I miss the days before AI. Partly because I’m tired of seeing an image online and not knowing if I can believe what I’m looking at anymore, which is especially unnerving. But the reason I say I miss the days before AI is mostly because of my love for reading and writing. I’m being a hypocrite of course because I use chatGPT every day… for my small business, and things like fixing coding errors at work in a pinch. But using it often enough made me able to spot chatGPT’s typical writing style and I made a rule for myself to never use it to help my own writing. Suddenly everyone’s writing online started to sound the same and I can feel all authenticity is going out the window. I’m sure most people who use it just occasionally read something written by ChatGPT and think it sounds so perfect. But once you read enough sentences with the exact same structure like these: 

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“It’s in that space between certainty and doubt where real growth happens.”

“It’s in that space between comfort and challenge that creativity actually shows up.”

“It’s in that space between who you were and who you’re becoming that things start to shift.”

“It’s in that space between intention and action where most people get stuck.”

“It’s in that space between chaos and control that clarity tends to emerge.”

You start to notice how often people are using AI for their writing and suddenly it feels like that episode of black mirror where everyone’s interactions are rated 1-5 stars and it’s the only thing that matters in that dystopian world. 

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I smile now when I see a typo in someone’s writing, rather than the slight eye twitch I used to get. Because now it’s like a breath of fresh air to read something that wasn’t written by AI. The mistakes are beautiful to me!  

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I heard someone recently mention how they never see those tiny red bugs on their patio anymore that they remembered from years ago, and everyone’s response was something to the effect of “it’s because you’re stuck in your phone”. They’re still there, we just don’t take the time to look at the details of the life right in front of us anymore. 

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The point is, I sincerely hope we don’t all lose ourselves to our devices and other technology. I find myself on my phone disturbingly often these days, most times I’m not even consciously picking it up. 

Life just moves way too fast to not recognize the hold technology has on us, and then make an effort to get back to real life. We all need to touch some grass. Or stick our faces in the snow… whichever is currently accessible. 

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