Luddite is now being used to describe those of us who refuse to use AI for anything, for the reasons you state above.
The printing press allowed people to do more thinking for themselves - they had access to information they hadn't had before. At that time, they would have had to rely on the statements of the readers and scribes of those times.
AI is doing the thinking for us, dumbing us down even more than we have already been dumbed down.
Whenever I read 19th century literature, I am always stuck by how deeply people thought, and how readily they thought out loud. They valued their powers of logic and emotion more than we do now. They had a more vital life force.
We are so in for it. Buckle up!
Your posts have always been spectacularly perfect. I especially enjoy that there are no typos or grammatical errors to distract me from you work. Now I know why you are so good at that.
It's great to have you back!!!
Thank you, @owasco, it's good to be back! Yes, being a 'Luddite' is a badge of honour when the alternative seems to be embracing AI without question... I'm always open to being wrong and as I said, maybe there are positive applications AI could have in the future. I don't want to be automatically pessimistic about everything. But there are definitely things I'm concerned about, especially when I see people outsourcing their capacity for original thought to the likes of ChatGPT – a dangerous trend that I hope will be a passing fad for most people, as text speak was for my generation back in the 2000s.
And yes, I am an editor in my daily life! This is a double-edged sword: I hold myself to a high standard, which is a good thing, but it can also hold me back in my writing when I get too analytical about it. I'm trying to break out of that way of being at the moment. 🤞
You mean allow yourself a run on sentence now and then, or a sentence fragment here and there? Some inventive spelling? How about a dangling participle? Just please oh please shy away from excessive use of the past perfect tense. That's like dragging fingernails across blackboards to me. It is just plain old wrong. All the rest I use liberally in freewrites (I haven't been able to freewrite for a long time now) and resist the urge to fix them during proofreading. I do fix incorrect past perfect tense use though.