Disappointed Relief
Generative AI is the most interesting, most disappointing technology I've encountered in my life.
In science fiction, AI is either a huge boon or a huge threat. But that's fiction. What we have right now is the most mediocre, most grifty thing I've seen in tech rivaled only by cryptocurrency. It has the same vibe. As usual, the humans are the problem.
I cannot say that GenAI is totally useless, but it's also nowhere as useFUL as I would have hoped. It's been a source of tremendous frustration to me that it does not help me write any better, certainly no more than a grammar and spellcheck does. And I've tried. What comes out sounds bland and mediocre and not like me at all.
(I like to think that I'm not bland and mediocre. That might just be my ego. Humor me, for now.)
About it not being useless: I use GenAI every day in my job. And for my job, it can be helpful. It can do menial tasks, write boilerplate code, and even do some complex things. I have been impressed by Claude Code more than once. And I have used Copilot to suck all the personality from an email to make it more business-friendly. It's great for that sort of thing.
But despite all that, using it creatively has been a bust. Because at the end of the day, you cannot take something that was trained on everything and have it feel like one person. It can mimic, but it cannot capture the essence of the creative spark.
What a fucking disappointment on some levels, and how amazingly liberating and life-affirming on others.
This little post is rough, and I know it. I should probably have done more drafts of it, polished it, but I wanted to capture something in this moment. See, I've been trying to find ways that AI could help me with my writing. Spellchecking, editing, advice, etc. At the end of it, all it does is suck all the life out of the words, grind them into a banal paste, and spit something that sounds like The Internet back at me. And it's not me. Not anymore.
It's not useless for everything, but it's useless for this. What a bummer. What a relief.