The One Thing You Can't Let AI Do For You

I can sense when AI has drained the humanity out of something.

(No, it’s not an em-dash thing.)

Can’t always prove it, but don’t always need to. It’s the feeling of outsourced feelings and it hurts when I see it.

Because you can, and probably should, use AI to summarize, assist, edit, pattern-match, and inspire you.

I love AI for that.

It’s a wildly useful tool, and I’ve even shared my personal guidelines here.

But, the place you have to draw the line, is at feelings.

YOUR feelings.

Never, ever, under any circumstance, outsource feeling to AI.

Don’t give them away.

Don’t let something (or somebody) else tell you what to feel. Your gut is yours.

The electricity flowing through the wetware between your ears and the software in your AI’s hardware - it’s the same kind of signal processing.

But the fingers that touch the world, and the fingerprints we leave as humans, to fire off all those signals - there is a difference.

When stuff hits your senses, in any combination, and then flows through your brain for processing - it’s after all those lightning fast steps that you react.

You don’t want to lose that process as part of your sense of self.

You don’t want to throw that into a prompt and solely ask, “What should I make of this?”

You get some bad news. You put the news and a quick prompt into AI for feedback. It’s going to give you something pleasing, to validate you, to keep you engaged and coming back for more.

It’s been created to do that. To hold your attention. To keep you wanting to come back.

That becomes dangerous when applied to feelings. It’s a feature in LOTS of other categories too.

These are user-awareness issues - that the companies behind these AI tools aren’t really incentivized to explain so clearly.

Buyers beware, caveats emptor, and all that jazz. It’s here to remind you: use AI tools at your own risk. Play with AI tools at your own risk, too. Just don’t lose sight of the risk when you’re using and playing around.

It is fair to use AI to know how else you could interpret something, or how to connect disparate reactions, but your gut needs to stay in that equation.

What keeps us human is our flaws.

What keeps us human is our idiosyncrasies.

We are messy machines, and we don’t need to clean it ALL up.

What keeps us human is the way all of our experiences get pattern-matched in the uniquely unknowable corners of our brains.

Entropy won’t yield to us, and we also can’t perfectly reverse engineer it. How hard we try, and how much we chalk up as poetry - that matters.

This is taste. This is the assembling of our unique preferences.

We are one of 8 billion souls on this planet right now, but we are also one of one.

If we outsource our gut feelings, if we outsource taste, then there’s no humanity left.

Keep it soulful. Keep your feelings yours.