On AI & Maintaining That Connection to Humanity
Friends,
Life moves fast, and it gets faster with each passing year. As we battle the turning of the clock, a monsoon of appointments and events rain down upon our calendars. We juggle these events in between errands and a never-ending rapid of pings from our phones. Chats, texts, push notifications, news updates, and promo codes buzz in our pockets to remind us that each second we’re not focused on keeping all of our plates spinning, there’s another message to check.
“Did you see that statement made by that politician today?”
“Have you texted your brother back? You’ve left his text on read for two hours…”
“Don’t MISS OUT—Your 30% off pizza DoorDash offer expires TONITE!”
Our attention is constantly in demand. Some of it is for the important things, like birthdays, anniversaries, and family get-togethers. A chunk of that attention is for the plates that need to keep spinning, such as work, chores, and picking up that gallon of milk on the way home. The other few hours that aren’t reserved for sleep? That’s for us. That’s our time to write, draw, read, watch a movie, or take a few quiet moments to let our mind wander and think.
But we have to plan for it. We have to schedule it onto our calendars and push out all the noise, and successfully doing this is harder and harder to come by. Because everything that’s put before us is sold as a way to make our lives easier. It’s sold as a “quick and easy” solution that doesn’t take but a few moments of our time.
Social media platforms make checking in with friends easier than ever. Smart devices like thermostats or ring doorbells make it so we didn’t have to walk to either the thermostat or front door. Apps like Uber and DoorDash mean we never have to leave our homes, and mobile hotspots mean that even if our internet is taken offline, we could keep streaming our favorite shows from our phones.
In the past few years, language-learning models, more often referred to as “AI,” have stepped in to solve a multitude of problems. Despite consuming a vast amount of resources to run a query, AI is sold as a way to write your emails for you, create your presentations, code your website, answer your questions, draw your art, analyze your data, write your book, and come up with tonight’s dinner menu with the ingredients you have in the fridge.
Trained on other people’s hard-earned words, art, and thoughts, AI crowdsources the perfect response to your request (except when it doesn’t, which has been happening exponentially more as its use rises). The worst part is, every major tech player has their own proprietary AI tool, and they all want you to use it as much as possible. Google recently launched “AI Mode,” which replaces traditional Google Search with their Gemini tool that they’ve been tweaking over the past couple of years. Don’t want AI Mode? How about Perplexity, ChatGPT, or any of the other apps waiting on your phone’s app store.
What’s Your Point, Scott?
It’s not that technology is bad, but everything that has been sold to us as a benefit also comes with its own downside. The more we rely on these tools and technologies to make our lives easier, the more isolated we become. Each app on our phone is another excuse to stay home, stay inside, and avoid the effort to move. These tools also mean we naturally exert less effort or work to achieve a desired outcome.
And these new AI tools? Their promise to do everything for us robs us of the ability to think. The more we rely on the machine to do our thinking for us, the less we exercise the most important muscle in our bodies—our brains.
Like any new technology that makes tasks easy and convenient, there’s a temptation to incorporate it into your daily lifestyle. Across many social media platforms right now, there’s a massive fight over whether AI should be acceptable in any circumstance when it comes to the creation of art (let’s be clear—I’m against it). Sure, you could whip up an image in 10 minutes with the proper prompt, or you could write a novel-length book by carefully feeding a plot outline into an AI platform.
But creativity? It’s an expressive form of thinking. We admire it because we understand how tedious and dedicated and marvelous it is that someone could conjure up a collection of ideas, and in union with their senses and hands, manifest a piece of art into existence that hadn’t been there before.
And creativity isn’t just how we put pen to paper or paintbrush to canvas. We breathe creativity, wonder, and thinking into everything we engage in. Creativity can be the way we problem-solve a home DIY project. It can be how we navigate around bad traffic, or how we hit just the perfect note on the tongue by playing around with ingredients and a spice rack. Creativity is how we wrap a present or it’s how we surprise a loved one on a dreary day.
It requires us to stop, feel the moment, reflect, and formulate something in our minds that can fundamentally alter our day or someone else’s for the better. No one wants to read the median average of all of the stories ever written, as crafted by a machine. They want to know what the author is fixating on or thinking about because it’s a window into the author’s soul.
I don’t want to bang on the pulpit about the ills of technology. I just want to lead into this one simple point. There’s a simple, unmatched pleasure in doing something with our own two hands. When we roll up our sleeves, there’s a sensation that starts with the touch of our fingers. It works its way up our arms, passes through our hearts, and hits a receptor in our brain that no tool, no matter how easy or convenient, can hit.
This is the only method I know of to pour something pure, beautiful, and wholly unique into something. Human hands can’t replicate the uniformity of machinery, but they can imbue each creation with an unidentifiable essence that makes the creator and the recipients feel connected.
This is why keeping that thinking part of the equation is so important. It’s also why many people are turning to “third places” in an age where technology can do almost everything for us. There’s an unmistakable benefit to being out in the world, connecting with others, and sharing drinks someone crafted with their hands or marveling at the wonder of human-designed architecture in a seemingly endless city. Each person we pass on the street has a story to tell, and we can catch bits and pieces of it as we submerge ourselves into the world. We can catch snippets of their joy, their pain, and their love.
In a world that’s increasingly digital, we have to fight to maintain a piece of ourselves that’s still analog. Because that’s where our soul lives.
Keep creating and sharing your own handmade bit of beauty and love with the world.
We’re all in this together,
Scott
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P.P.S. Here are the latest happenings in my neck of the woods:
My recent short story “24 Hour News Cycle of Violence” was published in Behemoth Magazine.
I have a video review of the Defenders of the Earth tie-in story in Flash Gordon Quarterly #3.
I have a video review of Defenders of the Earth #6.