Crutches

My Dad uses crutches because his knees are shot. I use crutches too, but of a different kind.

This post is a mixture of complete fanboyism (Hi, Eddie!) and brutal realism.

Just a quick note of thanks to Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy for actually reading selected posts in this blog, when responding to an email I sent him earlier this week. Sir, your words were very kind. I’d like to say I have written this post with your kind words in mind, but as I tend to write them off the top of my head, you may find some mistakes.

Now on to brutal realism.

Like many grownups who have elderly parents, you will find from time to time that they have to rely on crutches. My dad does - mainly due to a completely shot knee that he is waiting for surgery on.

His crutches are his lifeline. He literally can’t leave the house without them, and they are the one thing keeping him upright when he walks. Sometimes they are walking sticks, sometimes actual crutches; the metaphor remains the same. They are implements upon which he is completely dependent.

Over recent months, I, too, have developed my own crutch.

Yes, you may have guessed if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the last few months; it’s AI. I use AI tools almost daily now.

Any idea I have or long and complex task that I might have considered and then dismissed as too hard now gets shipped off to the genie who consumes power and water in a datacentre many, many miles from me. Said genie is observant, a good servant, and never argues with me unless I give it an explicit instruction to do so.

The genie is also overwhelmingly good at the tasks I have assigned - within entirely reasonable limits. I don’t trust it to write more than rough drafts. (I’m a professional writer, don’tcha know).

But ‘build me a website’, ‘convert these docs to epubs for my kindle’, ’take these hundreds of thousands of words, make them presentable in a pretty format, and spit out an 800 page PDF’ are entirely doable. Rather than read the summaries I am presented in the format the author desired, I take their words and format them in the way I know will draw my attention - on the devices I have to hand, and which make it easier to consume the content.

I am painfully aware that this exercise removes a sense of agency from the writer. I am converting them for consumption on devices they have either chosen to not support or which they have considered not worth the effort - but given that I am a man of many a short attention span, I find it easier to read PDFs or epubs that are readily available to me regardless of where I am (and whether or not I have an internet connection).

So I continue to support the intent of the author through their words, rather than their presentation. Somehow that still feels fair. After all, the little robot transforms the way the words are presented, but never so much as brushes the content itself. The words remain entirely true to their author, irrespective of how they have been laid down on the page.

I’m straying from the path.

The AI tool is my crutch, but it’s also liberating. My dad would have to give up even going outside if he didn’t have his crutches; and while my situation is entirely of my own making, my ready adoption of my own crutches has leveraged my attention to projects I might have abandoned just a few months ago.

I’m not entirely sure if this is a good or bad thing. I know that if the cost of inference went up to anywhere near what it should cost, then I would very quickly have to kick the habit; nevertheless, my token cost has it’s own line item in my personal budget, and that’s something I naturally allow for now. That’s a change I never thought I would make, but it’s a great one for my personal productivity, and my attention span.

I suppose at this point I should enter into a bout of ‘whataboutism’ and ponder how I would cope if AI tools weren’t so readily available; but the truth is that I’d just fall back to the world before these tools existed and live with it. Professional writing means that I am less reliant on them for the core of my work - I’d just lose a helpful and very fast assistant. I can live with that.

So - er - that’s it. AI tools are my crutches. I’m now going to hesitate in getting my favourite little robot to rip through the posts of this site and tell me what other opinions have either been adopted or abandoned so readily, but I might leave that as a personal exercise. Perhaps it might inform a future post.

As for this content - AI doesn’t touch it.

Every post I write, I write off the top of my head. Typing the words one by one on my mac, frequently misspelling them, never dictating them, and never once considering the opinion of a little robot helper and the representation of my words.

I am human, after all. I write for me. I have no idea if an audience exists, but if you do, know that behind these ramblings exists a man who lives, breathes, uses tools, and doubts his own ability frequently enough that he set up a website just to type once a week.

Thank you all.

Back next week.