What Happened To Thinking?

On AI slop, creativity, and shit - I think my prefrontal cortex just developed

Song of the week: One Last Breath by Silent Collision

This weekend has been a bad one for creativity and writing. I’ve been sent two links for separate creators? writers? thinkers? plagiarists who have lifted my work on Substack and repurposed them on their own pages. Taking everything from the title to the contents. My life, my words, my experiences repackaged into their own. This isn’t the first time this has happened, you might remember back in August I had it then, but one thing is for sure - it’s getting worse.

When I was a child, my Grandad and I were walking through Sainsbury’s and he refused to go through the self checkout.

“Why?” I asked,

“This is where it starts.” He said, as he put our shopping basket by the till and said hello to the cashier.

I remember rolling his words round my head for a while, wondering what it meant. I remember decided he was silly for it. This memory came into my mind when I was speaking at a panel a few weeks ago, someone asked my opinion about AI and I knew I should be impartial, or at least not rude about it. But, the truth is I hate it most of the time. I think convenience is turning our brains to mush. I think maybe my silence on it was like not feeding a fire, hoping it would die out on it’s own but I have to face that’s not happening. I’ve blocked it from being able to trawl my work and feed itself on it, but it doesn’t matter, people copy and paste my words into it anyway. Humans are doing this to ourselves.

“When I write personal essays on the internet, I’m making the most inner parts of me outside. I find it cathartic for the most part, still, a strange amount of trust is balanced in the online world. I spent the morning thinking maybe this was a mistake to trust the world so much. After all, I’ve shared my writing and now have no agency over my body of work. It’s just out there, that’s my risk and it’s been proven bad. It’s not just my belief systems, or arguments, when people steal your work, they’re trying to turn your memories into their own. It feels so dystopian and strange. I’d poured hours of time and effort into my accounts and in months they’d been replicated. And now with it being putting through Chat GPT it can happen repeatedly. Over and over and over until it means nothing.

AI music, AI art, AI words, AI slop everywhere. When did we start using it instead of thinking? And how do we stop?

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be inconvenienced more. Go buy groceries instead of ordering them on delivery apps. Go to a local book store instead of Amazon. Have my own thoughts as I walk there or listen to the birds instead of always being plugged into something. Ai has slipped so far into many of us, we think it’s normal for it to write our shopping lists and write messages to our friends instead of handling conflict. I think AI could be so used for good, I’m picking up my hearing aids on Tuesday and they use AI, and I’m grateful for it but it’s like the saying of ‘AI should do my dishes so I can create art, not create art so I can do my dishes’.

This morning, as I posted a screenshot of someone posting my own work to their story that had been ran through Chat GPT, a friend messaged to say; what happened to having a think?

How to have a think:

• Don’t rely on AI to think for you. Write your own itineraries, your own shopping lists, your own stories. There are literally countless studies done showing over reliance is turning your brain to mush (MIT)

• Go outside. Observe the world, read a book, go for a walk. Take a notebook, write down every time you see something happen.

• Talk to other people, your friends, your waiters, your colleagues, anyone. AI isn’t your friend, it’s no replacement for human connection. Be challenged, listen to other opinions, form your own ones back.

When it happened last time, I wrote, “You can copy and paste my words but you can’t live them. That will always be mine”. This remains true, and even more true in the context of AI - it can regurgitate my words but it can never be human. It can never live the experiences it spits out.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.