No AI was used to create this document.

And it didn't create my human community, either.

I have an idea for a project to carry out next summer, and in the course of one day, I spoke to Jennifer about the need for this project. She gave me ideas about how to work it into other activities going on in the state. Then I emailed Sally, my accountant, some questions about the bookkeeping aspect of the project. I mentioned the idea to Mike at work who suggested a way to calculate the numbers for it. I spoke with Erin about a partnership with her organization. I texted my three-person board and asked for their input on the project’s viability. I talked with Michelle about marketing it, Chris said he knew some people he could share the project with, and Bill helped me analyze costs.

In a few of those conversations, folks tangentially brought up AI as a way to get their work done. They use it to write correspondence, generate lesson plans, understand dense text. It enhances efficiency, they told me, and helps them refine their approach, to think in ways they couldn’t have thought otherwise.¹ They are genuinely grateful for the assistance, and I realize I sound like a grumpy Luddite in the face of all this progress. Get off my lawn!²

My lawn. Where, incidentally, I have managed to not fuck up so far as HOA president. And our little courtyard community is strengthening! Recently we banded together to tackle the inch of snow that fell. That’s something!

Interestingly and fittingly, the Luddites you might have heard of did not actually oppose technology on principle. Rather, they cared a lot about the value of their human contributions. “Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines,” according to this New Yorker piece. Sound familiar? Screenwriters’ and authors’ guilds are aggressively fighting against AI for this reason. In a personal example, Antonia Malchik discusses the ways generative AI scrapes other people’s content and makes it available to anyone else, as has happened with her own book.

This appropriation-and-repackaging is nothing short of colonization on a digital level. It’s theft, clearly, as well as a dehumanizing machine. This last bit concerns me absolutely the most. At the start of this newsletter I described a project I’m cooking up and mentioned no fewer than ten people I specifically sought out for a quick conversation about it. Those people helped me think in new ways, refine my approach, and develop a plan, same as AI did for others above. But they also encouraged me, gave me fresh ideas I didn’t have to ask them for, and reinforced my commitment to the project. They colored outside the lines and understood the underlying concepts without me needing to define them. And I didn’t have to enter any parameters into the conversation first.

AI erases all of that. It removes the human element, that messy, slow, and sometimes befuddled human element, from creative processes. Then it reintroduces that human element in a metallic-byte form, digested and reconstituted. I don’t recognize its humanity. I reject it. And that is why I have begun to add the following line to the bottom of all my correspondence and writing such as emails and grant proposals: No AI was used to create this document.

Writing those documents might require more of my time. Perhaps I will make an error that AI would have avoided. But I don’t care about efficiency and perfection. I want to connect with my humans, to ask for their ideas and insight and beautiful and imperfect thoughts. And I want to share mine with them. Exchanging ideas with other humans constitutes community creation. And because community is human in its very essence, AI cannot copy it. I want to keep my world that way.

1. What I hear when they say this is, “it would have been harder for me to think otherwise,” and I’m not sure I like the sound of that. You’ve seen Wall-E, right? No? How about The Matrix?

2. The last time I wrote disparagingly about generative AI I took some flak about its usefulness to folks who don’t otherwise have skills for writing important texts — the example provided by the commenter was a good one, though I am concerned that without the skills to write the document initially, how did they then read through and ensure it said what they wanted to convey? I’ve also been provided examples about AI’s use in the medical field for assisting in diagnosis. This, I feel, is a tool, like a scope or a searchable index of symptoms. I recognize that my education and skill allows me to sidestep generative AI entirely, and I’m happy to do so and remind folks that AI relies on theft to make its magic work.