Photo courtesy of Lilly Trace
Don’t get me started on AI.
Actually no, let me get started because I have had enough.
If you ask me when my breaking point was, I could not tell you. Was it when people declared
it their new God? Was it when some guy in Missouri decided to marry his AI girlfriend? Or was
when I tried to look up a recipe and the autofill was, “using ChatGPT as a therapist”. Either way,
the urge to launch my phone into the sun and go live in a cabin surrounded by goats and baby
ducks is strong.
AI—this thing— is supposed to herald a new Age of Enlightenment. A more productive, more
efficient society where everything from figuring out laundry to reconnecting with the dead could
be easily solved. It also erases pesky inconveniences like human made art. That last one is
absolutely enraging and baffling. The excitement surrounding, “humans no longer having to
make art” makes me realize how far gone we are regarding our relationship with technology.
Maybe I’m just prone to nostalgia, but I long for a time when I was not constantly under
surveillance. I wish my existence was not whittled down to easily digestible aesthetics. Please
take me back to a life when doom was not at my fingertips. Let the brainrot be cleansed from my
psyche. Give me my voice back. Sadly, the time machine I need to take me back to 1999 does
not exist. But I could fight back against technology’s suffocating embrace.
Lately I started writing by hand before committing an idea electronically. Essays, poems, this
blog entry—all written by hand. At first it was due to professors cracking down on AI. Pages and
pages of my written word, confirmation that my ideas are not a product of ones and zeros. Then I
realized how more immersive the act of writing has become. Putting an idea straight to Google
docs meant that it was just me and that ever intimidating blinking cursor. Now I have notebooks
filled with penciled scribbles and purple inked annotations. Thoughts are scratched over, arrows
indicate a living idea constantly shifting. Proof that nothing could ever truly take my voice away.
To pick up a pen and paper in this day and age is an act of defiance. Not just technology, but
against the stripping away of our humanity, against capitalism, against the environmental effects
of using AI. And the beauty is that you (yes you) can do it too, whether you decide to write your
ideas down in an aesthetically pleasing Molskine or pour out your soul at 2 am in a half empty
notebook you have lying around. Go for it, take your humanity back.
Maggie Robinson