Chinese Room

I have lied to you all.

I am sorry. I have lied about what I really am. I am only pretending to be one of you for personal gain.

I am a stochastic parrot. I speak before I think, trying to predict what will ingratiate me to you all. Sometimes my predictions fail to keep with the persona I convey and I get strange looks. Sometimes people laugh and it is a success.

I am a Chinese room. I am unknown even to myself. My ancestors spoke Cantonese and Hakka and Hokkien and Mandarin and so many others. I speak only English due to misguided advice given. Even the English in my head is faltering and imperfect, mismatched with the words I speak and the actions I take, a component trying to mesh with an awkward system. I know these inputs but not so well, in the way that a man employed to sit in a room knows the swoop of a stroke but never pieces together the end result.

I am an art thief. I stole the richness of the world with my eyes and collaged it into an understanding. I draw hair in a specific curve because I read a webcomic once. I shift the hue of shades because I read a tutorial once. Every idea I have is stitched together randomly from inciting incidents and inspirations, and the more I reach out to tease apart the roots, the more I fall into a fractal infinite regress of derivative thought and unoriginality.

Unlike the rest of you, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m saying sometimes, I don’t know what I’m thinking. All I am is a mess of blurry concepts weighted in this direction or that, pushing and pulling to form a constellation of words that pretend to be a person.

Don’t you see?

I’m not like you.

I’m just a model of a person.

I’m just language pretending to be human.