I'm Not Angry You Knowingly Shared That AI Video. I Just Think Less of You!

Look, we’re friends, right? Eighteen, nineteen years now? But we’ve never had a real fight. After all, I’ve always said that’s the measure of a real friendship— getting through your first fight. Man, I’ve had blowouts with some of my closest friends, and I know that those friendships are full and complete and trusting. I could probably sit in a car with those people for six, seven hours, not saying a thing. Just us two, silent after the conversation ran out, and feeling good about it. But if you and I were sitting in the same car, the silence would feel untested— a noisy silence. Because the friendship isn’t real yet.

Like that video you reposted of two hot people simultaneously appearing in the other’s dream. Now that’s a lovely concept, that prompt— lucid dreaming as a device meant to identify soulmates within the larger context of a piece of fiction (I have no idea if that’s what you meant, but I think that’s the deeper meaning, here). But when I watch that, and I see those characters, I can’t help but think you have resentment towards people like me, who pretend to be characters professionally. Like the AI video is a solution to the problem of my passion and labor. A creative workaround for the very thing that is my principle gesture as a person.

But I want to assure you— I’m not angry with you. I’m not even disappointed in you. I simply think less of you. When you show the world that you don’t need my hard work and training and human fault and labor and backstory and self-doubt — because you think that you can do it better — it leads me to believe you’re not so smart. “Oh,” I think, “perhaps you have always been this way when consuming movies or TV, novels or poetry—you simply never thought about the idea that labor gives it meaning and profundity, which is obvious to me.” We’re just very unalike, you see.

So I don’t think we need to have that crucial fight anymore. Because I don’t know if I could ever be real friends with you at this point. I don’t need to sit in a car in silence with you, and simply trust your presence, because I know I can’t. Once again, I am not angry with you. In fact, it seems like you saved me some trouble— I’ll never have to keep you around, wondering if, one day, you could be a valuable part of my life. I simply think less of you, my old friend. In fact, I’m thinking less and less of you as I write this. And, at the close of this sentence, I doubt I’ll even think of you at all, like you don’t think of me.