The Thinking Trap

We've all seen the posts about how AI can streamline research, accelerate papers, short-circuit decision-making, and overall just speed up your life.

This is a trap.

I used AI to do a Christmas post because I didn't want to sit down and write one when there was food to prepare (and eat, and a whiskey exchange, and all the other Christmas pleasures). I barely even read it, and now that I have I wish I hadn't.

I've also seen a whole cult of people preaching AI-accelerationism, how it can be used for all sorts of things to avoid having to think (that's not what their words say, but it's what they mean). Unsurprisingly most of those posts are suspiciously similar to one another.

They all have paragraphs of roughly the same length. They all have a plethora of headings (shout-out to the Three Amigos). They all have a lot of words which say...absolutely nothing of interest.

Worse, the "authors" slap each other on the back about their posts, with AI-written replies. All I can conclude is that the same amount of thought goes into reading their posts as writing them.

The Easy Way

Humans are lazy. It's not an opinion, it's evolutionary fact. We are designed to minimise energy expenditure for any given result. Doing otherwise may have long-term rewards, but it's always going to be fighting innate instinctual laziness.

When we stop doing hard things, skills atrophy. This isn't just about exercising. I've taken most of a year off training due to various stresses around house moves, and believe me you atrophy really fast going from lifting three times a week to nothing more than walking. It applies to thinking too.

Sitting down (or walking, or listening to music, or having a conversation, take your pick) and really putting effort into thinking about something has a value all its own. Writing something, or teaching it, requires a level of comprehension that doesn't simply pop into existence from a skim-read.

I enjoy reading a trash book for entertainment as much as the next person, but I'm not going to pretend there's anything more than entertainment value from them.

That's all you're getting from those AI-written, zero-thought, zero-effort posts. Shallow applause and faux-understanding nods.

There's no easy fix for this, the influencers are going to cheap pouring out LLM-generated fertiliser because it means they don't have to put the work in, and their peers are all cheering them on and doing exactly the same thing.

The Slow Way

So this isn't proposing some big solution of banning AI - it's not going to happen.

What I am doing is suggesting that maybe, just maybe, it's worth your skimming past that AI-generated trash and reading an actual book (and no, not one of those AI-generated books that tells you hemlock is safe to eat).

Instead of throwing a prompt at Copilot and copy-pasting, you could write from scratch.

Instead of bouncing ideas off a mathematical model which has no reasoning skills or ability to understand, sit down for a coffee with a person and really talk (I'm available for phone calls).

The easy way is a trap, it teaches you that it's never worth putting effort in. The things worth doing in the long term aren't easy, they aren't simple, and the current generation of AI isn't even in the same galaxy of capability as a fellow human.

There is value in doing things the slow way around. Long-term, you're better for putting in the effort rather than spewing out superficial verbiage in a pretence of intellectualism (yes, that's deliberate).

It very, very quickly becomes obvious how much some of the AI-evangelists have let their thinking atrophy when you have any sort of discussion about the topics they purport to be writing about (read: creating a prompt and copy-pasting). The worst bit is, if they put the actual work in they're perfectly capable of understanding.

And yes, I do recognise the hypocrisy of using an AI-generated image for the heading of this, but I'm a writer, not an artist, and since this is little more than a vanity newsletter my budget for artwork is non-existent.