As the internet revolution transforms into the AI revolution, writing has become the most dominant form of communication. We communicate through chat, emails, sharing memes, Slack channels, SOPs, saved AI prompts, reddit comments, documentation and pretty much the entire internet. Even work meetings have gradually moved to documents, transcripts and AI summaries. With AI being the way to maximise your productivity, having documented conversations and procedures is not just a luxury, but also a leverage.
Yet, we’re losing our edge in writing. Some might argue “rightly so”, as the skill of writing effective and professional texts will be delegated to AI. To that, I’d respond with a big fat NO. Sure man - make AI write your emails, make AI cleanup your documentation and make it get all the “tasks” done. That said, please don’t generate social media captions and gratitude messages through AI. Please. It’s pretty sad to see emotional messages from someone in a language that’s extremely unlike them. I’m seeing most of the cold emails I get and my LinkedIn feed being emotionless and devoid of any colours. Facebook back in the day was beautiful because people had their own style of expression when they’d post anything. Although it wasn’t perfect, it was beautiful - beauty lies in imperfections, beauty lies in diversity. What AI does to our language is not just translation and cleanup, but also decoration, which completely kills the spirit of our sentiment. Communication and collaboration is what made humanity progress and thrive. Since most of our communication in the internet era is in written form, the lack of depth in written communication would lead to the lack of depth in connection, which would lead to the lack of depth in empathy, which would lead to the lack of depth in human existence.
But well, communication is still understandable, since it has a clearly defined goal, what pisses me off the most is when we use AI for expression. I’ve done a fair bit of blogging, both professionally and recreationally. To be fair, while the ideas and content have always been mine, I have used AI for brainstorming the skeleton of my blogposts, refining the structuring of some sentences, or checking grammar. Despite this minor assistance, I’ve realized that the end result often doesn’t feel entirely my own. It lacks that sense of personal expression and clarity of thought I usually experience when writing without AI. Something is definitely missing. It feels devoid of style, quirks or colours. Weird to really understand why, but to me, it seems that we tend to show most of our colours and imperfections when we are struggling, when we’re most vulnerable. That’s what makes us what we are and that what makes us unique and beautiful. With AI covering our gaps, we’re no more showing our true colours and our inner core.
So well, I’ve decided to use zero AI help when I’m writing blogs, because turns out, the sole reason why I write, is to express, share and learn. Things might not be as clean and correct, but thats okay, as long as expression is pure — since purity of expression is what keeps us alive.