s02e17 - a.i and resistance
you notice it more and more, nowadays. you used to think that people were being alarmist. to an extent, you still do, but the evidence is impossible to ignore.
it's most apparent at work. a ghost of an webpage on a second monitor, a stray mention here and there— everybody's doing it. everybody's using AI.
You receive emails, legitimate ones, with no soul. You are sent Teams messages that are formatted with dividers and headings, responding to a query. You hear people say things like, "I just ran this through Chat-GPT and-" or "Studying is so much easier with AI", or "My kids use this AI website to learn maths", and a little bit of you dies. Funnily enough it's almost always older people. Not exclusively, but very often. Ten years ago, you wonder if they were talking about how "kids today will become overreliant on technology!".
Look at them now, digital immigrants from an analogue world, leaving behind a trail of outdated encyclopedias from the reference section of a public library.
It's not evil. You've used it before. Mostly in haste, you needed a Powershell script that you didn't have the skill to write yourself. You wanted some reference books for an essay you were writing (which you then read). You needed to puzzle out a very specific technical error.
The only thing you're really embarrassed about are the scripts— copying and pasting the output of generative AI feels hollow, none of the excitement of learning and problem-solving. But you're learning Powershell (for better or for worse), because you don't want to have to do that again.
It's a tool. But people's imaginations are becoming limited. Why be creative about it when you can have a "good enough" solution? You find that depressing. Anytime people have told you to "just use AI", you've responded with a frankly disproportionate level of resistance: "Hell. no."
You can write this email yourself. You can find the solution trawling through forums. You can use this tool in a way that doesn't make you lazier.
It's not even these peoples' fault. We've been primed for this kind of way of life. We have less free time than ever and we've been taught to value efficiency over everything. Don't waste time, don't read, just skim.
You're not an absolutist, you don't think AI is evil. it's a tool, and developing tools that are more and more advanced is not an excuse to let this hyper-individualist, hyper-efficient culture seep into your soul. You are a human being. You are not a drone. Fight back however you can. However small an impact you might make.