What AI Just... Isn't
Artificial Intelligence versus the Human Connection: A confession, a promise, and honoring a life well-lived
I noticed a single unclaimed chair under the pop-up tent that was fully shaded. Above 6,000’ the sun seems to take on a different intensity. I had been standing exposed to the midday sun for nearly twenty minutes with a squirming one year old in my arms. Raising a red-head for nearly five years, I learned to have an always present, always active sun-exposure timer running in my head and the sunburn warning alarms were starting to sound off.
I slipped into the chair mid-conversation of those already gathered in the shade, thankful for the reprieve and also soaking in my new view of the towering mountains we had all nestled our weekend camp beneath. My one year old gave a squeal of joy and elicited a round of chuckles from those who were sitting and listening to stories of a faraway land many years ago.
“Then, after the Peace Corp, I moved back to the states and taught high school English the rest of my career,” said a new acquaintance, Gwen.
From a distance I had heard tales of hippos, crocodiles, giraffes, and lions, but now as I sat amongst the others in the shade I could finally engage in the conversation.
“What have the last few years been like as an English teacher with the new AI tools that are available?” I asked.
A smile, followed by a combination of a groan and a sigh escaped her lips. “It’s changed so much,” she said, “there’s a spark from the kids that has been lost. The creativity is gone, and everything reads the same. And the parents,” she shook her head, “they have been the most difficult to deal with…”
I confess, my friends and readers, that I have used AI to help generate content on this here Substack. It felt gross, cheap, and lazy but I had a self-imposed deadline to hit and I justified it by adding back in “my” voice to the piece. I only did it a few times, but those times have stuck with me and been hard to shake.
But here’s the thing: I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I experimented with the tool in this space and discovered its very tangible, extremely visceral limitations—it’s remarkably not human1. This work—the space that I really enjoy to operate—is about the lived human experience. The stumblings, imperfections, and incredibly beautiful pain of being a human being. There was something incredibly off whenever an AI model would attempt to write, short or long, for a piece here.
I’ll get into my own more philosophical take on AI later in this post2, but first I want to highlight something that I feel really lucky to have declared nearly two years ago. In writing Chasing Control3, I immediately promised myself that I would do it the more difficult way. I wasn’t ever going to plug the piece, either a sentence or an entire section, into any AI model for help. It caused me to feel stuck for days on end, to wrestle with portions of the story for months at a time and to agonize over word choice and flow. It drove hours of conversation with others and caused tens of thousands of word to be written and scraped, never to see the light of day.
But this is my family’s story. It’s imperfect, agonizing, exhilarating and all those emotional states in-between and I knew I couldn’t fully honor it without doing every bit of writing on my own.
This is a funny stance to have to take. Certainly writers of the past never had to wrestle with the temptation of an easy button, right? No matter, there’s a proliferation of books being written right now, some metrics putting the month-over-month output on Amazon at 3x and growing. There’s an easy button to writing and many people are taking it.
Not this story. It made the process brutal. I get why many books never see the light of day. There were so many points I saw the exit ramp, but kept driving past. Staring at a blinking cursor waiting for you to start moving it across the page and producing words on digital paper has a weird way of making my insides turn. There were many mornings I had to trust my fingers on the keyboard as my ability to read what I wrote was nullified by tears gathering in my eyes.
Prompting my way through this story wouldn’t have healed and clarified in the manner that painfully working through each and every sentence over nearly two years provided. The process was intense, but required.
So why did I feel compelled to write this piece?
Sitting in the shade seeking refuge from the sun at the base of those majestic mountains I was surrounded by strangers who pulled together for a weekend to celebrate and honor a person who had impacted us all. Bonds formed quickly as we shared in our memories of their incredibly awesome and loving life that felt like it had ended all too soon. Connection is one of the most beautiful things about being a human. Finding others who are striving, struggling, joyous, sad, and every shared experience in-between is why we live. It’s why we’re here.
We have the potential for purpose in front of us every single day. We can show up for an individual struggling, or conversely open up and ask another human being for help. We can pull someone into an embrace to show them that there is support and love around them, or we could simply sit and quietly listen to another person, letting them know they’re heard and not alone.
All these things are available to us only with each other. Machines can’t fulfill this, only the connection with another person can. This is the beautiful experience we can partake in each and every day we are gifted in this life.
Keep showing up: for yourself and for those around you.
Kyle Layne
Yes, that em-dash was intentionally ironic
Let’s save that for later, this has already gotten long enough.
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