Two and a half years after quietly allowing my Hive presence to lapse (for a variety of reasons, none of which had anything to do with Hive) I have recently returned as a way to help myself get back into writing creatively. Recalling how helpful the #freewritehouse prompts were in that regard was a big draw.
A lot has happened for me over the past few years – but I have settled into a place that feels peaceful and content.
I love my job and I have been finding great fulfilment within it recently. However, as someone who edits and proofreads for a living, I found that my desire to write creatively waned in recent years. Now, though, it is coming back. I’m trying to break out of the mindset that everything I do needs to be productive in some way. I want to reconnect with the side of myself that once wrote – creatively, reflectively, ‘pointlessly’ – as a hobby.
I think my desire to be more organic, imperfect and unfiltered is partially motivated by my misgivings about AI.
I’m conscious that for as long as technology has existed, moral panics have sprung up right alongside them. Has any modern panic come close to the level of hysteria that greeted Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical printing press? Probably not. Since ancient times, elders have loved nothing better than to complain about the youth of the day: their behaviours, their habits; their preferred ways of speaking and communicating.
As a teen in the early 2000s, I remember there was a bit of a moral panic over text speak: how the youth were writing out sentences with the likes of ‘gr8’ instead of ‘great’, ‘4 u’ instead of ‘for you’. This was said to be rotting our brains completely. It makes me smile to think of it now: the concern seems almost quaint, compared to what has come along since.
The internet itself has provided countless bad actors with a means of meting out bullying and harassment of the worst kind – but it also has served as a powerful vehicle for people to come together, find community, and connect with people who understand them. Controversies over kids and screen time are ongoing – with good reason – and in the wake of Australia’s ban, other jurisdictions are also weighing up whether social media should be banned for under-16s. I am on the fence about the latter: on the one hand, I understand the harms social media can do to developing brains; on the other, I see how the ban could simply drive young teens to unregulated platforms. Time will tell.
Perhaps it is too soon to definitively say whether AI is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for society. Like all technologies, its potential to help or harm lies wholly in the hands of those who use it. I’m no expert in this, at all, but I have heard that AI is proving to be a powerful tool in medical diagnostics, leading to earlier detection of illnesses and therefore better patient outcomes. However, I – like everyone else I know – am fatigued by the ever-increasing deluge of AI slop on social media feeds.
One of the main concerns I have about AI is the way so many people seem to be outsourcing their critical thinking skills to the likes of ChatGPT. I myself have never used ChatGPT because I have never had a reason to. Anything I need to find out – whether professionally or personally – I will do so through other means, and check my sources thoroughly. I’m aware that AI can hallucinate and provide inaccurate information, so I wouldn’t necessarily trust anything that ChatGPT could tell me.
I’m behind the curve, I’m a bit of a Luddite, I don’t fully understand the many ways in which AI could revolutionise life as we know it, for the better: all of these things are likely true.
And yet…
Anecdotally, in my own life, I have spoken to people who regularly use AI to do work that they don’t feel like doing, or to write emails, or to come up with answers to messages they receive on dating apps. There is one story I heard about someone who expressed a political opinion, and – when asked why she felt that way – took out her phone to ask ChatGPT for ‘hints’ as to what she could discuss to back up her argument. She visibly struggled when she was asked not to use ChatGPT, but to come up with a genuine reason – on her own – as to why she had the opinion she professed to hold.
All of these stories are nothing more than anecdotal evidence, of course, but they have stayed with me nonetheless.
A dear relative of mine recently received an official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s – a diagnosis that we all knew was coming, but a diagnosis that was upsetting to hear, nonetheless. It is very difficult to watch this person struggle when they are asked about something they might have done or said just hours or minutes previously.
It pained me to hear of a much younger person undergoing a similar struggle when asked about their honest opinion on something, without recourse to ChatGPT.
If I might be permitted to indulge in a quick ‘youth of today’ rant (though it is far from true that only young people are doing this), I wonder about the long-term implications of a significant proportion of the population routinely outsourcing their abilities to think, to reason, to form an opinion. The rise in college and school students using AI to write their essays is particularly alarming.
I do wonder if, a few decades from now, we will see an epidemic of people experiencing Alzheimer’s and dementia much earlier in life than they might otherwise have done, due to a years-long habit of not using their cognitive abilities. This dire prophecy may not come to pass, and I might well be overly alarmist in imagining it – I will laugh heartily at my own foolishness, if so. It’s just something I think about sometimes.
I will always prefer to hear someone’s honest, human opinion over anything ChatGPT could generate. Perhaps their wording won’t be very concise. Perhaps they will be a bit all over the place – they won’t be entirely slick or flawless in outlining why they feel the way they feel – but that’s alright.
I don’t know the answer to all of this. But I know that on a personal level, I’m feeling strongly pulled to get back to writing as a hobby and expressing myself from the heart, even if that process is messy or awkward.
How important it is to keep exercising our brains. Efficiency is not everything.