Thinking should be hard. Selecting the right words, translating the image in your head to the page, finding a way to describe something you experienced, those should be activities that challenge you. Every time you are forced by circumstance to sort through the pile of words in your head to explain a thought, you are exercising that most important part of you. You are stretching your soul, letting it grow a little more.
I get it, I get the allure of using the agreeable machine that digests all the words we’ve ever used and spits them out in pleasurable configurations. It’s easier. It doesn’t hurt. You won’t be sore from it the way you might when you are forced to find the words yourself.
The brain is the busiest of all our components, and maybe that’s why it is always looking for a shortcut. Dictator, orator, traffic cop. It’s a lot of responsibility to keep the community that is a human person going. A machine that alleviates some of that burden is going to be infinitely seductive.
When people talk about how productive it makes them, I question that. Productive for whom, exactly? You are allowing the most important part of you to atrophy for the sake of a few more lines of code, a few more emails, a few more seconds you don’t spend deliberating over a sentence. Is that a fair price? I can’t answer that for you, but I can answer it for me: I would rather spend the extra seconds. I would rather know the value of the time it took than treat all the minutes of my life cheaply, like they’re part of one larger average. I like the exertion, the struggle of seeing a thing, thinking a thing, and then making it. If I let the sycophantic omniscient Clippy solve everything for me, I don’t know the process. It’s not part of me.
Maybe that’s okay with you. We all use things we don’t understand, wander out onto bridges without knowing how they were built. Does the fact that a person made it make me feel more secure? I don’t know. I do know that a machine can’t be held accountable, and worse still, if we let the machines make the decisions then no one answers for the eventual failures. No person crafted the words, so no one is at fault. There are no humans in customer service available to answer your questions. Have a nice day.
It’s easier to not be responsible. It doesn’t feel good when something comes down to a choice you made and you chose wrong. It’s uncomfortable to answer for that choice. And the brain is always looking for shortcuts, so why let ourselves be uncomfortable when we can know that even in catastrophe we were not at fault?
What happens, though, when no one is at fault but a computer? What happens when we hand our agency to a machine built by humans? We are letting these systems destroy our ability to think critically, our communities, our trust in one another. We can’t trust anything or anyone if an image or video we can see with our own eyes is just a made-up fantasy. You can’t have faith in others when there is always an outside chance that they made everything up. The internet was supposed to be the dawn of an information age and yet here we are, doubting everything, falling for lies machines tell us, rejecting valid evidence in favor of advice from social media influencers. I don’t know when last we were so in the dark.
I can’t help but wonder about a future where no one reads, where we’ve eliminated entry-level positions and a skill gap yawns open between those before and those after. To me it’s a terrifying premise. Thinking is good, it’s empowering. Being curious, learning about the world, these are traits that waste away the more a person lets a machine do the thinking. If information is all just whatever a chatbot says it is, how will we know any different?
I don’t mean to be a downer, quite the opposite; I am leaning harder and harder into creative work, into physical media, into deepening my relationship with the things that are threatened by the prevalence of these capitalist hell beasts. I don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee for generated art, for words that are an amalgamation of everything others have already written. I am increasingly tired of the feedback the computers have for me. Even right now, as I write this, there is a little red frowny face in the settings panel to indicate that my writing isn’t close enough to the flavorless beige preferred by the average reader. I don’t fucking care.
The nuance of an individual’s writing is a visible brushstroke on a painting; evidence of the human in the art. We are attracted to art subjectively, few if any works speaking universally to everyone. I want things that required effort, I want to surround myself with them and relish their uneven beauty. Existing in a world where images, writing, videos are all an average of an average sounds like actual hell.
There are so many interesting things being made by people. I hope that if you find yourself in the same place I am – where my tolerance for corporate slop is maxed and I would rather get rid of the internet entirely than talk to one more customer service bot – you go out and find people making things with their own brains and their own hands.
The more we value creative effort, the stronger our resistance becomes.
Please do some thinking for yourself. The billionaire dweebs are trying to attach a price tag to the one thing that’s completely free. Don’t let them.