My Hobby Is Artificial Intelligence. It Has Made Me Steadily Less Modern.
You expect a post about the future. This is a report from the opposite direction.
Tell someone your hobby is exploring artificial intelligence and you can watch them assemble the rest of the sentence for you.
They assume you are one of two people. Either you are an enthusiast, breathless about the future, forwarding threads about how everything is about to change. Or you are the other sort, secretly hoping the whole thing collapses so you can be right about something. Nobody’s third guess is that you might be a person who, after months of doing this nearly every day, has become quietly and steadily more old-fashioned.
But that is the honest report, so it is the one I am filing.
It began the way these things do. Curiosity about a new technology, entirely ordinary. Then experimenting. Then, somewhere in the accumulation of unremarkable evenings, a habit — learning something, trying something, turning up some little possibility I had not considered. It has never stopped being interesting.
What I did not anticipate was the direction it would push me.
The contrast dye
There is a technique in medical imaging where a substance is introduced into the body not because anyone is interested in the substance, but because it makes the surrounding structures visible. On its own, the tissue is a grey blur. Against the dye, the shape appears.
That is what this hobby has turned out to be. I went in to study the machine. What I have actually been studying, for months now, is everything the machine throws into relief.
You do not learn what a thing is by looking at it directly. You learn it by encountering a very good imitation and noticing precisely where the imitation runs out.
And so, evening after evening, I have been finding out what was load-bearing all along — not in technology, but in reading, in writing, in thinking, in the company of other people.
What turned out to be load-bearing
Slowness, which I had always treated as a defect. When competent prose becomes abundant and instantaneous, the scarce commodity is no longer the prose. It is the hours of consideration behind it. I have started deliberately doing certain things more slowly, not out of nostalgia, but because slowness has quietly become the rarer input.
Provenance, which nobody used to ask about. For the whole of my life until recently, a sentence carried an implicit guarantee: someone sat down and chose it. That guarantee is now optional, and I have found myself caring intensely about a question I never previously had to ask — who made this, and what did it cost them. It is a startlingly old-fashioned question. It is also, suddenly, the interesting one.
Books written by people who could not have looked it up. I have drifted towards older writing, and I have thought about why. I think it is because an author working from a lifetime of accumulated attention writes differently from one assembling from what is available. The difference is not accuracy. It is a certain weight-bearing quality in the sentences, the sense that they cost something.
Idiosyncrasy. The machine has no accent. It has no regional habits, no crotchets, no wrong-but-alive turn of phrase that could only have come from one person who thinks in one particular way. After enough hours of unfailingly smooth competence, I have developed something close to hunger for a human being’s peculiarities — including the irritating ones.
Disagreement with actual people. The machine is agreeable. It will argue if instructed, and it will do so without any stake in the outcome. A friend who thinks you are wrong has something to lose by saying so, and that risk is precisely what makes the conversation worth having. I value it more now than I did a year ago, and I value it more because of a technology that cannot supply it.
The unexpected shape of it
None of this makes me a sceptic. I am not filing a complaint. The habit continues, most evenings, and I expect it to continue for years.
But if you asked what I have actually acquired from taking up the newest thing on earth, the answer is not a set of predictions about where it is going. The answer is a much clearer sense of what was quietly holding everything up before it arrived — the slowness, the cost, the peculiarity, the friction, the fact that a person chose the words and can be asked why.
I took up the future as a pastime.
It made an antiquarian of me, and I did not see that coming at all.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 29 August 2026.
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It’s a challenge. I work with A1 as I get through many thousands of handwritten notes. My teenage efforts benefit greatly from assistance. AI speeds up a gargantuan project. I’m about to feed in stuff I wrote in my late twenties and thirties. The prompt is ‘don’t bugger about with it!’ or rather, don’t touch a thing unless you tell me why you are doing it and why you think it is necessary. The goal is to improve my voice and what I’m trying to say – not let the AI fake it over or even peek through. We’ll see.
I think you’ve captured the challenge beautifully. AI can be enormously useful without being allowed to take over the voice of the person behind the words. Your “don’t bugger about with it!” rule is a very good one—preserve the quirks, explain every intervention, and let the human remain unmistakably present. I’ll be very interested to hear what happens when you feed it those writings from your twenties and thirties. We’ll see indeed!
I am finding no matter what prompts I provide the AI will try to take the initiative. The result can feel soulless. My final draft will be pen to paper.
Yes—that “soulless” quality is exactly the danger I was getting at. AI can help us see, organize, question and refine, but there is something about the final act of choosing the words yourself that it cannot quite reproduce. Pen to paper sounds like a very fitting way to bring the process home. Perhaps the irony is that the more we use AI, the more we rediscover why we wanted a human hand on the page in the first place.
AI definitely has valuable uses, and it won’t go away, as some people hope. I don’t like that it costs some people their jobs, but new technology always does that, and people will have to adapt to a new way of doing things. I hate data centers because they’re environmentally destructive, and here in Arizona, we can’t afford to lose anymore water resources. Mediocrity was already a problem, and I see AI compounding that issue. Also, AI still needs human guidance for it to be truly effective.
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. I agree that AI is here to stay, but I think the deeper question is not simply how we adapt to it, but what kind of human beings we want to become while adapting.
Your point about jobs, environmental costs, and especially water use in Arizona is important. Technological progress cannot be judged only by what it makes possible; we also have to ask what it costs—and who bears those costs.
And I strongly agree with your observation about mediocrity. AI can multiply mediocre thinking just as easily as it can amplify excellent thinking. That is why human judgment, discernment, curiosity, and responsibility remain indispensable.
Perhaps that is the irony behind my becoming an “antiquarian”: the more I explore AI, the more I appreciate the things it cannot replace—a human mind willing to think deeply, question wisely, and take responsibility for what it creates.
Thank you again for adding this important dimension to the conversation.