I am not a fan of AI. It’s a professional thing. Still, I wanted to see if it could mimic a style enough to be passable, so I asked the robot to read my blog and create a post about interior decoration, as me. I’ll post what it “wrote” below:

<start AI babble>

Minimalist Modern is a Lie and My Living Room is a Trauma Dump

It happened again. I was scrolling through Pinterest—which is basically just a digital catalog of all the ways I’m failing at being a functional adult—and I saw it: The Perfect Living Room. It was all “greige” linen, a single architectural branch in a $400 vase, and exactly zero piles of unfolded laundry. It looked peaceful. It looked curated. It looked like the home of someone who doesn’t have a “femur-sized pile of things in limbo” occupying 30% of their floor space.

Naturally, I looked at my own surroundings and felt that familiar goblin in the back of my head start pointing its judgmental little finger.

See, my interior design philosophy is less “Mid-Century Modern” and more “Mid-Life Archaeological Dig.” My house is a physical manifestation of every version of me that has existed since 2001. There’s the “Technical Writer Who Has Her Shit Together” desk (complete with dual monitors and a lingering sense of corporate dread), the “I’m Definitely Going to Learn to Crochet” corner (a graveyard of tangled yarn and broken dreams), and the “Thrift Store Junkie” shelving unit featuring a Marimekko shift dress I can’t fit into but refuse to part with because it has pockets, dammit.

I tried to lean into the minimalism. I really did. I bought a sleek, grey rug that was supposed to “anchor the space.” Instead, it just provided a high-contrast background for all the stray weed crumbs and the various “feelings and onions” I’ve been dropping lately.

Here is the truth about interior design that the “mom-tographers” on Instagram won’t tell you: A house isn’t a showroom; it’s a skin. And right now, my skin is a bit wrinkly, covered in colorful tattoos I had to tap out of because of menopause-induced pain sensitivity, and definitely doesn’t match the “linen and eucalyptus” aesthetic.

If you’re currently looking at a stack of vintage yearbooks and a single crystalline rose suspended in time and wondering where the hell to put them, here is my unsolicited advice:

1. Embrace the #DecorWack. If you found a ridiculous, oversized ceramic panther at a thrift store that makes you feel “brazen and bold,” put it on the coffee table. Who cares if it doesn’t match the “SaaS professional” vibe you’re supposed to be projecting?
2. Lighting is Everything. Specifically, lighting that doesn’t reveal exactly how much dust is settling on your copies of Doom II on floppy disk. Soft glow = less existential spiraling.
3. The “Chair” Rule. Every room needs one chair that is strictly for the cat, the dog, or a 20-year-old teddy bear wearing your late father’s baseball jersey. If a human sits in it, the vibe is ruined.

I’m currently sitting in the middle of my own structural collapse (both literal and metaphorical), surrounded by half-packed boxes for a garage sale I’m not ready for. My house doesn’t look like a magazine. It looks like a person. Specifically, it looks like a person who is tired of being her own sounding board and just wants a space that doesn’t require a “detailed written action plan” to exist in.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cannasugar to consume and a resume to ignore. Stay weird, stay messy, and for the love of god, don’t buy a Pumpkin Pie Blizzard unless you’re prepared for the squash-flavored betrayal.

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I didn’t edit a single thing in that chunk of text. A surprising amount of it is just plain wrong: that MM dress fits me just fine, thanks. It was also interesting to realize that it’s not creating pure content so much as making pointed references to things I’ve written in the past; it’s pulling the same descriptors in but referencing things in weird places that I wouldn’t.

None of this has changed my mind: AI to create original content is terrible. If nothing else, at least Gemini can’t replace me sneakily. I can tell when I’ve been body-swapped, damnit. And I’d never purchase a grey rug.

Back to lurking. #lurkwack