Fight Back Against AI
Why I Now Use Notepad
A malign pincer grips our weary souls as I peck out these words in the bleak dawn of early 2025. You feel it too. That dull ache in your ribcage ain't a cardiac event. It's the life force being throttled out of you by a twin-pronged assault from on high and below.
At the societal level, governments today are squelching any search for truth that conflicts with their narratives, which means that the more boldly bogus their narratives (What grooming gains? What gain-of-function?), the more squelching they need to do, until we're back in Soviet Russia, wondering how we're in the Gulag merely for pointing out obvious things ("There's no food") or asking honest questions ("Why is Stalin such a dick?"). I railed about this strangulation of truth last week. Hopefully, this threat has abated for Americans.
But the other threat hasn’t abated and is picking up pace like a cocaine addict’s straw moving across a mirror. Its claw is ripping into our existential vitals: the relentless advance of soulless artificial intelligence into every cranny of our days.
AI slithered in all coy and helpful: keeping our cars from skidding with anti-lock brakes, rerouting us around pile-ups, buffing up our sloppy spelling, finishing sentences as we type emails. All quite handy and efficient, right?
Until your tires hit black ice, or the GPS detours you through Chicago's worst neighborhood, or you’re fumbling for words mid-chat like a stroke victim, or your ability to spell deteriorates until you're like tough man author Mickey Spillane who said his character Mike Hammer drinks beer instead of cognac because he can't spell cognac.
AI gives us tiny conveniences but takes away our humanity in massive, unseen chunks. The tangible benefits blind us to the intangible costs.
It's a classic hemispheric head game.
That literal-minded left hemisphere laps up anything it can tally on a ledger. A perk it can see, it grabs with both mitts. A loss too fuzzy to quantify, it sniffs at and shoves aside . . . until the tab comes due and we’re screwed six ways to Sunday.
Don’t be that chump. Keep your eyeballs peeled for AI’s creeping encroachments and push them out. Better yet, whack the bastards with a length of rusty rebar before they even get a foothold.
I ain’t saying ditch your ABS or go full Luddite. That's impractical if not impossible: AI’s as baked into our lives as sanctimonious drivel is into NPR. But just like you can mute the TV because the DEI female commentator’s voice during March Madness is giving you cognitive dissonance, you can carve out an AI-free zone or two in your world.
I could give suggestions, but AI today is more ubiquitous than Jew-baiting at an Ivy League "Free Palestine" rally. Just find a few AI incursions and nix them in your life.
Me? I nixed that nag Microsoft Word. Its incessant red-and-green squiggles and relentless suggestions and auto-corrects might be helpful in the details, but they’re devastating on the whole. It's like writing under the supervision of a neurotic schoolmarm on cocaine. MS Word keeps my brain flipping all over the place, never knowing whether I should be writing, pondering, proofreading, editing, or gouging my eyes out with a knitting needle.
Now I write the first draft of my essays on Notepad, the clunky Smith-Corona of the word-processing world, mostly untainted by AI.
Less efficient than MS Word? Sure. But I’m fine with the loss of efficiency. I’d rather type with one finger (the middle one) than surrender all stages of the creative process to AI's relentless march.