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Diary

Divesting from AI and algorithms

With the summer holidays nearly over, I think it's time for me to make an academic New Year's Resolution.

This year's resolution is a simple one: I'm gong to make the active choice to avoid letting technology tell me what to think and what to be entertained by.

I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted on TikTok or YouTube Shorts mindlessly scrolling through pointless content. Every single one of those hours is an hour I can't get back to do useful things, like working on my degree, watching a film or TV show I might fall in love with, or challenging myself to think differently.

In fact, I spend so much out-of-work time scrolling mindlessly through content that I know doesn't have much value to me that I haven't even finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 yet! I originally put it on time out because it made me cry too early on in the game (no spoilers), but at this point, it's just because I'm wasting so much time that I think I have none.

And then we get to AI.

I've said so many times that I'm actually quite AI-ambivalent. But there's one thing for sure: like I said in my rant about the state of the term 'polymath', knowing facts is not the same as building knowledge. And I want to spend this academic year building knowledge. I'm done with filling my head with useless facts that leak out again in two minutes.

I also want to support people more. I don't want things to actually become like the Dead Internet Theory. I love the fact that the internet is made up of human content that other people spent hours of their time making. And as annoying as ads are, I would happily scroll through twenty of them to read the perspectives of a real human being.

So, I'm going to make a conscious effort to ensure that the content I consume is more human. Instead of reading the AI summary for something, I'll go on to Wikipedia, which has said that it will not allow AI generated content to be used for its pages. I remember a time when teachers used to tell students not to use Wikipedia. In fact, I wrote a blog post about not using it wholesale years ago. Now, it's the better alternative.

I'm not going to completely give up on short-form content, but the idea of mindlessly swiping on my For You Page is out. I'm going to try to figure out a way to stop my YouTube app from going straight to Shorts when I open it. When I do watch short-form content, I'll be more intentional about what I watch. I'll watch the stuff that my husband pebbles me with throughout the day as part of his love language, and I'll turn on all notifications for a select few creators whose content I'd like to see when it comes out.

Also, I've ordered a set of newspapers and magazines that I'll be reading each month. Really, if I want to be part of the change, I should be promoting an art form that's in a little bit of trouble (but not yet near dead) at the moment – especially since I recently did complain about the loss of the Hodder Education magazines. I want to support the industry, and I find that I read better physically anyway.

I'm also aware that magazines are to books what TikTok videos are to long-form YouTube videos – except that magazines don't have the same damaging effects on attention span as short-form content that you can easily scroll through. Magazine articles are short and made to entertain just like shorts are, but they take longer to consume.

Plus, I love the fact that I can keep hold of it and find it again. I can mark them with little index sticky note thingies and annotate the hell out of them. One of my biggest problems online at the moment is that I can never find the interesting content I watched ages ago, which makes it hard to reference or credit the people who deserve it. And I can't refer back to things to check what I know, remember what I thought about the content in the past.

It's a bit like what Charlie Brooker said in The Guardian back on 2013: sometimes, all of this content feels a little bit like 'factor[ies] mindlessly pumping carbon dioxide into a toxic sky'. He felt like that well before the invention of AI when people had to actually sit down and type out their content one word at a time. Now, people don't even need to do that. They write a 100-word prompt and then AI generates them a 2000 word article or script in less than five minutes.

It's no wonder I can't keep up or remember any of the stuff I've consumed! I'm not savouring it or even stopping to mull over what I've just been baraged with.

To borrow a term from Viktor Šhklovsky, I've experienced the automatisation towards information, and I don't want to be like that anymore. I want to be wowed by information again.

So I, Shani Cipro, am going to make an effort this academic year to change my consumption habits. I'm going to do my best to be more conscious about what I read, watch and listen to. I'll support real humans writing real things as much as possible. I might slip up, but by darn I've got to try.

P.s. Here are some of my recommendations for magazines and other content I'm going to be using:

They aren't going to make me experts on anything, but they'll make me think. And that's the most important thing.