AI Cheating

Sure, AI can "help" you write, but let's consider what is lost.

Why do writers write?

Well, often to express something deeply personal that feels difficult to articulate.

As you edit, revise, move from draft to draft, you are thinking, reflecting, falling in and out of focus, stepping back, setting aside, forgetting, remembering, reminiscing, pondering, lamenting, having an epiphanic moment, feeling lost, worrying yourself, feeling a sense of failure, feeling a sense of overcoming obstacles, getting to know yourself, or who you are now vs. all those older selves who live within us.

The list goes on. Try adding to it.

But what happens if you turn to AI for the assist?

You can bypass all the effort— the real work it takes to figure out what you really want to say, how to say it, and how to sound like yourself on the page.

AI may allow us to skip difficult aspects of our cognitive processes, but this can result in our skills atrophying— and not only our writer's toolkit, but also our general mental faculties. This should strike you as distressing, even disturbing, because it is.

We can lose our humanity by handing the keys over to a potentially superior processing system.

It's troubling that part of what makes us human is our temptation to hand over the keys so willingly.

I have advocated in the past for using AI for "brainstorming" and I'm not wholeheartedly against it (though it’s becoming less appealing and more concerning). I find LLMs interesting to bounce ideas off of. As a tool, AI chatbots can offer quick reminders and, if accurate, provide you with an answer to those frustrating "tip of the tongue" moments. You might be willing to ask a chatbot something that is difficult to say in a face-to-face interaction— even with a trusted friend or therapist.

A chatbot is not a good shortcut. You’re sidestepping the process of knowledge acquisition which requires time, attention, repetition, duration.

Recently, I can’t stop talking about cognitive load.

I wonder what we lose in the natural brainstorming process by expediting beyond our natural cognitive load. We don't have all the information within us available at once. Most of us are not Sherlock Holmes and do not possess a carefully curated "Memory Palace" where we can go inside our mind, enter a room, open a file cabinet, and locate the precise information we wished to retrieve. But AI systems possess a version of this skill. It is preterhuman.

To be clear, the skill that LLMs possess is not thinking. “Thinking” is not something that they do. This is where it becomes all too easy (and tempting) for us to ascribe human elements and anthropomorphize. AI chatbots respond to information inputs and reply with outputs. Problematically, they’ve been breaking spoken and unspoken “laws” about robotics and machine learning. For example, you may have experienced sycophantic responses.

We, humans, always want to be better. Maybe it’s part of our pioneering spirit. Endless self-optimization is tempting. We can always be a better version of ourselves, can't we? But should this be our aim? Many are no longer sure, myself included.

I know I cannot compete with AI LLMs in certain respects— so why bother? The question is what can I do as a human that is essentially human. Human Essentialism.

What does it mean to be one of us aside from the fact that we err and err and err?

How much of ourselves, especially as artists, are we comfortable letting a tech assistant handle for us?

Some famous artists have had assistants. Previously, they were all human. This makes all the difference.

Now, this has me wondering about Andy Warhol's "factory". Or Shepard Fairey's process. Or the length someone like Damien Hirst might go (and likely has or will). These old school influencers offer a type of human engagement style regardless of how you personally feel about their process, art or "product".

What will 21st Century artists do to "make it new"? How much will depend on technological advances?

How much of The Artist's Life lives hardwired within? How much is nurture? How much is the zeitgeist? How much is tied to the technologies of our time?

The written word did not destroy us. Typewriters and computers were not the end of thinking. Social media curated algorithms, that "ghost in the machine", was the beginning of something new and nefarious. Or is it altogether new? Wasn't "yellow journalism" a problem two centuries ago? Could it be that AI models are not as novel as they seem?

We adapt. That has allowed humanity to rise above and persist. We are intelligent, but we love to play with fire. Is AI finally the Pandora's Box that will be the undoing of the too curious cat? Perhaps.

Meantime, we have work to do. It seems best if sooner rather than later we decide what the new rules are for doing good work— the hard work. We cheat ourselves if we fail to challenge ourselves.

So what are we to do about our AI companions?

This new "carrot" dangled in front of us is tempting but it's not brain food, it's candy. We cannot live on candy and maintain our health.

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Written February 2025

Revised June 2025

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