To be or not to be… AI

It is taking ages to rebuild my website. It needs re-building because people hardly ever looked at it, including me - even though, to my mind, the original was a thing of beauty. And probably I could build this new version the easy way - as people more and more seem to do - and use AI to write this text, caption my photos and do the all-important search engine optimisation (SEO) that helps to drive traffic to a website. But while of course I want a zingy and attractive website with powerful SEO, I also want it to say something about me, even if that means it is imperfectly formed and even if it is a long process. I worry that if we outsource our brain-power (as individuals and as a species) to machines - if we cede our capacity to think for ourselves, to see things through from start to finish - we will end up worse off than when we started. And the older I get, the more important it is to learn new stuff, even if the process is challenging and slow.

In the days before satnav, when people read paper maps, I was often not much good at it and frequently took lengthy and magical ‘mystery tours’ en route to new places, usually to a chorus of ‘are we there yet?’ with a gaggle of children in the back. Sometimes that was a nuisance. At other times it led to a joyful discovery of new and beautiful places. Now I rely on the phone screen to show me the way and yes, it is easier, and I am ‘lost’ a lot less, but here in Wales there are still many places where phone reception is weak to non-existent. When this happens, without a paper atlas in the van, I am more lost than I ever was before I let Google maps take control of my journeys. This has something to do with my sense of the shape of the landscape, a sort of loss of context and a failure to register where places are in relation to one another, even when I have done a particular journey more than once. It seems so much harder to get this sort of sense of space from a screen than from a map unfolded on the kitchen table. With that context - the remnants of a visual image of place-names on a map engraved upon the brain - came a sort of intuitive ability to navigate even when ‘lost’, which I often seem to be missing these days (apart from a very general impulse to, for example, ‘head south’. But that’s enough of this analogy.

The lesson I take from it is that in allowing a machine to take control of something I used to have to do for myself, even if I was bad at it, I have let myself become just a little bit more stupid - a bit more unknowing and unthinking. I don’t want forget what was once a useful skill - how to read a paper map, because at some point, the machinery may all just grind to a halt. AI may be the global direction of travel, but in this respect, I choose to be a Luddite.

All of which is by way of a plea - to bear with me as my website develops. Just as I will never use AI to create a photo - I want my site to be made by a human. It might not always be pretty and I hope will never be quite ‘finished’, but I promise it will always be mine.