The boy who sent me poems.

In the spring of 2023, a boy sent me poems. He had never shown much interest in writing poetry, but these were about me, and they were good.

Looking back now, it seems so obvious that the poems weren’t really written so much as prompted. But I didn't know it then. At that moment it was all really new. I didn't yet understand how a few scraps of thought could come back as a finished poem.

Since these first poems, so many people have used various forms of AI. For writing, coding, images, video, voice, games, design, software... We use it for everything. We adjusted to this new idea so quickly, even though we were so scared of it in the beginning.

I was scared, for sure. I didn’t want anything to take over my creative work. I didn’t want AI generating art, or writing books. But I got used to it. I found tools that let me do things I needed help with before.

It is strange how fast I started accepting finished work without working through the thought behind it.

I had already grown used to consuming words without stopping to think about them. I could spend an hour scrolling and finish without a single thought I wanted to keep.

Then producing the content became easier too. Once we use generative tools for work we dread, it becomes easier to use them for work we care about. It is so efficient.

But efficiency isn't always the goal. The moments we choose to outsource are often the very moments that shape our thinking. It is the struggle to articulate an idea or to search for the right word. It's the cognitive effort which helps us find out what we mean.

Choosing generative tools for tasks that are boring and tiresome makes sense. But when the work itself is meaningful, when it is the very thing that sharpens our thinking, why give it away?

Searching for information used to take time. Now, it is frustrating if Google doesn’t give us the answer on the first try. And with AI it goes further, because it acts like the smartest person so we go to it for answers in arguments, essays, blog posts, everyday decisions. It answers with such confidence that it's easy to forget to ask whether we agree.

I don't want to become someone who needs a machine to tell her what she thinks. I would really like to see AI as a tool that makes us more capable, not more passive. Where it takes on the bullshit tasks that were never enriching. Those poems were good but I think I would have remembered them longer if the words had been his.