Today I saw a post from a popular Twitter account saying, “As soon as AI is good enough to write blog posts in my voice as good as I would have written them, i intend to use AI to do so. I know what I want to say, and I could say so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor the words out one by one.”
“I kinda hate writing,” she said further down in the thread.
This sucks. I don’t like what we’re becoming. I don’t like how AI is making us so dumb so quickly that the simple act of writing is already being described as “manual laboring the words out one by one,” like it’s some superhuman feat of exertion that nobody should be expected to be capable of.
Most of the excuses people make for letting chatbots “write” for them are just admissions of a glaring personality defect.
“But I hate writing!”
Okay, that’s a character flaw, and you should change that about yourself.
“I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to say it.”
That’s a character flaw and you should change that about yourself.
“I get an idea I want to express, but when I sit down to write I get overwhelmed with frustration and restlessness.”
Yeah, that’s a character flaw and you should change that about yourself.
Writing isn’t just some skill you can have like juggling or surfing. Writing is thinking. Writing is the practice of sorting through the flotsam and jetsam of your own consciousness and transforming your thoughts and feelings into coherent, logical expression. Engaging in this practice makes you a more mature and cognitively lucid person than you otherwise would be.
It’s not always easy to delve into your depths and form articulate word-sculptures out of the jumbled messes you’ll encounter there. It can be frustrating. It can be confrontational. It can force you to challenge your pre-conceived notions and interrogate your own belief systems in ways you find uncomfortable. Sometimes you feel like you want to jump up and start running as fast as you can to escape the intimidating stare of the blank page in front of you.
Learning to work past these escapist impulses and drill down into the meat of your own vulnerable expression is what personal growth looks like. You learn to be courageous. You learn that the emotional surges which feel like they’re trying to whip you out of your desk chair are only feelings, and that you are large enough to safely embody them. You learn to calm your inner waters so that you can stare at the blank page until something inspired bubbles up from deep within you.
I never really know what I want to say when I sit down to write an essay. I’ll begin with an opinion, a feeling, maybe a snappy line or two if I’m lucky, but everything after that point arises from a process of patient and methodical internal excavation.
I need to get very clear, sentence by sentence, about what I know and how I know it. Every step of the way I’m asking myself “Okay, what’s the next thing that needs to be said? Is that true? How do I know it’s true? Is that morally correct? How do I know it’s morally correct? How can I defend that position?” I often need to do research and gather sources to support my claims, depending on whether I’m writing about things out there in the world or things inside myself I can discuss from personal experience.
Line by line I’m becoming clearer and clearer about the subject I’m writing on, and I get to take that clarity with me for the rest of my life. At the end of every essay, I am a deeper and more edified person than I was when I began.
None of that would have happened if I just told a chatbot to generate some text for me. I would end exactly where I began: with the basic nub of an opinion, plus a midwit validation machine telling me I’m correct and awesome for having that opinion.
It doesn’t make me grow. It doesn’t make me mature. It doesn’t make me deepen my understanding of the subject at hand. It leaves me completely unchanged as a person.
No actual, meaningful improvements will have been made to me. The only benefit it provides is the ability to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings and freeing up some time that I can then spend watching TV or scrolling TikTok.
The most dangerous consequences of AI are the mass surveillance systems and war machinery that our rulers are building these new technologies into, as well as the environmental impact of all the new data centers required for their operation. But individual use of generative AI is also having highly destructive effects on human consciousness, the most widespread and consequential of which is surely the disappearance of our ability to write.
P.S. Fuck ChatGPT for ruining em dashes for everyone. I loved those little guys.
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