Reading time: 3.17

Hey Reader,

If you could make a task easier and quicker, why on earth wouldn’t you?

Well, if you’re talking about cleaning my toilets and doing admin, I’m fully on board with that. I’d rather be writing poetry, reading books, and going to the beach with my love than adulting.

But writing?

You’ve probably read a lot of boring drivel about AI over the past year or so. I know I have. So don’t worry, this isn’t another rant about fucking em-dashes and rocket emojis.

This is something you need to think about, seriously, for yourself, for your kids, for their kids.

In yet another social media post about AI, I saw this comment, and as I read it a creeping horror slithered down my spine.

“In my case I gave it [AI] all my ideas, what I want to express and what is my POV and then in matter of seconds it already made something that express my ideas perfectly and for me it would be maybe an hour. The fact that is a robot making it doesn’t make the content less valuable.”

I beg to differ.

First of all, the content IS less valuable. Unless the AI has been trained very well, it’s going to sound like every other piece of AI slop currently suffocating places like LinkedIn because its job is to aggregate everything else and create the average of all that. Which is beige.

But that’s neither here nor there; frankly, if someone wants to pump out more AI slop, it makes things easier for people like me, who write from a place of humanity.

My visceral reaction to this comment was this:

The hard work is the POINT.

We are losing something absolutely fundamental when we get an AI to do the hard work of creating.

It’s not enough to simply have a bunch of ideas and feed them into ChatGPT because the process of writing, of shaping our thoughts and ideas and considering them, is what makes this worthwhile. When we get a computer to do that part for us, we’re not just saving time; we’re no longer thinking about our ideas.

We’re not figuring out if that idea is REALLY what we believe.

We’re not learning anything about ourselves and our worldviews when we do this.

We are, in effect, outsourcing our critical thinking skills, our reasoning skills, to something utterly alien.

I find that horrifying and so should you.

AI can be a useful tool — I use it myself, and anyone who refuses point-blank to use it at all will find themselves left behind — but I would never bring it in for this part.

The process of shaping my ideas into an essay or an article or a book is the thinking process.

There are real consequences to this, too. Our use of AI is changing our brains. I’m not saying all of those changes are bad; if I can get AI to do the drudge work of admin, to shorten my time in going through call transcripts, and in helping me to edit, that’s brilliant. It frees up my time and energy to do this fun creative work.

But if we’re using it to bypass our reasoning, our critical thinking, and that frustrating downtime where nothing seems to be happening but actually a lot is happening behind the scenes, we will lose those abilities.

A study conducted by researchers at McGill University in April 2020 found that the more a person used GPS, the steeper the decline in their hippocampal-dependent spatial memory.

That’s the part that helps us figure out and remember where things are in space. Those maps we keep in our heads. Our spatial memory is not just useful for driving, which IS easier with GPS; it’s useful for moving around our world.

The part of our brain that is creative, that thinks, that reasons — that’s what makes us human. It’s what makes our work interesting, valuable, and fun.

Writing is hard work. It is.

Thinking is hard work! Our brains use so much energy, it can be exhausting. Much easier to get a computer to do it for us, right?

But if we do that, what are we losing?

Interesting writing, for a start. Your AI-generated book will be boring.

But we’re losing something more fundamental than that.

We’re losing the ability to do hard things. The ability to sit in our discomfort and move through it to something better.

The hard work is THE POINT.

And it’s where we find the joy.

Trust me on this.

TTFN,

Vicky