Before I dive into this wonderful little story, I’ll do what
I always seem to do in these entries and wander down a path that has absolutely
nothing to do with the intended (I don’t think I ever actually outright
concretely stated) purpose of this multi-year long exercise in reading and
writing.
I spend much too much time online – in front of a screen.
Today, as I was writing a post to share on a particular social media platform,
I noticed that in the space where I was to paste my written content, a prompt offered
to assist me in writing the “content” with the help of AI. For some reason,
today, that hit hard. I have been reading and listening to people who are smarter
than me discuss how AI and generative AI can stunt/damage a human’s ability to
write – and possibly, as a result, to think. I need to do more reading on this
validity, but I am leaning toward understanding and believing that this is
true. As I sit and write this, the ideas flow from my brain onto the screen in
a Word document. I am also fully aware that these words will probably be sucked
into a LLM for training purposes. Perhaps it’ll be used to develop a
personalized AI assistant for me that will be marketed to me someday, and they
will take this chunk of content and use it to “sell” it to me.
Perhaps I am lucky that I experienced the written word and
the ability to write without the taint of AI invading my thoughts. Will my
children, though? Will they have the opportunity to suffer over written sheets
of paper, struggling for the right combination of words to effectively
communicate their feelings, such as I am doing now? Or will they select from a
library of prompts that will generate a set of sentences allowing the reader to
attempt to understand what they are feeling?
The in-person meeting, free of digital devices, might one day…or
perhaps, it’s even now, the only authentic form of transmitting thoughts and
ideas to one another. It’s not hard to find reports of the damage that these
digital words have inflicted on the humanness of humans.
Looking back on our lives, perhaps we can remember that
coming-of-age moment or a rebellion against control.
Perhaps the moment or act was something subtle and peaceful
beneath the surface of everyday life over an extended period.
Perhaps the moment or act came crashing all at once, forever
altering our lives, violent, hurtful.
Perhaps we had more than one moment that occurred during different
stages of our lives.
Perhaps that coming-of-age moment hit at 40…or 50…buying
that shiny red Corvette or finally getting that tattoo.
These moments can be quite impactful not only for us but also
for those that we surround ourselves with.
They can change how others view us, perhaps for a moment…or forever
moving forward.
These
transformations, these moments, these acts of rebellion are special – they make
us human; they allow us to evolve, grow, and mature.
They bring forth the crazy electrical connections inside our
squishy grey brains struggling to help us function in this shared reality.