AI Destroyed My Creativity: It’s Coming for Yours Next

Writing was something I used to get excited about. It felt good to be able to express my thoughts, never mind that I had little self-confidence. Now, writing is something I consciously avoid.

I miss the days I started writing, my honeymoon writing days. The transfer of energy through my writing was considerate, though limited in the sense that the writer feels more than the reader. When I wrote without any rules, and was able to tell myself I wrote all of that. However, I seem to have lost the ability to write my own words. And it is for no other reason than my lying to myself about saving time. To put it as it actually is, an obsession with AI to help finish or do my thinking for me… just because I thought I was good at prompting.

Now, every time I stare at the blinking cursor, my mind seems to go stale. Not being able to generate anything of substantial value. Even when I read from other writers, I end up saying, “Damn, I wish I wrote that.” But what I didn’t understand was that I typed words, but I didn’t think about them, and thinking is a hard thing to do.

I should be able to express my thoughts through writing without AI. I did it before. So why does it seem more difficult than it used to be?

What this demonstrates, I think, is that AI made me dumber. Because when you strip away all the stories, hypes, and opinions about AI, it becomes the greatest threat to human connection we’ve ever experienced.

But somehow I chose to ignore that and focused on the short-term wins that seemed way too shiny to let go. What if I were told, AI can write for me, and was also made to understand that it robs you of thinking, that no one is perfect? What if I were told it’ll save me time and that I’d eventually have to spend twice that time in the future?

You see, writing with AI is like a ship's captain, in the midst of a storm, giving the wheel to the smartest kid on the ship to steer. He may be smart, but he doesn’t have the experience, judgement, or grit to lead the crew out of that storm. For what is a captain if he has no sense of decision-making?

It didn’t really occur to me, but why the hell would I outsource my thinking to AI? Doesn’t it seem weird? To skip the act of deep thinking, the very reason for our evolution, and hand it over to a construct that recycles the words of the dead (and living!), dressing them up in what I call an abuse of rhetoric, so everyone can fake eloquence with their unedited, uncompleted first drafts. Tell me, how can language be appreciated if 51% (in recent research) of a group of respondents use AI to write? How much more of a generation? What benefit is there if language is flattened for the sake of being productive?

If I think AI is more creative than me, what does that tell me about my understanding of creativity? Am I really claiming that logic and pattern-recognition can outmatch my natural instincts and creative choices? Sometimes, it can. But if I let AI think for me, I’m also saying I’d rather skip the work of learning the craft. After considering this for a while, I decided to unlearn and relearn writing.

Yes, so I’ll teach myself how to write again. I’ll put in the hours. I won’t lie to myself about “saving time" when what I’m really doing is making myself dumber. I will use AI to speed up my research. I’ll use it to aid in research, and not ask to do my thinking for me.