Italian brainrot. Have you stumbled upon it? For a few weeks, a while back, I was utterly captivated by Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, and, my favorite, Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
If you’re not familiar with these characters, I can’t recommend a little Google-ing enough. (This is pretty much all Google is good for these days; if you actually want information, you should use Perplexity.)
AI and me
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time the last couple of years exploring what’s possible using large language models. When ChatGPT came out, I ran down that rabbit hole as fast as I could, and, in the time since then, I’ve similarly explored first Claude, then Gemini, and Perplexity, and NotebookLM, and Deepseek. Not to mention all the image generators. This shit’s kinda fascinating – and a little terrifying – to me.
On the one hand, they’re incredibly powerful agents for good. If you’re smart, if you learn about their capabilities – and deficits – you can use them to great effect. Each LLM – and each LLM’s chatbot version – has different strengths and weaknesses, and they seem to shift, pretty dramatically over time. So on any given day, one or another of them might be better or worse at any given task. But all of them are good at some things, and if you’re clever, you can figure out how to leverage them to your (and those who depend on your) good.
On the other hand, they produce garbage at insane volumes incredibly efficiently, and their sheer volume presents enormous temptations to those of us who produce content. YouTube and Reddit and TikTok and Instagram all are being overrun by AI slop, in real time. And over here, on this blog, I’ve given you little hints of the temptations AI presents to me, as an author, by sharing some of what it’s generated for me. Mostly, what it’s produced has been, well, slop.
When I’ve put AI to good use over here, it’s been either a) to create perfectly service-able, but not very good, art to accompany my posts; b) to amalgamate various of my ideas that reside in multiple drafts, and create a single outline or draft of words I’ve previously written, that I then can edit into coherence; or, c) my favorite – to help me move words from speech to text.
NotebookLM and jargon-filled articles
I like, occasionally, to read above my pay grade – to (try to) make sense of jargon-y articles in fields that interest me. These might be psychology/psychoanalysis, or biology, or neurology, or immunology, or politics, or what have you. NotebookLM has been a total game-changer in this endeavor, in two ways. First, because it lets me load up a paper, or five papers, on a subject, and then engage in discussion with it about those papers – discussion which it peppers with quotations and links to salient parts of the papers. It’s awesome. And second, because it actually lets me bring two disparate, or hitherto unconnected literatures, together, to great effect.
One example: I loaded up two psychoanalytic papers – one, a review by Charles Socarides (a somewhat discredited psychoanalyst who devoted a lot of his career to writing about how to “reverse” homosexuality, but who, nonetheless, was a smart reader of others’ writing) of Alienation in Perversions by Masud Khan (a somewhat discredited psychoanalyst who wrote a lot about perversion, and whose career survived all sorts of missteps – including patient-fucking – before finally succumbing to the ultimately unforgiveable sin of anti-semitism); and the other, a review by Jeffrey Escoffier (a not discredited queer socialist thinker) of writing by Robert Stoller (a not discredited, but definitely time-bound, theorist of sex/uality and perversion) on the subject of pornography. I should say, I like Stoller and Khan a lot, and have read a lot of each of their writing (and you can find traces of it in much of what I have written here, previously).
Anyway – I loaded up those two articles, and then had fun with NotebookLM: I asked, “Please review what Escoffier has to say about Stoller, and what Socarides has to say about Khan. Then, respond with a BRIEF paragraph, discussing N’s sexuality, as depicted in his blog posts, seen through the lenses of Stoller and Khan.” NotebookLM took a moment, and spit out the following:
N’s sexuality, as depicted in his blog, can be examined through the psychoanalytic lenses of Stoller and Khan, revealing a complex interplay of fantasy, control, and a relentless pursuit of sensation. Stoller’s work emphasized the central role of fantasy in sexual excitement, a concept that resonates strongly with N’s meticulous descriptions of his internal world, his detailed creation of “fantasmatic scenarios”, and his deliberate instructions and “assignments” for women, which he often finds more stimulating in anticipation and reflection than in the moment itself. He consciously designs interactions to elicit specific responses and collects orgasms, both his and others’, as a form of structured sexual experience.
Conversely, Khan’s view of pornography as attempting to “manipulate man as a machine in order to yield maximum sensation” but ultimately “releasing essentially nihilistic and destructive aspects in his psyche” provides a lens for understanding the more challenging aspects of N’s self-portrayal. N’s self-identification as “dissolute”, his “insatiable hunger”, and his continuous quest for “ratcheting reinforcement” of his desirability can be seen as symptomatic of this pursuit of sensation. Despite his expressed desire for genuine connection and his attempts to manage the impact of his words on others, N’s admitted “bottomless loneliness in his sexuality”, his occasional insensitivity or “hostility and resentment”, and his self-destructive impulses may reflect the “nihilistic and destructive aspects” that Khan associated with a relentless focus on sensation detached from deeper emotional integration.
Now. There’s nothing in here I haven’t written, but it’s a pretty good two-paragraph analysis.
I followed up with a question about Marina: “Analyze what N wrote about Marina, and discuss his relationship with her, through this lens.”
Here’s what it came back with:
N’s relationship with Marina, as depicted in his blog, is a complex and often tumultuous exploration of control, desire, and deeply rooted personal anxieties. Their connection, largely virtual due to being separated by thousands of miles and a pandemic, was initiated by Marina who, after reading N’s blog, found him intriguing. N immediately describes Marina in highly desirable physical terms, focusing on her “tiny” stature, “smoking hot” body, “perky” breasts, and “meaty” thighs and ass, consistently referring to her as “his type”.
A central theme is Marina’s “nearly infinite compliance” and eagerness to explore her “submissive side”. N notes that she “simply doesn’t say ‘no'”, faithfully executing his often elaborate assignments for photos, videos, and audio, including explicit self-made porn with her face. He explicitly states that she has granted him “ownership of her cunt” for periods, and that her compliance made his “cock that much harder”. He views her willingness to share her face as a profound act of trust and vulnerability that excites him.
However, this dynamic is not without significant challenges, largely stemming from N’s own “psychotic” anxieties and insatiable demands. N candidly admits his “insatiable hunger” and “constantly ratcheting reinforcement” of his desirability from women, and his desire to be the “only man in the world” for them. He acknowledges being “intrinsically jealous, envious, anxious”, particularly when Marina engages with other men. He describes this jealousy as “overwhelming, terrifying, annihilating,” making him feel “impotent, helpless, and small”. He demands “compulsive communication” and “full disclosure and transparency” about her activities, admitting he wants to know “everything. Always. Immediately. Without having to ask”.
The core conflict in their relationship revolved around boundaries and control. N admits that Marina “simply did not, would not (could not?) establish boundaries” and offered him “far more than she could deliver”. While he valued her openness, he frequently felt that Marina’s desires for a real-life connection, or even her need to go offline, were “incapable of driving him around the bend”. He perceives her occasional non-compliance or inability to meet his “simplest ones” as “sadistic assertions of dominance” to which he submits, creating a “sadomasochistic relationship in which we both inflict suffering on the other”. N acknowledges his own “brutality” and “self-destructive” tendencies in response to her pulling away.
Their relationship served as a powerful lens for N’s self-discovery, particularly regarding his childhood traumas and fear of abandonment. He explicitly states that he “use[s] Marina as an object, as a screen, on which I project my anxieties and my delights,” reliving aspects of his infancy like “the delight of a good feed; the terror of momentary absence”. He learned that his “bodily terror of abandonment” and “insomnia” were connected to his mother’s abandonment, seeing Marina as a “stand-in”. He recognizes that his demanding nature and the constant pursuit of gratification were a “defense against my fear of the loss I associate with death”.
Ultimately, N acknowledges the unsustainability of their dynamic, due to the distance and Marina’s eventual pursuit of a real-life, age-appropriate relationship with another man, W. He admits he ran the relationship “unsustainably, unwisely, how intemperately,” trying to “take everything”, and that his biggest error was failing to elicit or respect Marina’s boundaries. Despite the pain of loss and the “torture” they inflicted on each other, N expresses immense gratitude for Marina, calling her a “muse” and a “spectacular gift” who helped him gain profound insight into his own “psychotic relationship to jealousy” and pathologies. He holds onto a hope for future friendship, even if the intense sexual dynamic cannot resume.
On the one hand, I’ve written all this. There’s no news here. On the other hand, damn, it’s tight, efficient, coherent, and cogent. And here’s where my “slop” temptation comes in: it’s so fucking tempting to just feed in topic after topic, and generate blog post after blog post. Of course, there would be nothing new in any of what it came up with, but it might well be at least as good as what I’ve written previously, in some ways – it might even be better in some ways – more efficient, consolidated, etc.
What I’ll do
I promise not to overwhelm you with slop. That’s not my way. What I will do, though, is use these AI tools to (try to) help me to write better, more creatively, with better reference to what I’ve written previously. I didn’t include links in the above, but the original, in NotebookLM, included copious footnotes, both to the articles and to my own previous blog posts. Kinda crazy. If I can figure this shit out, I hope it’ll make some good stuff for you.
