What can AI do?
AI can tell you the best practices to apply to web content.
But it can’t fumble around in a new job after having earned a college degree that’s only tangentially related to your duties. It can’t try out these best practices with uneven application, see what the audience responds to, what the search engine responds to. It can’t organically become an expert on a niche subject matter after talking to an enthusiastic engineer growing in power until it understands the kind of article you need to write to reach people and have it matter.
AI can’t take that growth experience to its next job, where it’s already ahead of the game by knowing what to try and where to start and how to tell its younger coworkers that they don’t have to get it right away. That ultimately they just have to keep trying.
AI can’t go on a date and have a first kiss and find itself distracted in the following weeks after that magic moment, going through the motions of life and working on routine tasks only to drift back to that experience, that feeling in the pit of your stomach, the way your lips tingled and made it feel somehow real for the first time ever. It can’t wonder at a new experience, something that took you completely off guard when you thought you’d already had things all figured out.
AI can’t buy the new product that everyone’s been raving about and then discover that while it has ten functions you don’t need, it doesn’t have the one function you want. But you can’t seem to admit that to anybody else, so you end up with a piece of tech in your house that gets sparsely used until it ends up unplugged, without batteries, in a drawer somewhere. It wouldn’t find said abandoned object three years later in a fit of inspired spring cleaning, digging it out of the drawer and carting it off to the local thrift store while looking skeptically at the hot new gadget.
AI hasn’t tried typing increasingly specific searches into the search bar in an attempt to locate that one perfect tweet you saw years ago but neglected to download or screenshot. It hasn’t thrilled in the glory of saving a small piece of internet history from obscurity even though nobody else you know cares about this. The screenshot won’t sit in a digital folder somewhere only to pop up later and surprise you into loud, barking laughter. It can’t understand that weird form jokes on the internet take become a type of shared language and, in some ways, an odd form of emotional support in the modern age.
AI can’t get a bad cold and find both its nostrils stopped up and its throat aching and feel that post-nasal drip at the back of your throat that signals a lingering cough is imminent. That even after the other symptoms have disappeared, you’ll lie awake at night and not even the strongest dose of Nyquil will do anything to stop it but it also doesn’t feel like a big enough deal to go see the doctor.
AI can be funny in a programmed way, but it doesn’t know the feeling of being struck over the head by something so gut-bustingly hilarious that you and the person you’re with keep cackling until your stomachs hurt and your eyes are streaming and you both pull it together just enough to sigh but then you both sigh at the same time and that sets you off into fresh peals of laughter.
AI has never lain on a too small, not-quite-comfortable mattress, arm pinned under the body of a sleeping child, itself in a half doze in the dark, feeling the warmth and comfort of someone so small and vulnerable who trusts you so completely and loves you without any complication. It can’t wrestle with the question of whether you should just fall asleep or try to extract yourself to do the dishes. What the dishes worth anyway against that soft, even breathing?
AI doesn’t know the human experience. It hasn’t skinned its knee or held someone while they cried or felt a deep aching frustration at something not going the way it had planned. It doesn’t care if it gives you advice that hasn’t been fact checked or if you’re exhausted because your baby didn’t sleep or if you’re exhausted because your heart was broken or if you’re exhausted because you stayed up way too late reading a thrilling book.
AI doesn’t know the beauty of a sunrise or the sound of your breath in your ears as you go stubbornly run the next mile or a song you love but forgot about surfacing again on the radio.
It can’t do those things. But you can.
Gabs Writes 