After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft to fit Instagram’s character limits. You can see the Instagram post here. And for the record, here is the photo of the cake and what I wrote:
Two weeks before our ninth anniversary in April my husband told me he wanted a divorce. I was completely blindsided. Going through an unexpected divorce has been the most brutal, humiliating, and traumatizing process I’ve ever experienced. In an instant my life trajectory changed. The markers of security that I had clung to following the previous year’s burst appendix hospitalization and my Dad dying in the same hospital where I was being treated suddenly vanished. Being forced to sell our house, the address I lived in longer than any other place in my life because of my complicated childhood, was one of the most devastating parts of this hellish timeline.
I don’t know if I would have survived the last several months were it not for my friends, those from home or around the world, those I’ve known for decades and those I’ve only recently met in the process of beginning to rebuild my life. Having friends from all ages, backgrounds, and circumstances has been a lifesaver because it turns out a lot of people have also gone through similar traumas that turned their lives upside down, who have a lot of counsel and camaraderie to offer.
Enough people have received the memo about divorce etiquette to ask whether a person’s divorce is a “congratulations” or “sorry” situation. Until recently the latter has been more applicable, but now that the state has decreed that my divorce is official I mostly feel a sense of overwhelming relief tempering my deep grief, and trying to stay focused on what’s next.
A divorce you don’t see coming really does a number on your sense of worth and identity. I did not choose to end my marriage, but I am humbled and struck by how many choices I get to make about my future. I am spending a lot of time thinking about the people and places, principles and pleasures that I want to prioritize in this next phase of my life.
Over the last several months I’ve been grateful for my friends’ unwavering belief that things will be better on the other side of this journey. And who I am to argue with my friends? They are smart and I think they love me and I definitely love them. So with that, I’m officially in my hot divorcee era. WATCH THIS SPACE.
I hit post, and cross-posted it to Facebook. I also shared the Instagram link on glammr.us (the main Mastodon server that caters to GLAM workers), which is where I took a lot of my post-Twitter energy a few years ago.
A few days after posting, I was looking at the Mastodon app, Toot, on my phone (yes, all of the terminology around Mastodon is that embarrassing). And I noticed something I definitely did not remember writing. In the app, all the original text from my post was pulled in along with some additional text following my sign-off line of WATCH THIS SPACE that I certainly didn’t author. It also sounded very AI-generated. Here’s what I saw:
Here’s the AI-generated text I didn’t write:
Going through a divorce can be a life-altering experience that leaves you feeling lost and uncertain about your future. In this post, I share my personal journey of self-discovery and rebuilding after a sudden divorce.
From finding support from friends to prioritizing what matters most, I explore the themes of identity, worth, and finding happiness after divorce.
Whether you’re navigating a divorce or simply looking for inspiration, this post is for you. Follow along as I share my story and insights on rebuilding, self-care, and finding happiness after divorce.
After talking with my friend Ruth (one of the glammr.us admins and a much smarter tech person than myself) and finding this recent story from 404 Media, I realized that somehow my post had been targeted for Instagram’s AI-generated SEO bait. If you go to the original Instagram post and view the page source, you’ll see that there is both the description text from above, along with a whole bevvy of keywords like “self-discovery” and “finding happiness.”
While I am sure buried deep in some EULA there is some bullshit allowing Meta to get away with this, I was never explicitly informed about this possibility or asked to review this AI-generated text. Meanwhile, as of today when I look at Instagram’s posting settings, I see that there is a button that requires you to label any AI-generated content you post as the end user, but obviously there is no such obligation in the other direction.
One of the things I gave up long ago about being an extremely online woman who is a micro-public figure with a weird name are any assumptions about privacy. It’s why I drafted the brief essay for my announcement in advance, because I know that once I hit post on anything on the internet I can never unring that bell. I have been writing in the public sphere long enough to know that things that I write are routinely misrepresented by others (a lesson I relearn every time I check some of the citations of my work via Google Scholar updates).
But what I vehemently object to in this situation is the use of the first-person voice without my review or permission. The language used in the description makes it sound as if I wrote it (“In this post, I share my personal journey…”). Because I have fiercely protected my authorship throughout my life and what my name is attached to, any generative AI writing that purports to be in my voice without my informed consent is a profound violation of my authorial voice, agency, and frankly it feels like fraud or impersonation. As an archivist who has spent almost twenty years thinking about accuracy in information, it makes my skin crawl that there is a metadata field with the sole purpose of generating SEO-engagement purporting to be my voice that doesn’t disclose the authorship was actually non-consensual AI.
In recent days I’ve noticed this kind of “some people are saying” text showing up in my search results, especially related to Reddit threads. For example, a list of Google search results showing Reddit threads might show some description like “Some users are discussing the challenges of making a mug cake that doesn’t taste rubbery.” But even if this description had been in the third-person voice such as “This woman discusses her divorce and its impact on her….” my anger would remain.
Because what this AI-generated SEO slop formed from an extremely vulnerable and honest place shows is that women’s pain is still not taken seriously. The tone of the post is laden in the absolute worst therapy/wellness culture cliches (“Follow along as I share my story and insights on rebuilding, self-care, and finding happiness after divorce”) which is language that I abhor since it often trivializes women’s pain. I also object to the flattening of the contours of my particular divorce. There are really important distinctions between the experiences of women who initiate their own divorces versus women who come to a mutual agreement with their spouses to end the marriage versus women, like me, who are completely blindsided by their husbands’ decisions to suddenly end the marriage. All divorces do involve self-discovery and rebuilding your life, but the ways in which you begin down that path often involve dramatically different circumstances.
My story is absolutely layered through with trauma, humiliation, and sudden financial insecurity and I truly resent that this AI-generated garbage erases the deliberately uncomfortable and provocative words I chose to include in my original framing. If my story ends up becoming inspiring to others, that’s great, but that’s not why I share my pain on the internet. I share my pain publicly as a gesture of solidarity with other people, but especially women, who have been profoundly traumatized by those they thought they could love and trust. Having my pain witnessed and acknowledged is part of how I am healing while also letting other people know they are not alone. I have to externalize my pain in regular intervals right now because if I internalize it any more it might actually destroy me. Forcing an “inspiration” vibe onto what I posted feels tone deaf at best, and like toxic positivity at worst.
We already know that in a patriarchal society, women’s pain is dismissed, belittled, and ignored. This kind of AI-generated language also depoliticizes patriarchal power dynamics. Thinkers like Dr. Safiya Noble have been warning us for years that the prejudices carried by the people who design and maintain internet infrastructure continually shapes how we view and think about women and girls in society. I already felt immense pain and anger by the decision of my husband to suddenly end our marriage. And now I feel a double sense of violation that the men who design and maintain and profit from the internet have literally impersonated my voice behind the closed doors of hidden metadata to tell a more palatable version of the story they think will sell.
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