AI - A Thief to the Joy of Process.
Ai is being pushed into our lives from every angle and I find myself resisting it in every way I can. Not only are there a number of environmental concerns (habit destruction, water consumption and noise pollution) but also lasting impacts our society will face in regards to learning.
Teachers are already starting conversations about how ai usage is detrimental to learning, but what I would like to talk about is how ai is contributing to the obsession we humans have with efficiency. I said in an Instagram comment “optimisation is a thief to the joy of process” and I stand by that. Letting an algorithm do my thinking for me will only make real learning more uncomfortable and foreign. I don’t claim to never have used it, but since having banished ai from my toolkit, I feel I can convey my message more accurately. I understand every piece of writing I put out into the world and I feel much less of an imposter in my own business.
Being online can make us feel behind in so many ways, seeing and comparing my work to established artists with years of experience, has a way of making me feel like I need to be perfect from the start, and so ai feels tempting. If I could just get the algorithm to write me the perfect product description maybe I would reach more people? If I used it to make me a social media content plan maybe I would go viral more easily? But without those years of learning, how could we understand the progress we have made? Without the failures, how can we value success?
In many ways, I am still a beginner, and that is a hard, but wonderful thing. Knowing I have years of growth ahead of me, knowing I will look back on this piece of writing and come back with new insights or (hopefully not completely) different opinions is a weight off my chest. Because if we cannot learn and grow, as everything else in this world does, then we have lost more than our joy in learning, we have lost our humanity.
Inspiration for this piece: