Happy New Year Everybody. This past year has been a complex one for many of us.
For me, complexity leads to thought, and thoughts lead to introspection. In one of these introspection sessions, I think I can change how I identify myself.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
– B. F. Skinner
The Verb vs. The Occupation
I feel like I can consider myself a writer now. I have been writing articles for more than 8 years now. I’ve written across a few websites, and I manage Facets of life as well.
I’m not doing it full time. But if the verb makes the occupation, I think I can consider myself one.
However, by that logic, almost everyone today is a writer. At the very least, everyone writes emails, IMs and reports. But writing creatively is different from writing structured & formatted content.
Creative writing, to me, has been one of the best ways to centre myself around one thought or idea. I cannot write a passage without concentrating on the subject matter at hand. Otherwise the passage goes everywhere.
One of the biggest challenges for a creative writer is picking the subject for an article. In today’s modern age of AI, that can basically be considered a non-issue. A lot of people these days use AI to brainstorm ideas and find out what they want to write next.
Personally though, I haven’t used AI in this realm. There is a very solid reason for that.
The Muscle of the Mind
Creativity is one of the differentiating traits for the human race from every other species on this earth. We use our creative faculties to innovate, create and solve problems. Even when we are prompting AI, we have to use our creativity to articulate the problem in the best possible way to get the right response.
There is another notion, however, which I feel deserves more credit than it gets.
Anyone working in the technology industry today has seen the recent push to adopt to AI solutions. The outcome for organisations is to cut down production costs and time, while preserving quality.
An interesting thing here, is that most of us know the more we use an AI solution, the “smarter” it becomes. This basically means, given the right context and memory, the responses that AI generates are becoming better, and more acceptable in the first go.
Humans seek convenience and comfort, and this has unfortunately led to the misconception that we can completely outsource our creative tasks to AI, and not do anything ourselves.
I wrote about this in one of my earlier articles called Maintenance. The TL;DR of it was: An important component of self-care should be regular use of our God-given abilities. It applies to physical, mental, spiritual and emotional.
To simplify:
Using our creativity less makes us worse off when we really need it.
It may seem that the opportunities for us being more creative are reducing everyday. Since AI is now becoming all pervasive, it can do more.
This is where I feel our perceptions are incorrect.
Beyond the Zero-Sum Game
Contrary to popular belief, the world, and life are not zero sum games. There is always more to do, more to be.
It’s only a matter of us finding what that “more” is.
Now that AI can do more, it leaves us some time to figure ourselves out. It leaves time for us to understand what we like, what we’re good at and what we want to do more of.
Honing the Craft
There are things we have to do everyday which we aren’t fans of. And there are other things which we want to do more of. It has never been easier to learn new subjects and implement them in our daily lives.
The world is messy right now, but it also opens tremendous opportunities to hone in on our crafts, and be much better versions of ourselves.
This isn’t a pro-AI or pro-human article. This is just a perspective on today’s day and age, and how we can use what we have to be better.
Hopefully, that is how it resonates.
What is one creative ‘muscle’ you refuse to outsource this year?
Facets of Life 
Leave a comment