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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