Dolly was born in East Tennessee and used her success to make it better. So much money from her attractions and fame came into our mountain communities and was put into schools and infrastructure. She made the Imagination Library to help childhood literacy in Appalachia. Every month since our daughter was born, the library has sent her a book with a note from Dolly encouraging her to be proud of where she’s from and to learn the importance of the stories that built us. Her husband passed last year and she spoke of being reunited with him. I’m glad heaven is a little sweeter, and sings a little better for it. Rest in peace to the Queen of Appalachia, Jolene could never.

It’s not your expression, it’s a machine given words that it uses to create a consensus of how other people have expressed it. Expression is your voice, not the voices of others serrated and dragged through a machine made to mimic your mouth. You express nothing, you forfeit your voice to allow the rest of humanity to speak for you. Here, you even say the ultimate goal is the erasure of human voices. Your “expression” leads to a lack of humanity, not a furtherance of it. Every iteration and invention of art has found new ways to allow us to culminate the human experience through sensation, but generative AI is cancer, it’s the cells of what we’ve already built spinning ad nauseam until all we “make” is what others have already made. It’s a dead end and lifeless, and goes against whatever spirit, soul, or God gave us the gift of creation in the first place.