Something that AI can never do for you

I’m a total sucker for personality tests.

You know, the ones that have clickbaity titles such as “You May Be [insert characteristic] if You Can Answer These X Questions”.

While they’ve always been lots of fun to do, it wasn’t until I began developing the prismatic thinking paradigm that I started using them to their fullest potential.

The ones curated by writers across social media are some of the best for this purpose.

Take this one that I just did:

I know, I know, why am I not doing it here first?

I have a backlog of drafts that I am pulling into Beehiiv to act as my content hub, but this one was native to the platform, so I decided to keep it that way.

Anyway, when it comes to these types of questionnaires now, I’ve adopted a rule of thumb:

I don’t dwell on any of the responses.

Whatever comes to mind first is what I answer, and everything else is to provide context and proof…

which brings me to today’s message.

Don’t Be Afraid of AI Destroying Your Voice

“Why should I write? Isn’t AI going to do it for us now?”

That’s tantamount to claiming that there’s a legitimate reason for you to not know anything that technology can do for you.

As Nicolas Cole once said, “You can’t automate what you haven’t done.”

Perhaps I’m paraphrasing, but that’s not the point.

The slippery slope of this kind of thinking can go all the way down to questioning the point of living your life when you can do it in a digital world.

Actually, Nicolas Cole was a huge World of Warcraft player before he became a Quora juggernaut who catapulted his writing career into the solopreneur empire it is today.

There is a tremendous difference between remembering the path and knowing the path.

AI can only remember it through vast quantities of training data.

Guess where that data comes from?

Us.

It comes from the multitudes of people who KNOW the path through experience.

You can prompt your favorite AI to write a story about falling in love, but only you can share how it feels to have reality recede into the background when she walks into the room or that first time she laughed at something you said…

not the ditzy “ahaha, you’re sooo funneeeeeee” kind of way…

that real soul-shaking laugh that reaches to the eyes and physically makes you struggle to catch your breath.

AI can only recall an approximation of it because it doesn’t know it firsthand.

Life is something you experience and share with others.

There’s a big difference.

Technology can never supplant it.

This is why my rule for myself stands when it comes to answering those personality questions.

The first, immediate, raw response is based purely on your knowledge of the path you’ve taken and has depth.

Wait too long, and you risk trying to remember it from an analytical perspective.

Don’t Let it Go to Waste

I’ve run an a cappella group and arranged music for people to sing in three different languages.

I’ve choreographed everything from an all-male hip-hop routine to a battle scene in Feudal Japan.

I’ve developed entire course curriculums for accreditation for a four-year engineering degree.

I’ve performed as a musician, a dancer, a martial artist, an actor, and an educator, but I never understood how much it all mattered until I started writing and reflecting on these experiences and the underlying themes, values, and beliefs that drove me to do these things.

Unless you start trying to share what you know with others, those things will remained locked away in your past.

Prismatic thinking is my answer. It’s the mindset that I hope will inspire others to make the most of their lives.

First and foremost, I hope that my children will have a chance to see me as a person someday as opposed to the dad who cooks, cleans, and stares off into space.

You have some amazing to offer to the world.

Figure out what it is.

If you’re interested, try the questionnaire in the link up there and see for yourself if you have a tendency to struggle to remember or simply to know.