This is not a drill
Or how I finally gave in and learned to stop worrying and love ChatGPT.
Howdy ho!
Welcome to Of Cheese and Corked Men, all ye who enter here. This is an unsafe space, where I unleash the raw, unfiltered contents of my mind that have gone through a spell check at most. We’re off to a journey of self-discovery and growth, as I share my thoughts on embracing change, celebrating individuality, and accepting ourselves, for all its imperfections and disappointments. Because the violent path to self-acceptance is at its core, beautiful yet messy, captivating but repulsive. With a Friday the 13th ahead of us this week, we’re well settled into the October spooky season but there’s nothing as mortifying as being let down by oneself. And there’s no better time to finally let my blog see the light of day.
You’ll be triggered, consider this a warning. The wine helps, though.
But how did we get here?
The biggest fallout of the coronavirus pandemic for me wasn’t a needy sourdough starter in the fridge, but it was actually coming to terms with the fact that maybe I was just not fit for academia.
You see, growing up in a family of engineers, I was fed science and curiosity when my mother ran out of milk. Naturally, I turned out to be a free-thinker: adventurous yet pragmatic, hardworking but precious about my months-long holiday times. The textbook definition of an academic. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything but this. The thing that I had been doing since I was 5.
When the post-corona haze faded, and it was back to business as usual, I saw my future as the clearest I have ever seen in my life. I rounded up the courage to finally rip off the bandaid, tear apart the blueprint I drafted a decade ago for myself, and step out of the ivory towers of academia. Being let down by oneself is intensely frustrating, but it’s an important life skill to learn to live with it.
The next scene starts at our lab retreat, in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Limburg)…
Strangely enough, in the midst of all the ChatGPT panic and fearmongering going around me, I couldn’t care less. That was until last week. My colleagues and I had a small workshop where we had to use ChatGPT to generate a project assignment for a master’s level bioinformatics course. This would be the starting point for a discussion about ChatGPT, and its implications from a sane point of view that only we, the academics could hold with a straight face. That is until we found ourselves abusing ChatGPT to the point where it turned dangerously misogynistic, a la angry white men. That sparked a curiosity in me that ultimately led me to change my mind about ChatGPT.
While I haven’t been devising enough to use it to write my own publications, I find myself occasionally playing around with it to bounce off my inner thoughts and anxieties to explore my ideas further. It’s tempting to dismiss ChatGPT for being merely a collection of layers and neurons, with a handful or 175 billion of weights, trained on us, literally.
But now I see ChatGPT for what it truly is: it’s a mirror into our souls, it’s our reflection staring back at us.
During one such discourse on whether ricotta is real cheese or not (this place is of cheese too, after all) I heard about the news of the shootings in Rotterdam. Three people were killed: a young woman and her 14-year-old daughter, and a university lecturer. This only groomed me for what was coming ahead, perhaps one of the most devastating events of our recent history, the final drop…
When Hamas attacked a music festival in Israel, killing at least 260 people1, it hit me in a different way. In a way that I thought wasn’t possible. If you decide to take the proverbial red pill and keep reading my posts, you’ll quickly realize that I have opinions. About every single thing. And I’m not afraid to voice them - it’s the whole point of starting this blog. But I have to make an exception for this particular topic. Being physically, geographically, and mentally so far from the years-long conflict in that region, I don’t even know where to begin.
Ever so amazing Audra (Audra White) has an excellent take on this event over at her own Substack, so I’ll simply lead you to her post because she has expressed my feelings in a clear and concise way that I could never reach.
Where do we go now?
In response to my stream of consciousness, ChatGPT interpolated on the largest, scariest corpus of human-generated text, or as some like to call it: the internet. I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. That’s how I started sneakily putting out my writings on my Instagram profile, disguised beneath the charming images of Delft2.
The snippets of my writings that I had to dress up with beautiful shots and quirky videos on Instagram so I could get people to stop by and read were simply not enough. They were a teaser, hiding an iceberg of loaded thoughts. It was about time I relayed all this baggage that I’d accumulated to whoever was willing to read. So thank you, dear reader, for sticking with me until this point. We’ve come so far, but we still have much ground to cover… and not enough time. Seeing your commitment, I invite you to speak out! Instead of having these internal, tantalizing debates within yourself, be loud! Be audacious! Ask the bold questions that no one dares to even think of anymore.
What does it mean to live? To feel? Or simply to be human?
Please indulge me, as I embark on this quest to explore the deepest, darkest corners of my mind, and perhaps, find a little piece of your own story within. Hopefully, one day we’ll all learn to forgive ourselves, for all the false promises we made to our future selves. But that’s not all! We’ll talk about wine… the hints of honeysuckle and ripe quince we get on the nose, and we might get a bit tipsy too. That glass of holy water you’re holding in your hands boasts a hefty 14% alcohol, jsyk.
What else, you may ask? The name of the blog is supposed to hint at what’s about to come, except I’m terrible with naming things (see the cringe-worthy names I came up with for my bioinformatics tools on my Google Scholar profile3). On the rare occasion that we’re not pondering about the decline of humankind, we’ll travel around the world, tasting delicious food, and writing one-line reviews of films and music albums. Because sometimes, that’s all we have the energy for.
Perhaps, the world doesn’t need yet another grumpy professor, pacing back and forth in the corridors of a university, but we could all do with a cheese nerd writing a 2-page essay about Bleu d'Auvergne. Grab a glass of your favorite Chardonnay (yes, another boring Chardonnay) and enjoy the ride on this beautiful Friday the 13th.
Cheers!
Aysun
More than 250 bodies found at site of Israeli Supernova festival - rescuers | BBC News. 9 October, 2023. Read here.
Very corkily written. Curious on what's to come!
A very promising pilot, kiddo! Can't wait to see the "deeper of you" in the next episode :)