When to use AI (and when to avoid it)
Personal reflections on creativity and learning post-generative AI
One of the main benefits of AI is that it will help you do tasks well enough that you’ll look like someone who generally knows what they’re doing. This is important to note, given two of AI’s largest use cases lately: school and work.
AI in schools
Students can over-rely on AI when they’re not truly committed to learning. When “getting an education” is framed as the primary path for social mobility (i.e., education as the “great equalizer”), a lot of students will “invest” in higher education not to learn but to secure jobs and income streams in the future. When education is reduced to merely a way for future workers to develop job-relevant skills, consumers of education (students) can feel frustrated in having to learn non-job-relevant parts of the curriculum they’re essentially paying for.
The relevance of this to AI? The problem has always been that students care more about a diploma (especially given the secure future it claims to unlock) than they care about learning. Before AI, students have always found ways to “cheat” their education through plagiarism or by hiring someone else to do their schoolwork for them. AI just provides an easy no-brainer way to accomplish the main goal of graduating without exposing the student to the more severe risks associated with plagiarism or academic dishonesty.
If the main metric used by an educator in passing a student is whether or not said student has a general grasp on the course material, I return to the main benefit outlined above: AI will help you do tasks well enough to fool someone into thinking that you understand something sufficiently, even if you don’t.
AI at work
The same context that exists in schools, of course, also exists in work. Now that students can fake/cheat their way into getting a diploma, who says they can’t do the same thing in work? The culture is actually worse in corporate as AI is hailed as almost the next coming of Jesus — it’s absolutely everywhere, and use can even be part of company SOP.
Even before AI, a lot of people have had successful careers by role-playing and looking like they know what they’re doing. This is only made easier by AI now, and at an opportune moment as well. With companies offering entry-level salaries for roles that sometimes take an entire department to handle, AI can level the playing field by allowing employees to be somewhat competent across multiple responsibilities.
Often, anyway, the goal is not to create quality and compelling work but rather output that is “good enough” for managers and leaders. It’s why we encounter god awful copywriting and poorly thought-out products — final outputs are haphazardly thrown together and designed to be shipped out as fast as possible so that companies can make a quick profit. In this use case, AI, as a tool to “fake” competence, thrives.
What does this mean for creativity and learning post-AI?
The main point of the paragraphs above is to illustrate two things:
First, AI will continue to flourish in an economy that rewards quantity over quality and profit over creativity. Given the current state of the education system and the job market, we should think twice before labeling users of AI in school and work contexts as “sell-outs” in an imagined war between humanity and technology. It’s hard to blame people for acting in their best interests when AI is pushed down their throats everywhere they go.
Although of the two use cases — school and work, I would say that the former is more alarming than the first. Unfortunately, AI only exposes the problem of students feeling alienated from their own education. If we want students to fall in love with learning once more and prevent them from engaging in AI-mediated academic dishonesty, we have to go beyond the practice and narrative of promising wealth and job security to motivate students to stay in school. In essence, our youth must feel comfortable enough to wish to pursue learning for learning’s sake without being burdened by anxieties of whether their decision to do so will enable them to move up social ladders.
Second, haphazard over-reliance on AI in learning and expression can absolutely lead to a “soulless” humanity. In my opinion, the joy of being human exists in the moments where we try and make an effort. It exists in our shared spaces of adversity and overcoming. As long as we keep on measuring the successes of learning and creating in their capacities to make a profit, we will always keep on thinking of ways to make them more “efficient.” And in the end, what is more “efficient” than AI, where we can maximize the creation of profitable outputs with almost zero cost and effort?
The cyclical experiences of learning and creating are what drive the progress of the human race. To be overly dependent on AI to the point of not being able to express yourself without it is an insult and a disservice to your incredible potential and capacity as a human being for innovation and creativity.
There is joy in growth, euphoria in creation, and bliss in connection with others through something you crafted with your own hands. To purposefully rob yourself of these experiences is to rob yourself of your own humanity. It’s fair to use AI at your job to make your life easier in an unfair world, i.e., using it to manage heavy responsibilities at work, etc. Technology is supposed to make our burdens lighter, after all.
However, we should take care not to outsource to AI even the very things that we love about being human — that is, our ability to think for ourselves, the ability to express ourselves in creative ways, and lastly, our capacity to grow and evolve from our experiences and each other.
TLDR
Students and employees use AI because it can be a shortcut that makes their lives easier by allowing them to “fake” competencies in a highly competitive and unfair rat race/labor market. AI can also be a great tool to help us be more efficient in certain activities in the economy. However, to be unable to express yourself and your own experiences without it, whether through writing, art, or whatever medium, is an incredible disservice to your potential and capacity as a human being.
Let me know if there’s something you think I missed. I’d love to know other people’s thoughts :) What do you think is an acceptable use of AI in creative work?
I’ve also been making an essay daily of the various thoughts that fly around in my head and this just happened to be the thought of the day. I’m trying to write something substantial everyday to try to improve my writing since years of being overly reliant on AI for work also made me so rusty af lol. I deeply relate with the last line. I never thought I would be reviving this newsletter again but I needed a place other than social media to store these random essays.