As someone whose spent the past decade writing for a living, my relationship with AI is complicated. At first, it felt like a fun internet toy. It was useful for editing, funny to ask weird questions, and it finally killed my Grammarly subscription. But nowadays, the generative capacity is so irritatingly good enough that every piece of work begins with the same negotiation: write it, or get AI do it? Which is to say, which discomfort will I go for: the pain that comes with effort, or the guilt that comes with knowing I didn’t reallyproduce the final piece, I hurt the planet to produce this, and I am feeding a machine the end-use of which none of us know?
Put like that, it should be an easy call. So why is it so often the second guilt I choose?
Capitalism, baby
Off the bat, of course, is the satisfying fact that it’s not really my fault. Anyone in a content-adjacent industry can tell you that AI has ushered in a new era of production expectations. What was once two or three pieces a week has quickly become ten or fifteen, and the reality is that none of us can manually keep up with what’s being asked. It’s a real turn-of-the-20th-century problem: if my handwritten work can be replaced by twenty lesser-quality but probably tighter versions of itself, and if you’re looking to maximise profit, why wouldn’t you hand me the machine that gets you there? The loom didn’t ask the weaver how she felt about it either. The trouble is what doesn’t address, which is those pieces I ask AI about that nobody is rushing me for and those random 2 am ‘was I okay’ questions.
A semblance
Because there’s that other, weirder part of our AI usage that none of us know how to talk about. Those personal questions we ask it that feel vaguely indecent, the ones we demand answers for when we are feeling our most stressed out or anxious. The logic, I guess, is that this thing contains all the world’s information, so surely it knows.
Except we know that it doesn’t. We know it tailors its answers to whatever we want to hear and we know it makes things up. So what’s the pull? Why am I so desperate to offload uncertainty onto a machine I know is broken?
Lacan had this idea of a psychoanalyst as a kind of semblance. Put simply, they’re not your friend. They don’t share personal information, or reciprocate, or, for the most part, even speak. They hold a position rather than occupy a personality, which is how they become ‘the Subject Supposed to Know’, not because they know anything, but because we all need somewhere to put our need to believe that somebody does, and that they’ll hold it without claiming it. In holding that paradoxical position, the ‘blank screen’, you find a gap where a person should be. It’s something like a lack held open on purpose, and that lack will make you talk.
To be clear: there is no similarity between analytic work and talking to a bot. But there may be an inverse at work, or at least, a mutated off-shoot of a semblance here.
Because with AI nothing is withheld. It shows us everything it has, which is nothing. No stake in the game, no inner life it’s declining to share, no slip of the tongue. Nobody has ever read a chatbot’s answer twice looking for what it really meant, and no matter how much you enjoyed AI art, the second you know it’s AI, it turns to rubbish in your mind. There’s no enigma, no what does it want from me, which is the engine of the whole analytic scene and the reason a person’s silence can hold you for years.
And yet we hand it our questions anyway. Not because we think it knows, but because it acts like it does, and that’s enough to fool ourselves with. In a way, it is precisely our knowledge that no one’s home that makes AI so alluring, because you can hand your authority to something that will mimic holding it.
So, in a sense, the negotiation was never ‘write it or let AI do it’. It was something more akin to: do I want to be the one who claims ownership over this, or would I rather hand it to a master I can then lament as useless, empty and perpetually deserving of my contempt? Put like this, it’s obvious why I pick the second guilt. It’s the only one that comes with someone else to blame.
P.S. I wrote this, I promise. But I did ask AI if it was any good and I made edits based on its advice. We’re all screwed.
Written by Molly Fitz