Now a pervasive feature of everyday life, I go into my personal opposition to artificial intelligence and why I’ll never even consider using it for my writing.
Oftentimes in my day-to-day life, I have to remind myself that automation is ultimately not something completely novel.
I’m 30 years old, and machines in many industrial factories have been automated since before I was born. Calculators were a mainstay school supply, and the average person was getting more acquainted to having technology work for them with the advent of the personal computer and internet, which I felt in many ways I grew up alongside.
Yet in my younger years, I had a perception that automation was ultimately limited to applications in which there was a definitive, precise goal or answer being sought. A calculator will always get a certain equation correct, just as a packaging robot will always slide the product inside the box and seal it at the exact same time.
Fast-forward a quarter-century later, and large language models (LLMs) are ubiquitous as artificial intelligence companies dominate the world economy as a handful of companies pass billions of dollars back and forth in what certainly won’t be a massive bubble.
I could go on to write a novel on my grievances and opposition to AI, ranging from the devastating environmental effects, the soulless companies that scour the internet for every piece of art and writing that real humans made to train their predatory models and the increasing adoption of chatbots for the most basic of tasks that anyone with a few functioning brain cells should be able to complete.
Yet I want to focus my energy here specifically on the use of AI in writing, which has grown to be increasingly common among college students and everyday workers within the past few years.
I want to say that I don’t view myself to be an incredibly creative person – which is what leaves me in awe when I consume the content that other people were able to create with nothing but their own imagination. I’m a horrible artist who hasn’t really dabbled in music since high school band and don’t have anywhere near the technological knowledge required to build a video game.
What makes me enjoy art of any kind more than anything else is simply marveling at the ingenuity required to create something so grand and powerful out of nothing more than the human mind.
While I struggle with all of the aforementioned fields, I’ve always viewed myself to be a passable writer. Writing essays and research papers throughout high school and college were among the easiest of the significant assignments students are expected to complete, and it played a significant role in my college major of Sociology.
Of course, I ultimately made a career out of writing. I spent approximately 2.5 years at WGN-TV Chicago and nearly three years at NBC Chicago writing for my job everyday, ranging from run-of-the-mill crime stories to election coverage and digging deep on the history of the Cubs-White Sox rivalry.
I don’t see myself as an outstanding writer, and saw my personal skill level as a step below most of my colleagues in the news industry that actually did have journalism degrees and more extensive experience in the field. Yet still, through all of the frustrations and stress that the jobs gave me, I fell deeper in love with writing as both a skill to improve and a way to express myself.
Which is of course how I ended up starting The Rubber Match – a home for all of my ideas and thoughts that I really never had the time to dive into within the busy workflow that a day at NBC required. I do this as a way to not lose whatever of this skill I did learn, while holding myself accountable to continue to find new sources of content for each day.
When I’ve heard suggestions about using AI to “help” in my writing – because it’s “so good” at “organizing thoughts” – I honestly want to fucking throw up.
It’s not lost on me that on a lot of days, I feel like I’m talking to myself on here. I’ve had the site for over nine months and have totaled a little over 9,600 total views – many of which originated from ad campaigns where many viewers are almost certainly eating up my very words to train an LLM and steal the work of myself and millions of others across the world.
I don’t write this website to get rich quick or to prove anything to anybody – I do it because I love writing. I love challenging myself every day with trying to think of a new idea for a story. I love discovering new information about something I love and already know a lot about. I love the feeling of having my ideas seamlessly flow from mind-to-screen when I feel I’m at my best.
All of these things – the preparation, the research, the effort to organize and make a work coherent and easy to follow along with – they are all part of writing. It’s part of the process every single day. If you feel like you can’t write without using technology that didn’t exist seven years ago to “organize your thoughts,” then it’s quite simple – you are not a writer!
I don’t mean to say this with the intent of gatekeeping – it’s really everything but. Tech billionaires and the sect of the population that has eaten up this technology may feel that I’m missing out on something monumental and incredibly useful. But I feel as if this technology is paving the way for future generations to lose the wonder of human imagination and creativity, which fade to black when we type in a prompt and get an answer with someone else’s idea.
The internet is a wondrous place that makes the knowledge of essentially everything there ever is to know in the world accessible for everybody. Whether it’s a detailed Reddit thread that gives you the answers to the very specific issue you were having or falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about rock climbers, the information is already just a click away – you don’t need to kill the planet even more all to just get a wrong answer to your question.
I understand that for many people, writing is as frustrating as mathematics are to me. I don’t expect these people to have some sort of breakthrough where they will suddenly enjoy writing because they tapped into their imagination, just as there will never be a time where I suddenly discover I enjoy the discipline that served as an impassable barrier throughout my entire academic career.
Yet for people that feel even the least bit capable of writing on their own, the use of artificial intelligence to finish a work is robbing one of their potential to work through the tough parts on their own – something that people my age all had to experience at one point in their educational careers.
While I enjoy writing and look to continue to improve at it, I’d be remiss if I said that it just comes easy to me. Sure, it did when I was 15 and writing essays the night before they were due in high school, but it certainly isn’t now.
After writing each morning, I spend a part of each day trying to plan ahead for what kind of content I will write later on in the week – wondering if there’s anything new I can approach while also thinking about more long-form content that I’d love to pursue in the future.
On some days, this can be a frustrating experience. I sometimes feel that I’ve exhausted a lot of my ideas on my website that is still less than a year old, fearing that I will run out of things that I can feasibly write about.
Once again, these setbacks and difficult days where I feel like I can’t think of a single new idea for a story are all part of writing. The brainstorming and research are components to the equation that are just as significant as the inevitable frustration and writer’s block that comes with it. And honestly, I love it all. I love the challenge and the task I’ve set up for myself – where it is on me and me alone to create something new each day.
Whether that’s delving into the favorite titles in our video game collection or just giving a bit more context and information behind a question that one may Google Search, I wake up each day feeling a responsibility to finish what I started and write something that hasn’t been written before.
I don’t feel like I’m very good at much, but this is the one thing I enjoy and want to continue to improve at for the rest of my life. To take away that process to “ask” a virtual dumbass who is always wrong for “ideas” on “organization”?
Over my dead fucking body.
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