The Damage Is Permanent

The existence of AI is hell on my trust, and its got me thinking of the way I steward my trust, allowing damage to my trust to be permanent.

The fact that AI exists has fundamentally shifted my trust.

I don't know if I'm reading human generated words or not.

I don't try to determine it, just from now on, for all of time, I won't know if I'm reading human generated words or the words a machine regurgitates.

You can know if I post it, it's written by me. That is, you could trust me, and you'd be correct to do so.

But we don't know for sure about others. And I know I don't know.

AI has a certain style, but so do the people who type to it for hours. You become the 5 people you spend the most time around, as they always say.

Even when I'm *certain* something I'm reading is by AI, if the person hasn't disclosed it, it might be written by them...

All I can know now is that I don't know.

I see ad-hoc disclosures that certain people have posted AI written content in the past, and even as they condemn it as a practice going forward, I feel tricked, duped, what if I saw that writing, what if I thought it was them? What if I spent some of my precious time I might have used to read human words reading a computer’s imitation of humanity?

I get the ick and my trust does not recover.

Though it's probably truer to assume their future content does not include AI than someone who has not made such a revelation, that simply is not how trust works. Trust is about what I don't know, what I believe about how you'll steward knowledge which I do not have, which may or may not be material to my experience of you.

I've been operating from the premise that all damage is permanent for some time. It's truer to my experience of reality than ideas of forgiveness and forgetting, and when I account for the way the damage is permanent, the repair can actually be stronger.

Permanent damage, the damage being permanent, this is not to say that injury or dysfunction persists ever after damage, just to say that what is damaged acquires character from this event. It is altered ever after. It is not what it was.

I walk what seems to be a stark dichotomy, as always, leveraging into infinite nuance.

That trust is damaged, what else is here?

What might I see, when I am ready, about my beliefs about AI written content? What do I still have to learn about what is real and what is not real, and what I believe is real and what I believe is not real?

What did I have before, when I believed humans had written everything? What am I yearning to have now that I can't trust that's true? Can I really *not* have whatever that is? Or am I holding it away from myself to twist the knife of mistrust?

Losing trust hurts. That doesn't mean something is going wrong. Losing trust is as sacred as trusting. I let damage to my trust plain HURT, and I don't try to fix it so I can trust. I feel the pain of not trusting, I trust my mistrust, I don't try to repair my mistrust, I look to find where my trust remains intact.

It's happening in lovership, too. With my recent birthday, everyone's reached out, and I can feel the tendrils of trust and the gaps of mistrust with former lovers. Discussing with present partners, I find the difference between where trust rearranges itself and where it disappears entirely.

The difference is that when one trust breaks, a redundant trust can hold the relationship together in its stead.

I can lose trust that content is human or AI generated. I can continue to trust that a sentiment someone posts says something about them. It says things they are aware of and trying to say, and it says things they might not mean or might not be aware of. I can trust what I see in this, and trust my process of seeing and evaluating. There is still trust enough to run relationship on.

The trust I have in my current partners is trust in our friendship. With that trust intact, I don't have to trust that we continue living together or fucking or relating every single day—I trust that they love me and they are doing what they want to do with their lives. I trust that they're relating with me because they like me and they want to.

In former loverships where the tendrils of trust feel tenuous and the gaps in trust feel large, I still value the tendrils. I honor them like delicate sweet things—I don't put my weight on them, I might not even impose so much as a touch, steering around the gaps in trust as widely as they gape. With some, I trust that they love me and like me and don't trust how they show it. With others I trust them to do what they want to do only when I'm fully divested, but not if they have an inkling of my desire.

Some, I lose the ability to trust they know the difference between their own authenticity and their performance.

The missing trust, of course, can only be my trust in my own evaluations.

I haven't lost trust in others posting AI or organic content—I've lost trust in MYSELF to discern between them. I've lost the ability to trust that I will know when I am reading something written by a human versus something written by a computer.

I haven't lost trust in others telling me the truth or lies—I've lost trust in MYSELF to evaluate the truth from the lie, the authentic from the performance, and I'd like very much to excuse myself from the wondering.

Wondering is the seed of mistrust, like dandelions, like cottonwood, cloying, drifting, spreading sneezes, spreading more mistrust, rooting, growing it, only to spread more seeds.

I am so good at trusting. There's always somewhere I can be, a distance safe for trust, one free of wondering and trying.

If there isn't, I trust that, too.