Krapsakas

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This post is based on my personal thoughts on Krapsakas blog.
It’s not scientific or evidence-based, and it may be triggering for some.
Take what resonates, and leave everything that doesn’t.

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This was originally supposed to be a Krapsakas Substack note, but as more thoughts came up on the topic, it became a post.

I just happened to read a piece that caught my attention because of its title. When I started reading, it seemed like it was written by an AI, but at the same time, it seemed like a person’s own thoughts were there. I didn’t want to be unfair to the person right away, so I read a little further until I saw obvious signs that it was written by an AI, which made me think about what happened with this.

The proportion of AI texts is messing up our brains quite a lot.
I have started boycotting those writings that are clearly written only with AI and humans have added anything to them with their own hands*.
*Yes, I am aware that you have to give AI input yourself at the beginning.

This has made me wonder where the line is drawn?
What is the balance of using AI?

I admit that I have used AI quite a lot in my writings in the past. I was completely out of balance, my nervous system completely burned out. My own original writings were so complicatedly worded that even I had a hard time understanding them, but the writings needed to be published.

Then there was another period where I used AI to proofread and translate my texts*.
Since my native language is Estonian and English is only a second language, I write in English the way I speak Estonian. So, thanks to this, my writings have developed a unique voice.
At some point, I felt that if I used AI to proofread my texts, I would lose that special voice. The voice that I had come to like, the one that makes me me. So I reduced the use of AI in this way.

*Sometimes I write a text in English right away, sometimes in Estonian and then translate it into English.

Today I am in the third stage – I use the help of AI, but in a thoughtful way.
For example, when searching for a topic, I know in advance that if I go to search for the same thing myself in search engines, it will take me a lot of time. Generally, I don’t always have that time (fast pace of life). However, when I have time, I look for information myself.
Or when I need to put together a plan. Since I am a very good analyst and planner, I use the help of AI to reflect on and organize my thoughts.

But here we come to the most important and worrying part (in my opinion).

AI texts are taking away our voice and independent thinking

Why I said at the beginning of the post that AI messes up our brains and minds is as follows.
The structure of AI texts is taken from people’s own writing styles.
But every AI text is still the same in its structure. It does not have a human voice. It has a certain form that repeats itself as a pattern.
And if there are hundreds of thousands of writings with this same pattern and more, and we read them like normal pieces of writing, then eventually our subconscious will adopt it and with it we will lose our OWN ability to think about structuring sentences. This type of form will become normal for our brains.
So, most likely, at some point in time, people will speak and write en masse in AI form. And that’s terrifying to me!

Why did I say that I boycott writings that are written only with AI and do not include my own thoughts – because I do not want to teach myself the “AI language”.
So that I speak and express myself in only one way of expression.
I know myself well enough by now – what is in my life every day becomes the norm for me. In other words, if I read a considerable amount of texts written by AI every day, it will become normal for my brain and I will start writing like that myself. And with that, I will lose my own voice.

I’ll give you an example from my own life – I used autocorrect on my phone for years.
Then I went to work, where I often had to write short exchanges of information on the computer. And it was firstly shocking, and secondly very embarrassing – I made a lot of spelling mistakes. I wrote completely random words in sentences. And I sent these texts and only later, when I read over my own text, did I realize, “Hey! What the hell! Why is my text like this!?”.
In other words, my brain was completely used to the computer system automatically correcting my texts, and so used to it that I couldn’t write myself correctly anymore.
When I stopped using autocorrect on my phone, the first few months were still really hard. Especially the first few weeks. I was often very irritated, and it took me much longer to write.
It’s been 3 years now and I still make some brain errors when I write myself. The main reason for this is strange words or word inflections within a sentence.

Fourth stage

I feel like I’m slowly moving into the fourth stage of my AI usage, which is reducing my use of AI. That I’ll search for more information on search engines myself again, and that I’ll reduce my reading of AI’s long posts even more.
The same actually applies to shorter posts.
Which is sad in a way, because sometimes the topics of the posts are very interesting, I’d really like to read them, but as I said, I don’t want to teach my subconscious the “language of AI”.

In summary

I understand that it is so good, easy, and fast to ask AI for help and advice on any matter. Because it often saves a lot of time.
But we forget that AI is not fact-based – it makes mistakes.
I have seen from my own experience of using it repeatedly how it gives you the same answer in one window, a different answer in the second window, and in the third window it completely nullifies the answers of the first and second windows and gives a third answer. Even though the inputs were identically the same in all windows.
So it is such an endless dead circle and you cannot rely on the accuracy of AI, but you have to make decisions yourself.
In addition, when we search for information ourselves, dig, and go down rabbit holes, we discover a lot of additional information that we would not have reached with AI. However, you have to search for the right answer in search engines for a long time until you find it. Such a search has its own beauty and charm. AI gives you one answer. You gain time, but you lose additional information that could be useful to you when looking at the big picture, and you lose your ability to make decisions independently.

In addition, we can’t forget that we never really know for sure if and how the information we give to AI will be used.
Is it even safe? How safe is it? Or are they at risk of being leaked?
What happens if the information we provide is used against us?
These are the questions I keep in mind when using AI. In other words, I constantly keep in mind that all the information I give to AI is something that could endanger me in the future. And if I don’t want it to endanger me, I either change the facts or don’t enter it at all.

With AI, we actually lose our rationality and decision-making ability, and also our ability to evolve. It’s so quick and easy to feed AI input and let it compare things. And move on with the answer that the AI gave. But in doing so, we are dissolving our own ability to make decisions more and more.
It’s so easy to have an AI write emails for you. But it has no soul. It’s lifeless. It’s flat.

What is the price we ultimately pay for the speed and decision-making of AI?

I don’t think we can completely boycott AI these days. It’s just so ingrained in the world. There’s too much of it everywhere.
But I believe we can find a balance in how we use it. And that balance is ultimately up to each individual.

What are your thoughts on AI? Do you use it or not? Let me know in the comments.

With love,
Krapsakas Agnes

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