I have been feeling, like most of us, the pressure to use AI and frantically become “AI-proficient”, flooding my world. I feel like I got hired for a job where I had to learn a skill as quickly as possible, or everyone would lose their minds, except there’s no pay and very little incentive to do so. 

People say it’s faster – true, cheaper – also true. 

But when I make something – it comes straight from my heart and mind to yours – no filter. Well ok, sometimes I use a little bit of the Los angeles filter on Insta, but aside from that no filter.

But that direct connection really means something to me. 

In a normal working week as a mother and a writer and a coach, it is hard to generate the volume of content that social media algorithms demand in order to be visible. This fact is reflected very clearly in my follower numbers!  

But when I do show up, I want you to know it’s me. Not puppet-me. I want you to be able to trust I’m not tricking you into consuming something of low quality, made by a machine to get your email or your money.

I’ve also noticed I’m getting a kind of fatigue from just trying to decide if something is real or not. On the plus side it’s making me spend less time on social media, because when I see a ton of generic, not-human made stuff in a row, I feel disenchanted and put the phone down – a clear win! On the down side, I am just walking away from looking at newer books because I genuinely can’t tell if it’s going to be AI or not from the cover or description.

In terms of my own use, so far I have used AI to look at a contract and point out possible issues, which did help me, I asked it to devise a social media schedule that I don’t follow or even look at, and asked a couple other questions about how to be successful as a multi-potentialite, but I don’t really use that either. I actually am reading a really useful book about it instead (Renaissance Soul). 

I felt pretty good when I was using the AI chat, smart even. But I didn’t actually get any smarter. I didn’t flex the muscles of my mind much at all. I didn’t connect to my intuition, which if I’m honest, powers about 90% of my work. Well, I’d say it’s about 30% intuition, 30% research and learning and 30% hard work (10% tea). All of those skills require practice and frequent use or they atrophy and I’m just not willing to risk it. After I used it, I just felt meh.

My biggest tool isn’t productivity, or churning out content, or having 20 social media posts a day or even a week. My biggest asset is the quality I bring to my work. I’m not really looking to make watered-down or derivative anything at all. 

And let’s be honest, as an entrepreneur, it can be tough hiring everyone you need, especially when you’re self-published and sometimes it doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. But other times people surpass your expectations and help you make something beautiful. And when you hold it in your hand, it’s real. 

Every now and then I consider if I want to be one of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, optimizing things to churn out a high volume of “content”, that really only serves to compete with the high volume of other low-quality content, to drive a multi-billion dollar business that isn’t paying me a cent. 

Or do I just want to make stuff with my hands and my heart? And have genuine, thoughtful people buy that stuff and let it enrich their world a little bit. 

Just because a tech bro wants to pay some people I used to admire to try admonish me into heavy AI-use, should I do it? Should I be pressured and fear-mongered into it as if high school-level peer-pressure is something that can still move me. I mean, I’m a woman in my 40s – if you try to coerce me into something, what’s more likely to happen is I’ll do whatever I want to do, then put my feet up and have a nice cup of tea. 

I have also been wondering what it is about AI videos that turns my stomach and I think it’s this: I’m an intuitive, highly sensitive person. Where other people may just see a person talking in a fake interview, I see a scary mash up of bits of human, torn apart and stuck together all wrong, like bits of macerated meat in a hotdog. All bits of cheek and foot and ear all mashed up and stuck back together. My stomach feels sick, I can’t connect to the humanity, which for me is inseparable from any experience of a person whether IRL or on video, so it feels deranged. 

I can deal with normally-animated characters that worked on by 20 or hundreds of people, but for some reason an AI-animated video puppet is something from a horror video for me. It feels like bits of human poured into a moving model covered in skin. I know this is a pretty gross description, but there’s no other way to convey how it feels to me.

When I read AI writing it’s fine. It’s never life-changing. It’s performative humanity. I did a test to see if I could differentiate it, though, and I only got 5 out of 8 correct. However, a tricky part of that test, was that some of the human-written content was not great. So perhaps some AI writing is better than poorly written human stuff? But more emotional, connected or real? No. 

But there again, that’s something I’ve been wondering about. If we don’t read different styles, and occasionally bad writing, if everything is homogenized and always the same or similar quality – won’t we atrophy as people? Does AI ever have a headache or a bad hair day? No. It makes mistakes, but the tone doesn’t shift to match it. What will happen to our ability to handle different personalities and opinions if we mainly consume AI? Will our resilience and creativity wither? I’m afraid it will. 

I wonder if I’ll commit to doing things the human-made way forever, or if I’ll change my mind at some point. I really doubt it though – the media created by gen-AI gives me the ick so much, it’s hard to imagine it representing me or my brand. Plus, every time I go to use it, my fingers hover over the keyboard for a moment as I wonder if it’s worth the water waste or the environmental impact on people’s homes and towns. And most times it just isn’t. 

I think amidst all this pressure it’s important to step back and remember we have autonomy in how to interact with different tech, and how much. At the end of the day, it’s meant to be working for us, so if it’s creating tension or you’re getting addicted to use it and that’s having a negative impact on your ability to think, create or in other areas, it might be time to put it down for a while and remember how to human.

Perhaps I’ll be seen as antiquated and out-of-touch, but I’m surprisingly OK with that. I can let opportunities from low-quality words and work slip through my fingers, while I hold onto unfiltered humanity. I think that will be my brand. Just a human talking to other humans about human things, bad hair days and all. 

I just want to end with a couple of questions:

1. Are you a creative/ highly sensitive person/ intuitive, and does that shape your relationship with AI at all?
2. And if so – what role, if any, do you want AI to play in your life, in a way that feels supportive of your humanity, creativity and cognitive abilities?

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