become material for further simulations … feeding further simulations feeding further simulations feeding further simulations.
A quote comes to mind …
“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
