Dear Readers,

We live in strange times where someone may buy a vibrator for tapping a hamster rather than for—ahem—perfectly innocent guilty pleasures. And ChatGPT can go on a rampage and generate blisteringly hateful… well, hate speeches instead of generating gluten-free cookie recipes. In short, you have lions laying down with the lambs and lambs shanking anything that moves. Anything that looks like it could be gentle fun only turns out to be more creepy and violent than originally anticipated.

All that preamble to say that we’ve arrived at a rather momentous decision… well, momentous for us and probably yawn-inducing for anybody else. Still, we feel that we must pester you about it because we like being annoying. It’s our thing. We are the kind of duo that puts a slavish amount of effort into our writings. We even spend an ungodly amount of hours looking for the best words—ALL the best words—to put into said writing, and we wreck our very brains for the coolest titles. We’re a sick pair, we are. Truly sick in the head.

But even with all of that, there was a point where we foolishly decided that this wasn’t enough and that the addition of wicked cool pictures to our deliberately chosen words would bring us more attention. Naturally, we preferred human made art wherever possible (yes, we still believe that Tony is a human being), but often we would choose the path of least resistance and use AI generated art instead. It was fun for a while, and even seemed pretty danged awesome, but this later mutated into a rather unexpected burden because… well, we just needed to get a visual something, a visual anything, for every upcoming post. And not to mention our growing awareness of the ethics—or lack of—swirling around the production of AI art. That got us wondering if we wanted to be perceived as art thieves in the online space or as the creative geniuses we like to pretend we are. We felt this cognitive dissonance growing inside us like mould on a fungus cake, but lumbered on through the months just following the same old path because we felt it was what worked best for us.

But the time has come. When we began to discuss this, we were surprised to find how closely our visions of unbolt.me’s future aligned. So, we decided to go back to how Unbolt Me used to be, nothing but a gaggle of words and a paucity of pictures on a (borderline racist) white page! You, Dear Readers, didn’t seem to mind that before, so we’re hoping that you won’t mind all over again. Yes, we wouldn’t mind if you didn’t mind. That’s all we’re saying.

During the coming days, we are going to make a spring cleaning (though it’s summer for Tati and winter for Tony… hee hee hee!) and get rid of all the AI generated stuff on Unbolt Me. After this, we’ll add ‘This is an AI free site!’ to our header, and you can be assured that all the shit and fuckups that remain will be purely our own. Consider us the Amish of the blogosphere, if you will. But without beards, bonnets and the mandatory noonday prayers.

Anyway, that’s all we wanted to tell you. We’re going to have a cup of tea and a lie down now.

Toodles!
Your Tati & Tony

P.S. And, yes. we added ‘Boobies’ to the title just to get your attention. 😉

by TETIANA ALEKSINA & TONY SINGLE
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