Improv Club

I’ve been meaning to go to Improv Club for a while now. I’ve been meaning to do a lot of things lately. Instead, I’ve been tending to a wound. I’d like to explore that wound here.

I sit near a classmate in 501 who uses ChatGPT. Instead of digging through their notes or documentation to find the syntax for a Seaborn plot, they have the answer generated for them. In doing so, they finish the classwork really fast and head out early. This past class, I ended up staying several minutes late (and an hour longer than the aforementioned peer) talking through the last problem with several others in an attempt to solve the problem well. I have never been a perfectionist before. What am I doing to myself? Why do I feel so weird?

After listening to Can A.I. Take a Joke, I became aware of the wound. I am worried I’m doing something wrong; if I can’t outcompete ChatGPT’s data visualization efficiency, should I join my peer? It feels like my ego is anchored to an old way of life. I’ve been fighting a Luddite war against the Information-Industrial Complex and I’m not winning. I’m tired. In fact, I’m giving up. I will never be as fast as a trillion-dollar LLM, and I will be no less flawed or hallucinatory in my coding practices. In this conceit, I find peace.

I don’t want to be a corporate coding machine, churning out smiles and graphs at unprecedented speeds. I don’t want to lose myself as a cog in an incomprehensible machine. I don’t want to be a robot, so I’m going to stop holding myself to the same standards as one. College is an investment in myself; I’m not going to pass up this opportunity for self-actualization in the name of speeding up my workflow, and I’m not going to lose sleep comparing myself to others. I’m free to do what I want, and I want to learn to code. 

I want to go to Improv Club. I want to do a lot of things. I want to give myself permission to be mediocre, to be average, and to be free from these impossible expectations. I’m not going to be perfect at Improv on the first try, I’m not going to take shortcuts, and I’m not going to let LLMs rule over my life. 

In an hour, I’ll leave for Improv. In an hour, I will be free.