Chat GTP is making me dumb and I hate it. I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking. What self-respecting (not to mention craft-respecting and industry-respecting) writer uses ChatGTP? Well, spoiler, a lot of them, even though no one wants to admit it. But we need to talk about it.
My day job is in marketing and content and I’m not exaggerating when I say that EVERYONE in this field is now using some sort of AI to help them keep churning out content. Social media is a hungry, hungry beast. In fact, not only am I enthusiastically encouraged to use AI in my work, but required to do so. There’s reasons for it, many of which I understand (to a reasonable extent) at a cerebral level, but from a moral standpoint I have a deep revulsion and am repulsed by it. A part of my creativity dies every single time I ask it to write something for me, or even refine. Unfortunately, this is multiple times a day.
My critical and creative brain is wasting away, to the extent where I’m finding myself relying on it more and more. Even simple sentences, blurbs and even emails to my boss are run through it and I feel like my IQ has significantly dropped in the last four months since I began using it.
I feel like I’m losing my unique writer’s voice and I can’t write on a laptop anymore. This was written on paper first, so I at least am able to step away from screens but even as I write this, I realise it’s horrifically dull. I’m not saying anything that is particularly insightful or even adding anything fresh to a conversation that despite being relatively new within the past couple of years, has already been hashed out ad nauseam. But I’m struggling it all, the productivity addiction – and yes, “Chandra” (ChatGTP’s nickname in my office, as we’re encouraged to look at it as a coworker) can be extremely helpful at times – but it’s making the pressure so much worse. Not just the pressure to churn an exponential amount of content at work more quickly, but the pressure for my personal projects like revising my manuscript, write blogs for the website, stay active as an author on social media so I can try to build up a base of followers before I even *think* about publishing….
I don’t know how to do all of this without burning out.
This insane amount of pressure makes it extremely tempting to have it write all my social media posts. To take away the stress of figuring out what to post and when, just ask it to write a calendar for you. I’ll allow it to help me brainstorm some of these administrative things but it still makes me feel dirty inside and it’s not that great at it anyways. It also makes me sound like everyone else out there, which I hate.
I don’t really have a solution to this issue. Sorry. Like I said, I’m struggling with the implications of it all, not to mention my satisfaction with my employment. There are parts of the job that I do enjoy, and I’m proud of a lot of it, but this…this is eating away at me and I’m not sure I can reconcile it.
Not to say that I don’t believe there is no space for AI in our world. I remember not long ago seeing a mammogram image where AI was able to identify a cluster of problematic cells, presumably before they even became cancerous down the line. More of this, please. Go for it. But replacing writers and artists, the creativity that makes us human? There’s a reason it feels like a sucker punch to the gut every time I see an AI generated image or superfluous use of the em dash (don’t even get me started on the em dash!) and why I feel like a traitor every time I type in a prompt and allow it to essentially do my job for me.
I guess this is why I’ve been gravitating to a more analogue life on my days off. Putting pen to paper instead of staring at a screen, feels more me. Perhaps it’s more about reclaiming something I *know* I am good at, but a skill that is slipping rapidly through my fingers. It’ disappearing fast and I hate it and it’d just be nice to know I’m not alone.
T. Aldwyn Lee 