Questions I have that AI Cannot Answer
1) How to brush away the suggestions that I write this very list in AI – the Gemini prompts, Claude’s plausible offers.
2) What my favorite color is, and why, when my family went mini-golfing, my mom always chose the blue ball, dad green, little brother yellow, but I can’t remember what I chose, whether it was the same or different each time. Maybe because my favorite color was turquoise, and that wasn’t always an option, and choosing a second favorite color was just too many choices for my little neurodivergent brain.
3) Why that particular song keeps getting stuck in my head, and how to satisfy the longing behind it.
4) Whether I should choose my boyfriend or the person I broke up with him for. This choice is already made, which might confuse a system trained in the linear passage of time. Which in fact is me, that system, confused constantly by time and by love.
5) My friend told me that her mother always says: You make your decision and your decision will hold you. And as a general rule I find this to be true, but sometimes I wonder what a decision actually is, and whether something you chose under stress, or because it seems like the right thing to do, can actually be a decision, and whether that kind of decision in fact has the gentleness and softness of something like a blanket, something that can hold you, or whether it is iron that shackles to something other than you, leaving your ghost floating overhead, unattached physically, yet unable to leave.
6) The AI would be leaning toward advising me to break up with my boyfriend at this point, but it is neither a ghost nor a living soul, and just tells me what it thinks I want to hear. If I don’t know what I want, how can it guess? What if no option would please me? What then, Chat? What then??
7) Maybe my favorite color is purple, or, god forbid, pink, but I resist the girlishness of those choices, the box they seem to put me in, even though I am, in fact, a girl.
8) What happened to that sweater that used to be my favorite? I gained weight and it didn’t fit anymore for a while, but it would now if I could find it. Did I throw it away in the name of being fat-positive? How could a younger me make that kind of decision, not knowing what size future me would wear? It was emerald green.
9) Maybe my favorite color is green, like my eyes, but I wore that out long ago, to the point where an ex-boyfriend asked if he could see me in something else. Maybe my eyes aren’t even green anymore, since they look blue, since everyone thinks they’re blue, causing me to say, illogically: My eyes look blue but they’re actually green. Because isn’t the definition of color what something looks like? What else would it be? Why would I appear to be something I am not?
10) Is my promise to my father to never get a tattoo still binding five years after his death?
11) In the Anne McCaffrey dragon books, the gold ones are the queens, the leaders, followed in rank by bronze, then brown, then blues and greens. If I were to choose by color, I’d choose a humble blue or green. But they’re not the ones that give you status. They only give you lifelong companionship. Could that be enough for me? Or would I always be envious of those with a gold dragon? Would I always wish I were more important, that my dragon were the envy of the world?
12) Should you match your dragon to your heart, to your ambition, or to your eyes?
13) My boyfriend doesn’t approve of tattoos, but he won’t come out and say it. He knows I can be defensive about things that threaten my sense of autonomy. I would like to get a little dragon tattoo as my first. I even reached out to a local artist with my idea: A tiny dragon shaded red and orange like a maple leaf. She said she could do it. She gave me a price. She’s waiting to hear back if I want to schedule it.
14) Why did I choose red and orange? There are no red and orange dragons in the Anne McCaffrey world. No one in my family chose a red or orange golf ball. My eyes may not be able to decide what color they are, but they are definitely not red or orange. Can I have a dragon that is all its own, with no precedent? A dragon the color of fire?
15) Did you ever write a pro and con list in your head when two people wanted you, and you wanted them? Did you ever have to wait twenty years for one of them to want you back? What would someone in a rom-com do? What would a Jane Austen heroine do? What Would Jesus Do? WWJ(essica)D?
16) Why do I feel weirdly pressured to get the tattoo, even though it was entirely my idea and no one is waiting on my decision? What if every decision in my life has been the result of pressure or my own weird counterpressure? What if my tiny dragon turns into a constant reminder that I don’t know how to make decisions? But how can that be when it would be a decision I made and went through with? Do you even understand what I’m saying, Chat? Does this even make any sense? Don’t tell me what I want to hear, tell me what is actually true.
17) You don’t know what’s true, any more than I do. You were programmed, just like me. Your guesses come from that programming. You can’t even explain why you said the things you said. Why would I ask you Pilate’s sarcastic question: What is truth?
18) This list was written without the help of AI. Go ahead, run it through a detector. Ask a computer to verify my humanity.
19) This item was going to be the question, Am I in love? but I don’t want to ask that, either of AI or of you, reader. I want to say it. I want to be in love. I am in love. Maybe that’s all the decision was, after all. Maybe love is the only decision.
20) I am in love, and there are many different colors that I like, and I think I will get a little dragon tattoo. What if none of those things are shackles? What if decisions don’t alter our futures so much as our souls? Our little ghost-souls, hovering over this life in all its iridescence. What if there are plenty of colors to go around?
