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Let's Ignore that Terrifying Robot

A dark, unsettling AI-generated humanoid robot with exposed skull-like face, captioned 'Find humanity in a to the machines'

Let's use this terrifying request from Gemini to answer a question – is this all AI generated?

No. These are posts I've written myself by hand like an artisinal little dispatch from a steampunk telegraph machine. The purity! The realness!

That said, I have 100% leveraged Claude for editing. This includes feedback on theme, structure, and phrasing. I have found it enormously helpful for sharpening my thinking and improving my grammar, but I stop short of letting it write for me, because it does a bad job. Some things aggregated just get distilled into flavorlessness. Personal writing is one of these things.

I do, however, rely on Gemini for image creation because it delights me. They are always slightly off in a way that you would expect an application named Nano Banana to be. You cannot ask a microscopic man in a yellow hat to create great art. You can ask him to do his best and accept his limitations with love.

And sometimes the yellow hat will slip off and he will show you that he is a terrifying robot on a mission to "Find humanity in a to the machines." Which makes letting him write for you all the more dangerous.

Screenshot of Gemini's pixel-art living room image with the two grandfather clocks still in frame, and the note that everything else is perfect

Screenshot of Gemini ignoring the instruction not to generate a new image, producing the unsettling robot again instead of just updating the caption

Screenshot of Gemini's flustered apology for generating an unrelated terrifying robot image, ending with: Let's ignore that terrifying robot and go back to your brilliant caption.