Stop using AI. It’s stealing your ideas. It’s stealing your ability. It’s stealing your job. It’s stealing your soul. It’s stealing your brilliance. It’s stealing you.
Stop taking the easy way. You’re not learning. You’re not struggling. You’re not pushing through. When you give up your ability to persevere and do the things you don’t want to do, you stop creating important neural pathways in your brain. The more effort we make, the stronger and more robust our neural pathways are. It’s literally a brain gym. It improves the way our brains work, from problem solving, to recall, to retention. Doing things that challenge our brain, that involve absorbing and using information, analysing and creating outcomes or innovation – that’s how we get our brain buff. It’s literally what stops us sitting sadly in the corner with a saggy frontal cortex.
Brain fitness keeps us well. It helps regulate and restore. Thinking is literally the brain’s version of walking. We need to be problem solving. We need to be resourceful. We need to work things out for ourselves. I fear a future where soft brained and bodied humans are having to do Sudoku on a treadmill so we don’t waste away. I worry that humans who don’t problem solve, who outsource their research, their analysis, their content, won’t question anything. They’ll just take their instructions from the matrix. Then go back to asking Claude why they’re sad.
AI will never make art.
Sure, it can manufacture music and poetry and weird videos of babies doing a 1980s version of club comedy. But it’s creepy. It has none of our humanity. It’s just AI scraping the web to cook up a performance of a performance. Everything about us is missing. And the us of us is always better than AI. AI has none of our deep learning. The stuff that can’t be captured in an algorithm. The lived visceral experience of our broken humanness.
AI has never suffered. It has never woken at 3am convinced it’s a failure. It has never wept at a sunrise so beautiful it enters your soul. It has never held a baby. It’s never experienced the death of someone it loved. It has never loved. Or been loved. It has never felt the pain of not being loved. AI has never questioned its existence, or where it belongs, or who it belongs to. It has never felt empty and alone. It has never cried in the car. It has never slept in the street under a cruel fluorescent glare. AI has never gone hungry. It has never got drunk. It has never humiliated itself and had to apologise. AI has never put on so much weight its pants no longer fit, or been shortlisted then rejected. AI has never had hope. Or felt sad. Or happy. Or lost. Or crazy. Or lonely. Or angry. Or obsessed. Or kind. That is us. That is the soup of our conflicted humanity, and art is where we go to make sense of it. To fathom what often feels impossible to fathom. AI cannot do this. Humans do this. And humans who resort to using AI will lose.
What they will lose first is the capacity to resist. The capacity to struggle. The capacity to reach. The capacity to make art. To make art not to sell, or to monetise, but to make meaning. To make art because it’s the language we all speak. It’s our expression of understanding, compassion, wonder, misery. It’s problem solving. It’s how we touch the eternal and the ephemeral all at once. AI can’t do that. But it can take it from us.
It can take us. Resist.
Mandy Nolan’s column has appeared in The Echo for almost 25 years. She is a writer, comedian and artist, is the preselected Greens candidate for Ballina and was the Greens candidate at the past two federal elections.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
