NO. I typed ‘omw’ not “On My Way!.”

Machine-learning, algorithmic suggestion features continue to pop up in more and more nooks and crannies of my life. I imagine some product manager salivating over the accolades they’ll receive for setting auto-suggestion emoji’s enabled by default or forcing ‘AI-Powered’ auto-complete for every single damn sentence.

My antipathy towards these tools has grown with each passing passive-aggressive, enabled-by-default thrust of these features into my workflow. Email. Slack. Word processing. Search. On and on.

Here’s the bottom line: I will take complete responsibility for articulating my thoughts.

This is my standard, this is where I draw my line in the sand.

If I can’t write a simple email, text message, or greeting card then I need to learn the skills to do so. The neurons in my brain need to fire and wire the neural pathways that allow me to articulate the sentiment I feel about any given subject. This is called growth, personal growth; something that the AI-powered tech-bros seem to want to do away with completely.

It’s extremely infantilizing to have tools complete my sentences. Imagine if your boss at work came and told you “Oh look. There’s celebratory sentiment in this Slack chat. This is where people normally use the :confetti: emoji. Do you want to do that now?” It’s creepy and invasive when another person does it, but when some guy hiding behind an anime avatar on Github enables this feature by default for 300 million users we just accept it as a cool neat futuristic time saver.

Do we stop to think that we’re training ourselves to be MORE unconscious as we habituate to using these auto-suggestion tools? For most, no. Instead of taking the time to actually collect your thoughts and attune to your feelings, and THEN express your emotional state, we just jump to whatever the cool AI algorithm says. The process of self-expression is inverted. Now the external tool is telling us how to express ourselves, and implicitly influencing how we should think and feel.

And the thing that aggravates me the most is that even if I don’t use this; in a few years most people are going to be addicted to this technology and I’ll be dealing with human ciphers regurgitating LLMs trained on listicles and other internet slop instead of interacting with people’s actual thoughts and feelings.

When I’m writing this blog it isn’t about pumping out as much content as possible or regurgitating neutered internet marketing copy in order to generate clicks so I can sell-out my blog as a platform to hawk testosterone supplements and VPN subscriptions. It’s about actually expressing myself, struggling and grappling with transforming my thoughts into a form that can be understood beyond the confines on my mind. It’s about seeing my blind spots and the limits of my ideas in the words I write and dealing with the implications of that. It’s about shining light on the images and analogies that pass through my mind and giving color to my thoughts. It’s about being able to articulate the ideas I write about in casual conversation without stumbling over my words. It’s about adding depth and breadth to my person through this act.

“But… but… but… I’m just writing my corporate email. It’s different than blogging.” OK abdicate the responsibility of expressing yourself in that context. Zone out and become even more of a corporate drone than you already are. Then maybe you’re a little too tired to write that text to your friend, maybe you’ll just have Sam Altman’s binary progeny say hello for you. Then what’s next… the slippery slope does a number on those who don’t have standards. Wake up in 20 years wondering where your life went realizing you’ve been reduced to a emotional blob that’s nudged and prompted by dead-algorithms trained on the corpus of 20th and 21st century nihilistic materialism.

You’ll realize you didn’t learn anything. You didn’t accomplish anything. You never even made a step to figuring out who you were. You just gave into hedonism and instant gratification and abdicated all responsibility of learning and growth to something outside of yourself. Congratulations, you’re a cipher, a drone, a non-entity and if I wanted to hear “your” opinion on anything I could cut out the middle-man and go open a session with whatever big tech AI Chatbot you decided to replace your words with.

Until the end of my days I will uncheck the “give suggestions” option on any piece of software I use, and if the tech-overlords take away the opt-out, I’ll opt out of using their products. I don’t care how it affects my quality of life, I signed up to be a human being, not a freaking intellectual cyborg.

/endrant