On Not Becoming a Cyborg

Nolan Lawson:

So how do we fight this horde of agents colonizing our brains? In short: stay human, friends. Resist the whispering earring. Be jealous of your time and attention, and try to find other sources of artistic sustenance than the chatbots. As doomed as it may feel, try to keep a part of yourself that is the tiny little village of Gauls holding off the Roman invaders. Whatever your inner sanctum is, protect it from AI infiltration.

Plus, I know that as soon as I ask the chatbot for help on even a single sentence (“can you help this land better?”), it’s all over for me. I’ve already given up on keeping my own voice in my code: I used to care a lot about variable names, function arrangement, which kinds of for-loops to use… and now I just accept Claude’s little stylistic quirks because they’re not worth fighting. If I let the same thing happen to my English writing, I’d feel like it had lost some indelible stamp of me-ness.

A lot has been written about AI writing. This is one of the best I’ve read, perhaps because it echoes a lot of my worries.