A Double-Edged Sword

Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, Drag and drop it, zip – unzip it (Daft Punk)

What a time to be alive! We are standing at the edge of one of the biggest and fastest technological revolutions in history. AI has been part of our lives for years, often without us even noticing. For a long time, we have shared this planet with specialised AI models that were either helping us by making our lives easier in the background or influencing us by nudging our behaviour, selling us products, or worse, shaping political narratives without our awareness (hello, Cambridge Analytica & friends!).

Now, with AI models becoming more powerful and more visible, they are impossible to ignore. Not only because the media talks about them incessantly, but because we are finally embracing direct interaction with them. We actively engage with AI to improve our work and our lives, and the risks of unchecked influence are still very much present.

AI today can generate text, images, music, and code faster than humans. It helps brainstorm, summarise, and automate tasks we used to do manually. It expands access to knowledge, making complex tasks easier for everyone. In many ways, it is democratising access to creation. However, the sheer volume of content it can produce is overwhelming, and quality is never guaranteed.

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves. – Gandalf

Not an original parallel, but just like the Palantír, AI is a tool. It is not inherently good or bad. However, as we will see a little further down the line, humanity has never encountered a tool quite like this before.

I am not going to touch on the socio-political or economic implications of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). My focus is on the creative side: how are people choosing to rely on AI?

Naturally, there are different levels of reliance on AI, and it is not one size fits all. Different tasks may require different levels of AI involvement. Let’s take a look at them, focusing on writing tasks.

Use to refine: you create everything and ask AI to help with the final touches, whether that means editing, improving structure, or rewording. At this level, you are fully in control, using AI as a tool to polish your work without altering your voice.

Use as a brainstorming partner: you bring ideas to the table and iterate over them with AI. The final content is fully human, but AI has played a role in shaping it, almost like bouncing ideas off a virtual assistant.

Use for suggestions: AI is more involved, providing ideas, outlines, or rewriting sections. This is where things can get tricky. It is easy to become a little lazy, letting AI take over more than intended and losing some control over the final product.

Completely outsource: AI does everything, and the person just copies and pastes. This is a slippery slope, and let’s be honest, I bet many people do not even re-read what AI has produced before sharing.

Over-reliance, even when unnecessary: really? You need AI to write a birthday card?

Aside from this last level, where people may be losing trust in their own creativity, I believe that the other approaches can all have their place depending on the task. But never, NEVER, paste something blindly without re-reading it. We might relax on some boring tasks, but critical thinking cannot be lost.

I have seen too many LinkedIn posts of companies boasting about products they don’t even build, comments referring to topics unrelated to the original post, and cover letters addressed to the wrong hiring manager.

Some tasks are perfectly fine to outsource completely to AI. Summarizing long reports or meeting notes, writing product descriptions for e-commerce, or translating simple phrases and instructions are great examples. Note the emphasis on simple. AI is now excellent at handling these tasks.

Let’s not forget that humans have always embraced technology that makes life easier. When we no longer had to worry about hunting for food every day, we could think about other things. That shift led to inventions that allowed us to evolve, live longer, and improve our quality of life, not to mention art, philosophy, and everything else that makes us human.

Could we live without electricity today? Probably, but it would fundamentally change the way we experience life. Does it make it evil? I don’t think so.

I was born in the 1980s, so I spent a good chunk of my life without the internet or mobile phones. I find myself smiling when someone asks, "How did we do [X] before?" Well, we went on holidays without Booking.com. We ate at restaurants without knowing what everybody else thought about them. We showed up to meetings (mostly) on time. And we managed to reach destinations, near and far, without Google Maps.

Maybe we are worse at reading maps than we used to be, and that could be a problem if we find ourselves lost without our phones. Have you ever felt that slight anxiety of not being able to communicate for two hours? OMG.

However, I still believe that the benefits here outweigh the risks. We may be overly reliant on the internet, but there is no denying that it has transformed our lives in incredible ways.

Did you know that even writing was once feared? Socrates worried it would destroy memory skills and that it could never convey the same depth of knowledge as oral tradition.

So now you might think I’m all for AI taking over our lives. No, dear Reader, not at all. There is a massive difference between past technology and what we are heading toward with AI. Past tech gave us efficiency, but AI threatens something far greater: our ability to think for ourselves.

The way I see it, past technologies weakened certain skills but freed up brain power for thinking or doing something else. AI could do the same, but only if we make a conscious effort to use it in a way that’s enhancing our thinking rather than replacing it.

What does this conscious effort look like? I’m learning as I write this. For now, I’ve told my AI assistant to never write a sentence before I’ve had a chance to think things through and draft something myself. I’ve asked them to slow down, give me time to think, and not jump ahead too fast. AI should never take over content creation but should wait for me to give the green light.

Sometimes, I still need to tell them to stop and let me do my thing. Let’s see if, over time, they learn better.

I will share more about my modus operandi while writing posts for The Spotter: I lead, AI refines. Until then!