How My AI Free Commitment Challenge Is Going

Edit: thanks for linking this in Hacker news, but the link you actually want is

CLICK HERE: ← this is a formatted link, but does not work. Sorry.

(For copying and pasting into browser, you are looking for https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/lvOC8ccaqr . )

*This post is truly old school. It was written by hand into a notebook, because in order to have the time to write it this morning I had to give my children my cell phone so that they would watch Paw Patrol and let me write. I ended up writing it by hand in 3 pages, and if you click through to the substack link, you will be able to see the pages as they were originally written in my own handwriting, pen on paper, like your grandparents used to. This electronic version of this post was drafted on Substack because it automatically saves and has an undo button.*

***_My AI Free Commitment Challenge_***

(Aka what happens when you put 3 stars and and underline on reddit?)

A few weeks ago, inspired by a comment someone linked me to on LessWrong, I announced on my Substack that I had committed to be AI free. I drew up some rules. See the original here: [Link](https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/token-economy-english)

>From now on, Isha Yiras Hashem is officially AI-free. I have never used AI much, but I'd like to emphasize and clarify this now. All writing, jokes, images, and sources will be humanly flawed and locally sourced, so do the kind human thing and let me know if I made a mistake.

- No idea generation

- no editing

- no finding sources

- no asking for easy explanations

- no asking for feedback

This has been a surprisingly hard. I had originally allowed for exceptions for translation, but I found that it was too easy to slip from translating to asking questions. I am also an extrovert, and artificial intelligence had been providing valuable feedback, so I didn't have to annoy everyone who knows me in real life, and maybe also a few people who don't know me, but seem like they might be fun to correspond with.

**Hoped-for and Actual Positive Consequences:**

1 My natural style and preference is fluid human anyway. I like human generated content, even with flaws, and I don't like how the internet starts to feel more artificial by the day. I don't want to be a part of that. Isha Yiras Hashem always wants to be part of a solution and not the cause of a problem

2 I'm a consequentialist, not a utilitarian. I'm not good at philosophy, but I'm trying to figure it out, and it seems that consequentialist abstention from AI would be a consistent intellectual position to take, and I'm all about being firm and consistent, just ask my kids.

3 It is a challenge. If I, a stay at home mother find it this hard to stop using AI to write a packing list, imagine how much harder it would be for people who need it for their jobs. Being hard isn't a reason to give up. I'm not scared of doing hard things. I have given birth multiple times. No one expects me to know anything about AI anyway, even if I did write AI for Dummies Like Me (Link)[https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-for-dummies]

4 I'll be the first person to write this style post, which has to count for somethint

**Negative Consequences I Have Experienced So Far**

So far, my experience not using AI has been practically very negative. I have not seen anyone else on the internet becoming more human as a result. I'm not even sure I did the whole consequentialist abstention thing right or if it makes philosophical sense. My writing is less impressive. But I did do something hard, which I'm proud of. Here are some of the negatives I have experienced.

Firstly, it made my writing take longer. Pre-AI, I used to spend a lot of time doing dumb things, like checking how to make a link work on Reddit. (I can never remember if it's the rounded things or the square things on the side, and which one is supposed to have the link and which is supposed to have the text.) Chat GPT saved me a lot of time doing this sort of activity.

But idea and language generation is not my writing weakness, and speeding this up is actually counter productive for me. I'm a naturally a flighty thinker, and being forced to slow down and check punctuation and spelling and how to do links greatly benefits my writing and my written communication. Often, while checking small details, I will notice larger, important details missed earlier. In general, I'm more interested in communicating well and clearly done and communicating a lot.

Secondly, I've noticed people get more irritated now when I ask questions or say things they think could have been more easily done using chatgpt. It's the new “let me Google that for you”. Everyone else on the internet is an introvert and they don't want to say one more sentence than is absolutely necessary.

Thirdly, well, I was going to write that it takes l me longer to write things. I thought this was true, but upon typing this up, I'm not so sure. While chat GPT can generate a lot of words, I end up spending so much time editing them that I may as well have written it by hand, and the result *still* still doesn't feel like me.

Besides, it may not even be true. I started writing this post at around 7 am this morning. I got all the kids dressed and off to school. And it will be on reddit by 9:30. Granted, I'm not making images on Canva and I'm not translating anything, but still. So maybe I should count this as ‘to be determined’.

Fourthly, I seem less sophisticated online, which means that smart people are less likely to respond to my comments. The reality is that I'm not sophisticated, so I'm just communicating a true fact here, if inadvertently. I'll have to work on my self-acceptance.

Finally, I might (G-d forbid!) lose an internet argument once in a while. This is okay, right? Like sometimes I'm going to be wrong or the other person is going to out-argue me. I don't actually *have* to change my mind, even if I lose the argument. At least not immediately.

Now, I am going to end with my characteristic Biblical tie-in. The end of Ecclesiastes is “because everything man does will be judged, if its good or if its bad.” Traditionally we repeat the seconr to last verse so as not to end the reading with the word “bad”. It also happens to be my favorite Bible verse of all time.

“At the end, everything is heard. Fear G-d and guard his Commandments, for this is all of man.”

What makes us human? It's certainly not checking a box verifying we are human or identifying objects with wheels or typing. Perhaps this *is* what makes us human.