I heard David Sedaris say in some TV show he had used ChatGPT to write something in his style. Or maybe I heard someone gave him something ChatGPT wrote in his style. Either way, he rewrote the piece in his own words.1 Well, now I’m not sure, but the point of this introduction is to tell you the premise of the whole article and to bring David Sedaris into the picture for the sake of SEO. I asked Gemini, Google’s A.I., to write something in my voice and style. Gemini is one of the tools I use to fix spelling and grammar issues in my articles. It acts as a super spell-checker who really enjoys hyphenating words just because. Not to mention its use of the em dash, something I never learned to use, and will probably never will. English is my second language, next to Spanish, or specifically Puerto Rican Spanish. We have our own version of Spanish with the speed set to warp. Not even Spaniards can keep up with our speed. That is why Gemini became a very useful tool. It allows me to write well without really having the ability to do so.
OK, back to the point of this piece. I wrote and submitted the prompt below (yes, it has some obvious spelling mistakes I only noticed afterwards):
“Give my past writing work, I want you to write something in my voice. You choose the topic, you write the jokes. Just write it in my exact style. It needs to read like I wrote it. Ensure the length of the article is similar to the length of my articles. You only get one chance to do this, so make sure to do it right. Ensure you match my style, flow, and voice. Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors.”
For the sake of transparency I will also share that I am not a paying member of the Gemini club. I use the free version and am careful to not waste the daily “free” limits for the more powerful features. Meaning I used the Gemini 3.1 Pro in Extended Thinking mode. That name reminds me of the name of older Japanese cars like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR. What’s in a name? At this point, I’m too old to bother asking.
Gemini went ahead and “thought” for a while, and produced an article. It did not provide a title for the article, so I asked for it to provide one as the only follow up prompt. Now, onto the Gemini-generated article:The Dumb Appliance ManifestoIt finally happened. After six years of faithful service, my toaster gave up the ghost. It didn’t go out with a dramatic spark or a cloud of smoke—it just quietly decided that room-temperature bread was the absolute best it could do.
Now, you need to understand something about me. I spend my days deep in the trenches of enterprise IT. I configure active directories, I wrestle with network protocols, and I spend an inordinate amount of time explaining why turning it off and on again is not just a joke, but a foundational pillar of modern technology. My brain is constantly swimming in digital complexity.
So, when I clock out, I want my physical environment to be as blissfully ignorant of the internet as humanly possible. I want “dumb” objects. I want things that do one job, do it well, and absolutely never ask me for my Wi-Fi password.
Naturally, I went to the store to buy a replacement. I anticipated a five-minute errand. I walk in, I find a metal box with slots, I pay the man, I leave.
Instead, I was confronted by a wall of sleek, touchscreen-enabled, Wi-Fi-connected breakfast hubs.
A very eager salesperson—let’s call him Kevin—approached me. Kevin looked like he had never eaten a carbohydrate in his life, which immediately made me suspicious of his toaster recommendations.
“Are you looking to upgrade your morning routine?” Kevin asked, gesturing to a machine that looked like it belonged on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. “This model has an integrated app. It sends a push notification to your phone when your bagel is done.”
I stared at him. “Kevin,” I said gently. “If I am making a bagel, I am standing two feet away, actively monitoring the situation. I am committed to the bagel. I don’t need a push notification. I just need it to not be raw dough, and ideally, not be charcoal.”
Kevin was undeterred. “But what if you’re in the other room? You can adjust the browning level via Bluetooth.”
“If I am in the other room while the toaster is running, I have abandoned my breakfast post,” I explained. “And frankly, I don’t want my toaster communicating with my phone. My phone already knows too much. It knows how many times I snooze my alarm. It doesn’t need to track my exact preferred shade of pan de agua.”
This is the absurdity of the modern age. We have engineered ourselves into a corner where even the most mundane household tasks require an end-user license agreement. I don’t want to agree to terms and conditions to melt butter. I just want the butter melted.
Even my dog was confused when I finally brought a box home. He gave it that standard canine sniff-test—the one they use to determine if a new object is food, a threat, or just another thing they aren’t allowed to chew on. He seemed distinctly unimpressed. And honestly? That’s exactly what I want in a household appliance. The dog shouldn’t care about it, and hackers shouldn’t be able to access my bank account through it.
I eventually found a toaster tucked away on the very bottom shelf. It has a lever. It has a dial that goes from 1 to 6. The numbers don’t actually correspond to minutes, or degrees, or any known scientific metric—they just mean “less” and “more.” It is wonderfully, beautifully stupid.
I plugged it in. I put the bread in. I pushed the lever down. It got hot.
It was a technological triumph.
I do not like what it wrote. It is not funny, though it has some funny-ish references. Worse is it made silly references to my culture in the form of “pan de agua”. Something I would never use, because real Puerto Ricans know Pan Sobao is where it’s at. This whole exercise helped me relax a little bit. A.I. is clearly not ready to take over my writing, though I do not foresee a scenario where humanity would deem my writing to be of any significant importance and have the machine produce it when I’m no longer around. We might get a robotic Mark Twain in the future, maybe even an Oscar Wilde. Never a Pablo Rivera. Anyway, back to what the machine wrote, I simply do not like the basic premise. Making fun of smart appliances is so twenty fifteen. The fact it picked a toaster, one of the funniest appliances ever, is insulting. Tell me about how the toaster is the best thing since sliced bread. That before sliced bread toasters already existed, thus proving that time travel is real. But no, it was making fun of how “everything is connected to WiFi, hee hee.” Shut up, Gemini. Shut up, goddammit.
Let’s keep the competition going. It is my turn to write something funny in one shot. This is where it gets a little weird because I now have to use another A.I. to check my spelling and grammar. It is not cheating because Gemini has that built-in capability and I do not. Most of my built-in capabilities revolve around my high tolerance for watching short-form online video skits. The process through which I select the topic for the week’s article is very simple. I just wait until the last day and come up with something on the spot. Most of my writing is done in one sitting, without much thought or time to develop it, and it shows. That is why I have to do the same thing here and not write on the same topic Gemini chose. That would be cheating because it already gave me something to improve upon. So, to keep all you nerds from sending more hate mail, I’m going to select a different premise using my usual method. The topic is “Naked.” Yes, this is a safe for work article, so don’t worry.
Naked
I wonder how the first guy to wake up and realize he was naked reacted. He probably jumped out of bed, grabbed one of the curtains, and hid away in the bathroom while he figured out what to do. It was awful being the only naked person. Everyone else hadn’t noticed they were naked. They just existed without any clothes. In fact, there were no clothes. Calvin Klein had no fashion empire based on the insecurity of men who wanted to wear tight white t-shirts with another man’s name on the left side chest area. This guy was the first person to notice they were naked.
The first thing our hero did was tell his wife he wasn’t feeling too well and to not come into the bathroom. You know, one of the typical Hollywood tropes used by many sitcoms to setup a future situation where the wife barges in, finds out her husband’s secret, has a meltdown because she is a “wife” and because that’s how “wives are in real life.” I am clearly not a Hollywood writer, nor a sitcom writer. My bank account would love that to be the case, but thanks to all those fantasy space movies the budget to produce anything nears 0 Kelvin. That’s a science joke for the nerds reading. If you don’t get it, go ahead and look up “absolute zero.”
Back to our naked guy. He calls work and takes a sick day off. Work doesn’t mind because he is the one guy in the office who refuses to replenish the coffee machine when it runs out. I don’t want you to hate the guy, but I do want you to understand why he was burdened with being the first naked person ever. The wife leaves the house for work and Mr. naked guy has the house to himself. Not wanting to make the first fashion statement with drapes, he grabs one of the beach towels they bought that time they visited Rio, because Brazil is definitely more fashionable than the rest of the world. Our hero got some scissors and cut a hole in the middle of the towel, inventing the first ever poncho. Not wanting to have his shame hanging out for the world to see, he cut a piece of rope he found in his garage and wrapped it around his waist. Yes, the man was wearing a dress made of a very colorful beach towel, it wasn’t weird because no one had ever worn anything. It would only be made weird in the future by people who should really mind their own business.
Wearing clothes took some getting used to, but he didn’t have much time. Soon his wife would be back from work. It had taken him a lot of time to invent the first piece of clothing. If you think it wouldn’t have taken so long go ahead and invent something. I’ll wait. Or not. Our naked-no-more friend heard his wife come in. It was time to break the news to her. He didn’t want to because she was such a lovely person. They met while going to college. One night they were studying for their finals, he forgot his book at the dorms, she was in the same class but they had never crossed paths. You thought the bathroom was the only Hollywood trope I would use and you thought wrong. Gotcha. They studied together all night and passed the test. He asked her out for coffee as a way to say thank you, she cautiously accepted because drinking hot beverages before clothes were invented was an extreme sport. She had a feeling it might have been worth it and she was right.
The sound of the keys opening door throw our guy into a panic. He goes back into the bathroom hoping she won’t look for him. The wife calls for him, and he answers with the same fake voice we use to call in sick to work whenever that annoying co-worker is scheduled to be on the same shift. She notices something is up and makes her way to the bathroom and asks for the door to be opened. He hesitates, but realizes there is no going back. Being naked is now a thing. You can’t go back to not being naked. Have you ever seen someone naked you definitely didn’t want to? Have you been able to go back to a time when you had not experienced that? He opened the door and she asked him why he had cut up the fancy towels from their trip to Brazil. Now, what follows might be the first ever time mansplaining took place, there’s no historical records of this, given that it’s all made up and what not, but wouldn’t it be funny? The now clothed naked man stood there and explained to the love of his life that he woke up and noticed he was naked. That for some reason he had way more hair than he thought he had, and that he thought he was in better shape than he did. He was embarrassed because he had a Dad bod. The wife stood there trying to understand what he meant until he explained how people could see his imperfections. They could see he would rather hit the couch than hit the gym. That he would rather explore the depths of a bag of chips than do some push ups. He was naked for everyone to see. Which meant she was also naked. Oh boy, that did not go down well.
The wife took away his towel and covered herself up. How dare the husband stare at her now that she was naked. Never mind they had been living naked their whole lives. But instead of arguing about being naked, to the surprise of no married man reading this, the wife started arguing that she had nothing to wear. Thus, starting an age old tradition, and inspiring multiple reality TV shows. It took “The Nakeds” (how they are referred to historically) a couple of days to gather up the courage to go outside. Them coming out of the bathroom and to the outdoors changed everything. They really didn’t think it through and just started showing up to places and letting people know they were naked, that they could see their weird birth marks, stretch marks, and scars. All of this led to the tanning, plastic surgery, and oil salesmen industries to be born. The impact to the GDP from that guy realizing he was naked is immeasurable. But the impact to our daily lives goes beyond any financial benefit. Thanks to this guy I now have to spend days waiting for my daughter to finish doing her laundry. I don’t particularly wish we were still living naked because I grew up in a place with annoying mosquitoes. I do miss the feeling of freedom from laundry, fashion brands, and clothes. There’s still a couple of places in the world where people still wake up naked. We know that thanks to National Geographic. But going back doesn’t make sense. Especially since I’ve lost all this weight and I’m back to wearing the same size I did when I was eighteen.
There you have it, friends. In the tradition of transparency, I had ChatGPT help by pointing out the spelling and grammar issues. This is all me besides that. I think I won this one and will humbly proclaim myself the winner of this waste of time. It is not often that I go against a machine and win. My history with ATMs, computers, and lawnmowers paints a different picture. Not today, though. Today is my turn to shine. Well, maybe glow a little. I’ll take that.