25 year old man yells about X, Writing, AI

When these LLMs started popping out around 2021-2022, just right when I was a senior at Amherst, I was not a fan of them. I wanted to learn and struggle on my own and not offshore it to some “clanker”. It felt very antihuman of me.

Fast forward to today where I’ve been working for about 2 years now, I’ve been using AI in a lot of my work now, whether it is to brainstorm ideas, do quick literature reviews, jumpstart me in a domain I’m not familiar with, write boilerplate code, set up pipelines, debug code. I’ve been relying quite a lot on it actually, now that I’m writing all of this out. And recently, I’ve been going on X a lot and my algorithm had led me to the hopecore/self-help side of X (if you know you know) and I started noticing that the posts would all sound like AI. They have a very staccato’d way of writing. Shortened declaritive sentences, “It’s not X. It’s Y” type beat.

And seeing this honestly makes me really disgusted. AI should be used to help us out, not to replace human to human interaction on social media. But how can I judge when I rely on AI so much? It appears I draw the line where it makes me comfortable. For all I know, these people on X might be doing this for a full time job or something else necessitates the use of AI.

I’m too tired and it’s too early for me to think about this too critically so I guess it’s more of “old man yells at clouds” kind of post. I quite like that, I think I will make that the title of this post.

But anyways, back to my rambling, the reason why I wanted to write about this was because I want to write poorly. I want to write with poor grammar, typos, run on sentences. Because AI has made writing too easy, too polished, too perfect.

And I’m scared AI will influence me to write in a way (eventually) that converges to the way AI writes. A positive reinforcing cycle where we consume the writings of AI and thus mimic it in our own writings (if we still write that is).

So I choose (or maybe its because I’m lazy), but I like to think I choose to write like myself. I don’t want to write the perfect sentence and have it sounding like AI. Writing is art, it is a form of expression and I don’t want to lose it.

The older I get and the more I rely on AI to do my labor, the more I’m scared I don’t know where to draw that line.

I saw a post online about someone asking AI to help write their birthday cards or holiday cards for friends / family and that makes me really fucking sad. Why are we telling a probability distribution of texts to do the job of being human for us?

When we no longer have to be human, what is in store for us? It reminds me Osamu Dazai’s novel, “No longer human” which deals more with social alienation but perhaps I wonder if us having AI do everything for us, if that is also a form of social alienation.

In which we’ve just asked AI to do the social connections for us but if everyone asks AI to make social connections for us, then where does that leave us? Just all socially isolated beings who have little to none capacity to experience the human experience.

I don’t know. But I find solace in the not knowing, because I will persist and I will struggle and I will try to hold on to any shred of humanity I have.