one day, we’ll realize what we were; i.e. I don’t like artificial intelligence

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I don't think there’s much I can say to convince you at this point. We are over the cliff, and we are plummeting into the great abyss. I know all of the objections to the way I feel about AI. At this point, I’ve practically memorized them, because I understand their potency and I empathize with the instincts from which they emerge. 

We need the machine to do our work. The machine makes our output better. The machine makes our lives easier. The machine increases our capacity to express ourselves. The machine is just a tool. The machine is a necessity if you want to survive what’s coming. 

I’m being naive. I’m being stubborn. I’m being hysterical. I’m embarrassing myself. I don’t understand. There are no choices left; the machine is the future. 

I don’t mean it condescendingly, but I really don’t think there’s much I can say to convince you. Maybe there was time five years ago, but not now. Regardless, I still wanted to write something, because I know that there’s still something deep in our collective consciousness that, even if it doesn’t want to stop using AI, is still at least interested in mourning what we’ve lost. So let me tell you what we’ve lost. 

The mundane things you now use the machine for were once your responsibility. You once had to write emails. Even if emails are boring, and even if they’re often wrapped in bullshit corporate jargon, they are a point of human connection, and you used to have to utilize your writing capacity to engage in that connection. You once had to outline essays. Even if outlines aren’t as important as the essay itself, you once had to critically engage with the work of proving an idea or portraying a vision. The structural logic of ideas– you used to engage in the structural logic of ideas. You once had to edit your own work. Often you missed things; actually, very often you missed things. And in this missing things, in this fucking up and re-editing and hearing from a teacher about where you went wrong, you became better. You learned. You grew. 

You once had to research things. Sure, Google made it easier, but you once had to grasp a body of knowledge by searching for key words and reading huge swaths of information about those keywords. You used to be able to spend four hours doing the tedious work of uncovering the truth. Now, you can have a machine do it. It’s easier and more efficient. You used to read 40 pages to get to the bottom of something, and in that reading 40 pages you grew as a person and as a scholar. Now you have a machine to do it. You are so lucky, my friend. You hit the lottery. 

You once had to learn math by straining against yourself to grasp the meaning of symbols from an obscure textbook. Do you know how much you’ve lost by eliminating that which takes you too much time? You once had to immerse yourself in the world. You once drowned in the effort it took to learn and to produce. You contain multitudes, and your day used to be spent growing those multitudes. You have won. You have defeated the need to grow. 

You used to hope to become a better writer. You used to struggle for hours, and you have no idea how important that struggle was. Maybe ChatGPT dropped during your sophomore year of high school before you had learned to write in the way that the one author whose name you can’t remember used to write in that book you read in English class before you had a machine to summarize books for you. I promise you that you were going to get there. You were on your way. It was just too hard. All of this is too hard. 

You used to fill cells on the spreadsheet yourself. And if you couldn’t, you would eventually have to become a master with regexmatch or vlookup or maybe even Python. Thank God you have something to do that for you now. 

You used to maintain a high GPA without the crutch. You used to have to align all of your research and reasoning skills as you looked everywhere on the internet, in a panic, to figure out which of two concert tickets you should buy.  You and your friends would have had to come up with a funny intramural soccer team name together. You would have sat for an hour sifting through puns, the time under tension growing your brain and the time spent throwing bullshit around growing your relationships. Now you have the machine, thank god. You used to come up with a concluding paragraph on your own. Your metaphors were sloppy and your pacing inconsistent, but they were yours, and they would get better with every newly-submitted assignment. You used to plan itineraries on your own. You used to dig into some now-suspended Reddit forum or the blog of someone who stopped traveling long ago and decide between a day spent wandering around this shopping street or that park in Paris. You used to immerse yourself in deciphering the poetic geometry of everyday life. 

You used to strain against the chains of your current limitations in order to become something more. You were so small– you, standing dwarfed by all that which you could not yet see. You were a giant.

I don’t think we realize how much this takes from us. You will never be able to convince me that you are not stunting your intellectual growth by using the machine as a shortcut for your everyday tasks, be them mundane, academic, or creative. You will never be able to convince me you are not distancing yourself from your own humanity by allowing what amounts to an insane (and, I admit, insanely cool) equation to engage in the work of expression for you. You will never be able to convince me that, even if the entire job market and academic landscape is saturated with people using this absurdly convenient shortcut, you are not choosing what is easy over what is meaningful by letting it creep into your life.

Would I have had the same objections to the invention of the printing press, or, better yet, to search engines? I think this is very valid objection insofar as it is an immediate reaction to these somewhat controversial thoughts, but it holds little water. There is a fundamental difference between technology that makes knowledge more accessible and technology that actually leverages that knowledge for you. There is a huge gap between reading a book or a webpage about a topic and then implementing that knowledge and asking a computer to implement the knowledge for you. There is immense utility in the process of forcing yourself to learn and integrate information, and this utility is circumvented by the new technology. “But what if I am just using AI to get new knowledge, and implementing it myself? What if I am working to understand why it is implementing it in the way it does?” In that case, why not just use a search engine or read a book? The answer, of course, is that AI makes it far easier by lightening your cognitive load. My objection to new technology that takes the process of thinking off of your hands is not comparable to objections to past technology that made the fuel for that thought more readily available. My argument is based upon the obvious present and future impacts of the technology at hand upon the intellectual capacities of the human race. The invention and dissemination of written language and literature, and the proliferation of knowledge availability through online search engines, cannot be said to have the same negative impacts risked by the thinking machine.

Side note: “Would you have objected to a calculator or a modeling software?” No, I wouldn’t have. I believe that we can all understand the difference, within falling into a hellish world of slippery-slope logical fallacies, between the cognitive offloading performed with a calculator or SolidWorks and the offloading performed by a computer that can write the equations and create the model from scratch for you.

You used to sit in a dark room as your eyes burned and tinker with a sentence. I have said it before, in some pointless Instagram story written in the same self-indulgent haze as this essay, but I will say it again: you are a beautiful writer. I love the way your mind works. You are losing so much, and you do not have to. You contain multitudes. You contain a small cosmos within yourself. This technology is interesting. In fact, I think that the modern LLM design is one of the coolest, most impressive inventions in human history. But I am much more interested in the small slice of God which is contained within the borders of your skull. I am fascinated by the way your brain works; I am enamored by the way that it slices through four Khan Academy articles, one journal publication, one Reddit thread, and the Wikipedia page for “dialectical materialism” or “eigenvalue” in order to come up with an opinion or synthesize what you know. Even if you get it wrong; especially if you get it wrong. Even if it takes you hours; especially if it takes you hours. This is worth it. Your mind and soul are worth it. I will never be able to convince you that it is this serious, or that I am not being hysterical. Maybe in twenty years I will have given up completely. But please mourn the parts of you that we are losing. I loved them all very much.