Good morning,
This week marks four years since AI disrupted my life in literal and personal ways. I find myself ruminating, so I’ll take you through the journey.
Four years ago this month, a job working on a new technology relocated my family from New York City to San Francisco. That fall, all I knew of AI was sleepless nights next to a partner experiencing a rapidly growing company and product. I was staunchly against using the new tools or talking about them, because growth and productivity at that speed felt too intimidating to look at with any honesty, and too difficult to grapple with against my own work at the time.
Two years later, as a journalist, I was asked to engage more meaningfully in the conversations emerging around AI, and I began writing about it. That fall, I facilitated this talk on the future of work and education with the hosts of Hard Fork and Hilary Mason. It forced me to articulate, at least for myself, my own approach to the tooling that existed at the time, and I leaned heavily on my values-based approach to media consumption.
Then, last summer, I began an intentional exploration into working alongside intelligent tools, some of which I documented. My questions at the time were:
What does a healthy, human relationship with AI look like?
What kinds of emotional and ethical literacy will we need to develop?
Around the same time, I had a kid and began to invest seriously in my own work as a writer, not just a journalist. But in so doing, I found two sides of me start to become legible and they felt tricky to reconcile. This is what I want to unpack today.
A tale of two writers
Recently, on a morning walk, I was listening to Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick, to try to get myself into a story. This was on the heels of a few days of feeling a bit stuck on a long-form writing project. It felt as though I was no longer interested in the questions the story asks, and yet I still had to sit with the prose and revise it until I was confident I could bring the reader into the feelings I once felt.
In the book there’s a part where Dunham describes her HBO pitch for the kind of girls she wanted to see on TV. She writes:
That night, sitting on the floor of Nancy’s perfectly constructed living room in a beam of bright moonlight coming through the sliding glass doors, I wrote the page they had asked for:
“These girls are overeducated and underemployed, sure that they’re too smart for their positions as assistants, nannies, and waitresses but not necessarily motivated enough to prove it (or even do their jobs well enough to advance). They have that mix of know-it-all entitlement and scathing self-deprecation that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many twenty-four-year-old women with liberal arts degrees. They have varying degrees of ambition but have been raised to achieve. They know they want to be successful long before they know what they want to be successful at.”
Her specificity woke something up in me. The beauty of memoir and fiction is that you don’t have to prove an argument to bring a reader along, even if you’re subtly making one. You just have to give them specificity that allows them to feel whatever it is you’re describing. Which is an inherently different process from writing nonfiction or content online.
Working on this project while also being submerged in takes on productivity and seeing more and more tidy, flat, AI-generated writing all over the internet has made me feel a gnawing sense of doubt about the value of this kind of craft-based work. To be clear: I deeply believe in it, but making it started to feel unrewarding. And so, suddenly, the stuckness started to make sense. It was as if I was trying to run at two speeds at the same time.
If I were to oversimplify to make my point, there seem to be two writers in me, and in the age of AI, their bodies are feeling very different, almost irreconcilably so.
One was trained as a journalist. She’s drawn to making connections and seeing systems, reads mostly nonfiction, and finds that reading inspires synthesis and questions she can draw out, report on, build into something. She’s held jobs in research labs, design labs, production studios, newsrooms. She’s a producer, interviewer, researcher, designer. She wrote her entire master’s thesis in a week in the same pajamas, eating a massive pot of spaghetti and whiskey. When she falls into a research hole, she struggles to come out. Making conversation about anything else is boring. The dishes are insipid. When she uses AI to aid in research, the dopamine of information synthesis is so high that she doesn’t notice the hours pass. I think AI turns the average nerd into a mad scientist. There are no human beings attached to the ideas she’s engaging with, just the fertile soil of ideas.
The other thinks in poetry. She observes things slowly. Writing feels moody, intuitive, like reaching for a feeling, perhaps a bit like improvising music. She reads mostly literary work: fiction, memoir, poetry, craft reflections by artists on their own work. She’s worked in a public-interest publishing house, a feminist nonprofit, a number of independent funded collaborations. She’s interested in the kind of deep learning that takes years to metabolize, and this often fuels long-form or unconventional work. She works at the pace of life. She can’t produce more than a few hundred words in a day, but those words are almost always considered and felt. When she reads other writers, she engages with them as people; in her mind a community of practitioners emerges. She wants to be in their rooms and at their readings, dressed like the feeling of the week. To her, engaging with AI feels uneasy, wrong, and difficult to process.
Today, the journalist writes this newsletter. You might catch hints of the other one in the prose, but the systems thinker is the one conceiving the endeavor. The slower writer is largely invisible online, working on long-form projects with in-person communities here in SF.
It has always been hard to be both. But I’m thinking about this today because AI is making the rift between them harder to navigate in a specific way I am only now beginning to see clearly. AI is enormously useful to the journalist/content creator. (Here is an interesting, honest take on how one writer heavily uses AI for nonfiction, Substack, and teaching books.) It accelerates exactly what she does: synthesis, structure, connection-making.
But in my experience, it absolutely flattens and degrades what’s required for the slower arts. Craft is a practice. I need to engage with art to get my own gears turning. And the cost of task-switching has always been high for me. AI has made it astronomically higher, because the mode in which the researcher works is now so different from the mode the other one needs. I can’t drive at full speed and then suddenly slow down and feel finished. There is no warm-up or warm-down, the way there is in craft work.
In this sense, the mode AI rewards in me is also the mode that seems least good for me, at least as a person trying to do the art I want to do. Sure, AI can help you synthesize a point, check your arguments, pull research together. But these aren’t just tasks. They add up to pull my body toward a speedy metabolism I don’t actually have. Then, switching into the slower work, which has no equivalent accelerant, feels too difficult.
It’s also possible AI is just revealing a fracture that has always been there. But at the same time, four years in, in my body, I feel as though I am experiencing an inflection point that I’m not entirely sure how to navigate.
How does a person switch from feeling immensely clear and productive to regular old life, in seconds? And further, how does that same person switch into the messy, sometimes ungratifying process of art-making in the same day?
For now, I’ve just put boundaries on which days allow for which type of thinking. But I’m still living in a world where I can choose whether I want to accelerate my productivity by opting in or out of the tools at hand. I don’t think the choice will always be so visible. And in that world, who will nurture the slower me?
Jihii
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I've said this before...you have a gift for putting into words hard-to-describe points of friction in our lives. This time a reminder of parts of me that often clash: head/heart, rational/intuitive, thoughts/feelings. AI makes the rift more stark.
I know I need them both. When I ask myself how I navigate that fast/slow, thinking/feeling dichotomy, I go where I always go: take a breath, listen for what purpose - inspiration/aspiration - calls me, and trust what emerges as my next step. I know there's gold to be discovered in the conflict. I just need to be open to the outcome and give those parts of me space to work it out.
Perhaps that is naive in the age of AI. An oversimplification that takes new strategies because it all moves too fast and comes too easily, at least the rational part. Thank you for sharing your journey. I've sent it to two writer friends because it struck such a familiar chord.