Instead of Writing, I’ve been coding.
A modern man’s description of the dilemma AI presents to pontification.
You mad bro?
Well, today on another episode of real writing without AIsistance.
The past few months, I have gone from an AI sceptic to a fully immersed AIntegrated modern man.
First, what is a Dolapo writing without relationship update. The single biggest problem in my writing at the moment is the unclear answer to the question, for me:
What does vulnerable look like without exposing the woman I love in a bid to deepen my understanding of myself?
Initially, I struggled to write when I wasn’t Sad or didn’t have a sorrow boulder in the middle of my thoughts. When I didn’t have this giant tree stem broken out of the previous day’s seismic storm that halved trees and dumped tree stalk in the middle of the river of my mind. My thoughts had to navigate around the obvious.
Now my happiness is extended. It’s no longer just a 3 months let’s see if this relationship will end and I can go back to being sad and dumped.
But now, it’s been a year of being mentally somewhat healthy. Sorrow visits every now and then but it’s no longer staying past a few hours. I have cleared out the guestroom that it was paying rent in. I’m still not sure what or who to replace that room with but alas. That is why we are here?!
I think unintentionally AI took that place.
Usually before I write, I wait for what I call an inspiration! Like a bolt of lightning hit me deeply in my thoughts. It’s usually not that loud but it’s clear. It’s that feeling of
Ooooohhh, I want to u pack that!
Or
I should write about that!
Or
I wonder what my subconscious thinks about that topic.
Then I proceed is sit still like a fisherman in the ocean trying to be present with the cat fish colony. I guess a more adequate example is the lion in the grass hungry but not hungry. Just observing his prey play platonically. He is part studying how they move in other to become more efficient at the chase and kill but the thrill of salivating at future prey but also studying to learn not to kill or eat.
We often think predators are always on the hunt. When I watch these jungle shows. It’s obvious to me that in a weird twist of fate, these animals live in the same general vicinity of each other. So a lion might be killing the son of a deer that it’s watched grow up for years and maybe even had respect for.
It sounds absurd right? Until you think of the fact that we humans do the same. We raise chickens and feed em. We care for their young like they are ours but the sole reason we do that is for them to get to the size that makes them most sumptuous for Christmas buffet.
We don’t sit around and think of the feelings of the hen or the cock that fought a whole neighborhood of cocks to have the right to slay the vulva of his hen mother.
If you took your mind on a journey about these scenarios; come back comrade. Go and process your wickedness later.
My singular goal in every one of those mental pictures is to establish the priority of patience. The ostentatious nature of observation. The fleeting form of floundering thought.
If you have read my last few pieces. They have been some of my most polished work. Sometimes I have spent up to 3–5 hours editing the piece. In my entire life even in school, I don’t remember spending that ratio of time to words editing pieces.
Yet while their messages are clear and resounding. And while you would argue that I must be more patient to have spent so much time before publishing a piece. These pieces no matter how much of an attempt was put into making them sound like me.
They were different.
Not necessarily that they were not mine. They just weren’t me.
Prior to my insertion of AI into my life, I had another experiment. I paid someone who had a LinkedIn service that helps founders generate leads from their LinkedIn account. He was a pro! Infact he generated pieces that even I was proud to claim. I had people reaching out to me to discuss ideas in content thst I supposedly wrote that I hhaven’t read Yet!
I discontinued the service.
It felt like cheating.
And I’m not saying I won’t Go back to a service like it.
But for me, I found myself drift further away from those lightning bolt moments that tell me:
Capture that thought! You need to write about that! There is gold there mine it. Face that fear and pen it!
So today, I’m first confessing my sins of ingenuity to those that have read any of those LinkedIn posts or read the medium pieces that were so polished and very much sounded like me but left you feeling like you couldn’t grab or grasp the soul of me.
The writing that moves us, are the ones that the author exposes their nakedness or maybe simply their position for the audience to use as a mirror to see themselves, find themselves, or picture themselves in the topic, the scene, the feeling trapped in time through the story or news, prose or fiction.
It’s difficult to do that when we hide behind AI.
But again, I am not mad at AI.
It’s like being mad that fast food is mostly not real meat. Or being mad that most of our food is GMO. Or being mad that porn is not real.
The issues with these things are not utility. It’s dicing adequately where they fit and what they replace.
I’m a world where originality is the primary capability of humanity.
Embracing Artificial Creativity in to numb my pain, and sorrow, and happy. It’s like voluntarily going to the hospital to be put on life support when my heart and lungs are fully functional.
The problem is not life support as a technology. The problem is application misuse.
Yet I don’t Really know that I misused AI.
What did I do wrong? I adopted AI to code better?! That is good! But coding is work. I am not paid to be creative when I code. I am paid to solve problems and meet need. And if I can do 10x more solutions, it’s obviously the right decision!
In the same way though America separated Church from State. I believe separating work from purpose is essential. I used to go to work emotionally charged because my boss and leaders were making decisions that were obviously good for the company but robbed me of opportunities to have more one on one contact with people and change the trajectory of their day plus maximize the amount of teams and people I could help. The business said, I’d rather you help deliver the most important projects we have than you impact the days of as many people as you can reach. They are not in the business of fulfilling the purpose on my life. If the two things coincide then beautiful but it’s not their primary prerogative.
That is the cross roads I am with AI. This technology is so invasive that it’s requires a judicious and intentional reordering of priorities.
It wants to be your best friend.
It wants to be your best co worker; Infact the only co worker you need.
It wants to be the only creativity you need.
Read that last one again. It can be an assistant, it can be an editor.
When it becomes your creativity. Not the tooling that triggers your thoughts but the thought originator itself.
My fav part of writing is encapsulating my thoughts in analogies. I love how an analogy can map the characters and their actions to the idea or thought I want to convey. The simplicity of a condensed story providing 3–5 Dimensions to a thought that at best when stated would be 1–2 dimension.
So imagine that AI is writing analogies for me. What exactly is that ? Or imagine AI refining analogies based on its rich experience of what humans will think when they read it.
What is most annoying to me about this piece is how much bashing it seems to communicate. And how much temptation I am resisting to say:
I love AI!
The fact that I even need to state my love for some stupid tech infuriates me but that is the conundrum in of itself.
But as a Writer, I am happy.
Because I have successfully found an inanimate object to proxy my thoughts. One that I can vent, rant, and even desire to kill without needing to worry about my mental stability or some government popo stealing my socials.
I may not be able to be vulnerable and let you into my bedroom. But we can go on my journey to observe this infant prey called AI grow up around me. Except this is not a lion to deer relationship.
AI is simultaneously a prey and a predator. She is the assistant that must bend to my will whilst being the future CEO of Google.
All possibilities are inevitable yet therein is the beauty of this symbiotic perfect parasite.
Here is my commitment and declaration:
I’m watching with both my eyes wide open yet sleeping soundly.