As we come to yet another end of the year, with hardly any blog updates again this year, I would like to address one thing that has taken the internet by storm in the last one, two years. And that is AI.
Artificial Intelligence is not new, but we have all seen its power grow exponentially this year. People generating crazy, realistic video edits in just a few seconds from their phone, WhatsApp uncles and aunties falling for obviously AI-generated slops and forwarding them to your community or locality groups, even tech-savvy people getting scammed by AI morphs, these past 2 years have been wild.
In fact, AI is one of the reasons why I just don't feel like blogging anymore. When you know that the amount of effort you put into writing a blog can easily be replicated by AI in just a few seconds, suddenly, everything else becomes meaningless.
I did the "AI blog test" earlier this year. I copy-pasted 20 of my old blog posts, the ones with the most views, and then I asked AI to learn my style of writing and write 5 blog posts about some random topics like our Mizo society, football, street food, gaming etc. as if I was the one writing it, and OMGGG it generated five interesting blog posts in my exact writing style!
I mean, God forbid, if one day I met with an accident and had a head concussion that resulted in memory loss, and I were to read those generated posts, I sincerely wouldn't be able to tell if I wrote them or not. It even included some Mizo phrases here and there in quotes, even though I never even asked it to do that. That was so amazing and... scary at the same time.
Aaand that begs the question, "Why am I even writing when I can just ask GPT to do it for me?"
Of course, if I were monetising my blog, I'd probably let AI do all my writing. But I write not for money, but for passion. I put my heart and soul into my writing, and using AI to do it loses that very purpose. And so... I just kinda stopped writing altogether. :(
But then again, I don’t think it’s fair to blame AI alone. If I’m being honest, some of that blame has to come back to me. When you strip it down, AI tools like GPT or Gemini generating full blog posts may feel like "cheating", but have we not been easing into this for years already?
Browser plugins like Grammarly quietly fixing our grammar, auto-correct nudging our words into place on Microsoft Word, spellcheck underlining our mistakes before anyone else can see them, aren’t these also forms of writing assistance we’ve happily accepted? The difference now is not that help exists, but that it has suddenly become capable of doing everything.
Maybe the discomfort isn’t about cheating at all, but about no longer knowing where my own effort ends and the machine begins. What do you think?
Even though I don't write blog posts much now because of AI, I still use AI heavily for work. Today's ChatGPT year recap shows that I am in the top 3% of all GPT users, lolzzz.
Now hold on, before you judge me, no, I don't use GPT to generate my blog posts, lolz. I use it mainly to research clients, products, target audiences or markets, and to summarise lengthy briefs and long-ass meeting minutes. I also use it heavily to generate reference images for a presentation deck I am making, as well as boring ToS and Privacy Policy documents.
Outside of work, I use it to learn new cooking recipes (I have mastered more than 10 this year), answer random plot questions when a movie or TV show I'm watching gets confusing, and even get health and welfare advice for my dogs and puppies when Google just adds to the panic. I also use it a lot when a word is stuck at the back of my head, so I describe what I’m trying to say, and it gives me the exact word I was looking for (again, not cheating, because I already knew the word before).
But yeah, I have been certainly overusing AI, which means I have been spending a lot of money on premium subscriptions. And so I decided to cut down on a few.
Here are my current personal AI subscriptions
- ChatGPT Plus - ₹1,999 / month (plus tax wax)
- Grammarly Pro - ₹11,799 / annual
- InShot Pro - ₹1,600 / annual
- Adobe Pro (includes everything like Photoshop, etc) - ₹1,915 / month
That's more than ₹5K a month on just AI-related software subscriptions. After a long, hard thought, I decided to let go of Adobe Creative Cloud Pro. After all, my GPT Plus was generating much better images than it anyway, and I also have access to other premium image services like Gemini Pro, FreePik Pro, Midjourney and Canva Pro using my office ID anyway.
And here is the funniesssst part, lolz.
So I tried to unsubscribe from Adobe Pro, but I just couldn't find the link or button to do that (you know, corporate greed). And so I asked GPT for help, and it gave me the exact instructions to find the unsubscribe page. I followed that, and when I finally tried to unsubscribe, I had to pay a freaking ₹5,745 cancellation fee!
So apparently, my Adobe annual fee was discounted since I was paying monthly but now that I am cancelling, that discount is void, so I had to pay the balance. Aaargh! And guess what GPT did next????? It told me ways to bypass that even though I never asked it to do so, lololololzzzz.
In short, it told me not to cancel my subscription yet, but to simply switch my plan! I found the cheapest plan available, which was Acrobat PDF Reader for ₹621, lolz. I changed my plan, so the cancellation penalty no longer applied, and I actually got a ₹556 refund for my unused Creative Cloud, lolz. And then I cancelled my Acrobat subscription and got back the ₹621 refund as well. Bwahahahahaha!
So yes, all hail the AI for saving my money, my time, and my sanity. But when it comes to writing this blog, I’m still stubbornly human. Some things I want done faster, and some things I want done better. But there are also some things I want done slowly, like writing a new blog post, even if no one’s waiting for the result.
AI isn’t the enemy. But silence isn’t either. I’m just somewhere in between, figuring out what still feels like mine, and what feels like a cheat. And maybe that’s enough for now.
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