I did something daft the other week. I fed ChatGPT a stack of my own blog posts and asked it to tell me who I am. Not in a therapy sense, more out of curiosity: what does a machine make of a couple of years of rambling about cameras, French bureaucracy and my own bad moods. What came back was three paragraphs of the kind of praise you’d get from a wedding speech written by someone who’s never actually met the groom.
Apparently I’m “a unique blend of wit, introspection, and cultural curiosity.” Apparently my writing “invites readers into my world” and “reflects the complexities of my mind.” It called my grouchiness “self-professed” and said my life has been “anything but conventional.” All true enough, in the way a horoscope is true enough. None of it sounded like me. It read like someone had skimmed a summary of a man and never sat in a room with him.
So here’s the real version, since you lot deserve better than a chatbot’s book report.
I’m 52. I grew up in the UK and I’ve lived in the Vendée since 2019, before that near Nantes, so I’ve had a good long stretch of being the Englishman who doesn’t quite get it, and the Englishman who gets it a bit too well. French bureaucracy still makes me want to put my head through a wall. French bread has ruined every other bread on earth for me. Both things are true at once, and that’s more or less what living here has taught me.
I moan about birthdays. I moan about getting older, my knees, and the French obsession with paperwork in triplicate. I’ve written about mental health here more than once, not because I’ve got it figured out but because pretending I have would be a worse lie than just admitting I don’t. If a post of mine has ever made you feel less alone in whatever you’re carrying, that matters more to me than any of it sounding polished.
I’m grouchy. I’ll own that one, no “self-professed” required. But I’m also genuinely grateful for the people who turn up here, comment, tell me I’m wrong about something, or just read quietly and never say a word. Thousands of you have clicked through over the years and I still don’t fully understand why, but I’m glad you do.
What the AI got right, in its clumsy way, is that I don’t hide much. The bad days, the arguments with myself over whether a photo’s any good, the culture-shock gripes, they’re all here on the blog because that’s more interesting to me than a highlight reel would be. What it got wrong is the tone. I’m not a beacon of anything. I’m a bloke with a camera and a horn and a house in the Vendée, still working out what I think about most things, still willing to say so out loud.
Was it eye-opening, having a machine mark my homework? Not really. Was it funny? Yes, in places. Am I letting ChatGPT write about me again? Probably not, or at least not without editing out every third adjective first. If you know me, or you’ve been reading a while, tell me in the comments whether any of it sounded like me. Be honest, that’s what the comments are there for.