I’m writing a little bit of text right now about establishing right relationship to software. Mostly this is an act of resistance. What’s practical? What’s worth changing? What is possible?
Somebody once took me out to dinner and said I’m “the most unreplaceable by AI ever.” Which implies that someone was evaluating me for replacement, which uh weird but ok. I guess they were referring to how I write weird, or (more charitably) distinctive, and how you could hoover the whole corpus of my writing up and make it riff on various topics for a minute and there would be effectively no difference. Fine.
A few weeks later, someone else called the writing in these letters “metaphysical,” which is hilarious. I don’t talk too much about my spirituality here, as I don’t think it’s terribly relevant to the practice of design. Nobody is gonna read my letters and get the religion, you know? But there is a real person behind all of this, and that person ostensibly has more of a spirit than any server farm could. So you’re probably not wrong there, either. By actually having a spirit and operating from my own intuition, I’m probably establishing an unassailable competitive advantage over the things meant to replace me. Fine.
In short, nothing beats going hard into a text box, just you and your psyche. And the more you cultivate your own voice, the voice that is truly & wholly yours, the less “replaceable” you stand to be.