by MUNA KHAN
IMAGE/StockPlanets/iStockphoto/Getty Images/CNN
The fear I keep hearing about AI isn’t the one that makes headlines. It isn’t about robots taking jobs or machines making humans obsolete. It’s quieter than that. It’s the worry that dependency might make us forget how to think for ourselves.
Some doctors say even young adults may not be spared ‘brain atrophy’ so forgetting is normal. But what I’m increasingly witnessing isn’t the forgetfulness of age. It’s something more voluntary. A willingness to hand over the thinking.
Don’t get me wrong. I am on team AI. It’s no different to assistant tools like Cliff Notes in the late 1980s when we needed help understanding the AP literature heavyweights. You still had to read Joseph Conrad but Cliff Notes could help you understand him better. Now you could probably get AI to write like Joseph Conrad. We’re blaming AI for generating writing but not looking at the person making it do the generating. There’s always been, and will be, shortcuts to everything in life. Sometimes I think we are mad at the wrong thing.
But let’s be precise about who benefits from our dependency. Big Tech is already telling us how we should look — the same stick thin, filled lip, cat-eyed faces that scroll past us on every platform, until we forget what an ordinary human face looks like. In 2019, Jia Tolentino called it the cyborgian look — a single beauty ideal engineered not by culture but by algorithms optimised for engagement. I wrote about it for this paper when I noticed rows of women with big lips and ‘snatched’ jawlines at a dermatologist’s office in Karachi in 2018.
We are morphing into versions of each other, and we have barely noticed.
We are morphing into versions of each other, and we have barely noticed.
Now Big Tech is coming for our voices too. The same companies profiting from our insecurity about our faces are also profiting from our diminishing capacity to think and write without their tools. Almost perfect AI-generated sentences, frictionless and indistinguishable, are becoming the norm. The result, if we are not careful, will be a literature of sameness. Content that sounds like everything else because it was made the same way. That is not a coincidence. It is a business model.
What can we do to retain our agency?
I have a simple suggestion that I’m now teaching: Write with your hand. Keep a notebook to record your thoughts, your grocery list, the phone number of someone you met. Stop using your phone for this. Think of it as a small act of resistance.
The forgotten art is not writing itself. It is observation. To look up from a screen and notice the room you are sitting in. To register the specific detail — the light, the object, the thing that makes you stop. Ten people in a room will never write the same thing about it. That irreducible difference is your voice. AI cannot replicate it because AI was not there. You were.
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