Stop lending your personal credibility to AI

Hello friend! I've been reading your posts on the Internet lately, and I noticed you're using a lot of AI. At first I wasn't certain, and I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. But then, a couple of paragraphs in, after all the "load-bearings" and the em dashes and the "honest truths" and the "it's reals" — I just couldn't take it anymore.

Your warmed-over AI writing is a pile of horseshit. And now I can't take you seriously.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the allure of asking a robot to do all the work for you. It's incredibly easy and compelling. I, too, use the autocomplete machines. They can help explore an idea, source some complex data, summarize a big mess of information, and jumpstart tedious efforts that would have taken days or weeks to pull off on your own.

That stuff is great and magical. But at some point, you need to bring your actual functioning human brain back to the occasion, and think for a moment about what you're putting into the world.

When you outsource your writing, you outsource your critical thinking too. Writing is thinking. Taking the time to write forces you to consider different approaches, edit, change your mind, and dig deeper until you're sure you're presenting something you can stand behind.

If you skip those steps, you skip everything meaningful. You get to the destination without even embarking on the journey. It's like buying a postcard at Wal-Mart instead of taking a vacation. You get the artifact without any of the lived experience that made the artifact significant.

Most importantly, when you present a machine's raw generation as your own voice, you immediately trade your credibility away, because everyone can see exactly what you're doing. The earned expertise you've built for yourself rapidly trends down to zero.

As humans with a painfully brief time on this grand beautiful planet, all we really have is our unique voices and points of view. Machines can try to simulate this. They can look at a corpus of evidence and predict what you might say. They can pretend they're you. But they can't be you.

So, please. Stop copy-pasting garbage text out of a chatbot and posting it on LinkedIn. Stop phoning in a document and submitting it as credible homework or professional-grade content. Stop asking people to spend precious fleeting hours of their lives reading stuff that you couldn’t be bothered to spend minutes authoring.

Go ahead and use AI as a research tool, a helper, and an efficiency booster. Then do the meaningful work it takes to turn that into something thoughtful and considered. We'll all be better for it, and you will too.