I don't WANT to work faster.

Another installment in the "I don't want AI, thanks very much" annals

I often have this experience: My words flow easily, I write smoothly, and all seems wonderful. But for one reason or another, I can’t get back to the piece for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, occasionally a few years. I do get back to it, eventually, and that’s when I realize…

I got it all wrong.

Well, not all of it. I spit out the bones of a decent piece of writing. But after I walked away and forgot about it? I came back to it a new person. My passion had cooled, and those ideas that I thought I had spit out and forgotten were actually fermenting in my brain.

The time away from my work is when my best writing moves from a functional cup of tea to a fantastic bottle of kombucha. The fresh stuff tastes great, but it’s the fermented stew that has the happy yeast, the funky biome, and the floating pellicle that puts it all in balance.¹

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Speed is the enemy of the creative process

One of the selling points for AI is that it “speeds up your process.” Perhaps you write some brainstorming ideas into ChatGPT and tell it to write an essay. What you get will be bland but quick and typo-free. If you’d written it yourself, however, a great number of fortuitous things might have happened:

• Perhaps the slow writing process triggered a memory of your past that makes the perfect anecdote to cap off your essay.

• Maybe as you wrote, you realized that you missed an important point that you should have addressed, so you adjust to a much more thoughtful thesis.

• Definitely as you wrote you would develop new pathways in your brain, fermenting the ideas in your essay into more depth and meaning, cementing concepts you could build on later.

Time is an essential component of creativity that AI steals from you.

Ease is the enemy of the creative struggle

Another selling point is how darn easy it is to create a piece of writing using AI. It saves you from taxing your brain too much. But taxing your brain is exactly the point of the creative process. The creative brain at work is a mass of synapses firing in all directions, making new connections and smoothing out new pathways. As you create, you exercise your brain and find its dusty corners full of fascinating curios that you’d forgotten.

Writers like to talk about “fresh” writing: what makes it fresh is the weirdness, the unexpectedness, the mishmash of ideas that only the human meat brain could come up with. AI writing is to a creative human’s writing as Lipton is to a funky kombucha. Sure, everyone likes Lipton, but no one really remembers Lipton; no one’s life was changed by a cup of Lipton; no one ever got inspired by their fiftieth cup of Lipton.

Ease is a false promise being sold to you in the form of AI.

This is your brain on AI. Photo by notorious v1ruS on Unsplash.

Commonality is the enemy of creative exploration

We don’t remember great visual artists because they made new copies of the visual images around them; we remember them because they found a novel way to look at the human experience. When I was a child, somehow a coffee table book of surreal art made it to our small-town home. I was stunned by those paintings. I never went to an art museum as a child, but years later, when I went to Paris, the first one I visited was the Pompidou so I could stand in front of Magritte.

One of the selling points of AI is that it gathers all human output to draw on. But Magritte didn’t go around looking at every other painter’s work to come up with his own. Of course, he educated himself in visual arts, but his paintings came from the funky stew (the very funky stew) of his meat brain. AI won’t come up with anything new; it will just regurgitate more of the same.

AI lulls you into comfort in a hall of artistic blandness.

What AI is good for

People who have worked writing the same regurgitated “Top 10” lists are scared for their jobs. People who write trite pablum published by glossy magazines have already lost their jobs. People who have learned to “code” but not to understand computer science are starting to lose their jobs.

AI is actually good for something: It’s good for doing the crap that no one ever should have been forced to do anyway. Everyone who’s ever written ad copy at one point probably wanted to be a writer or artist. Everyone who designed websites for corporations did it to make money, not because it was their life’s calling. Yes, humans can make meaning out of these jobs, and the people I know who had to do them generally did that. But there is no intrinsic human worth in these jobs.²

Am I happy that people will lose their jobs? Certainly not. But as we mechanize and digitize away human worth in repetitive, noncreative tasks, we have a huge new political problem: What do we do with all of these out-of-work humans? What are they good for?

Squelching your Creativity? Oh, NO!

What humans are good for

Each and every human is intrinsically important because each and every human meat brain is unique and infinite. I generally don’t expect the best of humans when it comes to politics, but I like to think about what I wish and hope for from our politics. And my wish is that in our future societies, we let machines (mechanical and digital) do all the boring, repetitive, dangerous, ugly, and demeaning jobs. Then we take all the output by those machines and we distribute it.

Universal Basic Income works. It works well. It is the inevitable future that we’ll have to embrace as there is less and less that humans have to do, and more and more that we’re inspired to do. Imagine, if you will, a future where a person who would have stood at an assembly line now has the basics of life guaranteed, so they have time to walk in nature, help out at an addiction recovery facility, learn woodworking, spend time with their or other people’s children, and live.

Just live. When you believe in the intrinsic worth of every human being, it’s enough for all of us to live fulfilling, productive lives. And that is something that I’ll be happy to see AI give us.

What do you think AI is good for?

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1. Yes, I am a home kombucha maker. It’s an awesome process! And yes, I also like a really good cup of freshly brewed tea. But great kombucha can be made with the humblest of crappy CTC tea.

2. The huge caveat here is that there are people at the top of every field, no matter how trite the output of the rest of the people in their field, who make Art of it. These people are rare, and I think they’ll still keep making art of what they do. Because let’s face it, AI isn’t going to make art. It’s going to give us regurgitated crap that only comes out of the least creative of human meat brains.