Picture this: It’s sometime in the 90s or aughts and I am teaching Senior English, a high school graduation requirement. I have a student; let’s call her Stella. Stella is in doomed-to-fail-and-not-graduate percentage range: 56% or so, and there’s one long overdue essay that, if I accept it, and read it with my eyes closed, she could pass and thus graduate. I like Stella. Stella has a lot on her plate and has a completion problem. OK. My heart expands. The weather has turned and the lilacs are in bloom.She turns in the long overdue essay. It’s plagiarized. I confront her. She promises it’s her own work. But I’ve found the trail, thanks to Turnitin.com. I show her her essay, all lit up in blues and reds. She’s written a couple sentences ok. But not enough to pass. The usual shitstorm ensues and as they say in the business, Stella “does not walk.” I am the devil. In my 34 years as a high school English teacher, plagiarism was the Great Foe. My Dragon. I battled this monster on every front available to me in every era. Armed with various internet weapons of my own, I traveled into the dark place where lying lived, faced the demon of student desperation and apathy, slayed it if I could, and returned to the world ready to be a stronger, wiser, forever changed teacher.Whatever.We English teachers exhausted ourselves trying to outwit the beast that had threatened our sacred calling to change the world, one Catcher in the Rye essay at a time. We conferenced, punished, cajoled, failed. The technology was outpacing us, following us through the labyrinth with its dripping fangs, gaining on us at every turn. By the time I was in my final laps as a teacher in 2018-2020, I had surrendered. All student writing was done in class, in front of me, with pen and paper. You can imagine how my popularity soared. Because really, Ms. G.: What is writing, like, good for? When am I gonna, like, need it? Writing’s just like multiplying and translating. The internet does all that now. So really, Ms G.? Why?By 2020, I no longer had an answer.But for a while there I thought I did. Have an answer, that is. Although I always resisted the impulse to wax poetic about higher art and higher living and expanded intelligence (I did have a clue about my audience after all) I managed to boil it down to one simple chorus (blurb? post? story?) that I repeated term after term, year after year, class after class:Writing teaches you how to think. You learn how to write?You’ll know how to think.I never had that many takers. Adolescents are a tough crowd.I retired just as Chat GPT was making its way onto kids’ phones, which is where they now conducted all their schoolwork. I was sad, but enormously relieved to let the door hit me on the way out. It has been, in total, an incredibly satisfying career and I am lucky to have made a living doing what I loved. But… this newest beast? This was a hydra with millions of heads and I was over 60. Tata.Then I wrote a novel. Then I discovered that selling a book in the 21st century involved this thing called social media, which BTW, I had also railed against at every opportunity to students who just smiled with that SMH look in their faces. And now social media was not just Facebook. It was Instagram and a Website and a Substack and Blue Sky and X, and TikTok oh yeah: Reddit. And all these “platforms” were ruled by algorithms and I had to enter another goddamn labyrinth, (this time with walls that moved) and try to figure that shit out.I was not prepared. My neurological pathways had done their most significant growth in the twentieth century. Link in Bio? Canva? Hashtags? Copy, paste, copy, paste, delete, send, share, omit, block, trash, copy, paste. Cookies. Eat them? Hydra.I went looking for help. And I found it in younger women who had the patience to sit with me and teach me how to do all this (I’m still learning as you can no doubt tell from my posts/stories/formatting/linking debacles). Bless you Anna and Sarah, your wizardry has saved me.One day, as I was being patiently explained the alchemy it took to develop a “following” on social media that might be big enough to impact the sale of books, my friend Sarah said,“Now, I know you’re an English teacher and so you may think this is a kind of blasphemy but let me show you something.”And she proceeded to pull that sucker (ChatGPT that is) up on her laptop, type in a brief summary of who I was, what my book was about, and what the subject of my first Substack post would be. Then she asked it(?) her(?) them(?) how to best promote it and drive traffic to my website and Substack via Instagram and Facebook.We promptly got a very cordial, complimentary response with a dozen or so hashtags (all of them accurate) and an equal number of pithy, two sentence blurbs I could use as post language. They were succinct, funny and engaging.Every single one was better than mine. I guess I had a new friend.Or maybe not? Right now where I land with ChatGPT? I would say we are casually dating. But they are emerging as kind of a bad boyfriend. So awesome in just enough ways to keep going back for more. But there’s something…off. A lurking dummy streak maybe? Or some well-concealed narcissism? Or maybe, the worst possible thing: complete superficiality. Those bad boyfriends? The package is so nice, and so much is so right about them and yet, when you go looking for more, for the real human under there somewhere?Blank. Nada. Nary a heartbeat.Last Anecdote: as I was searching for a good image to accompany this post I Googled photos of “people chatting without computers.” Results? A cataract of images with happy people working together: all of them looking at phones.