In Memory of Imagination

Here I go again

Staring at the blank page

Not sure how long it has been

Maybe minutes, maybe hours

It feels like an eternity

Since my imagination roamed free

Sometimes uninvited

Inventing stories about passers-by

The stars

The trains

Anything

Stories came so easily and freely

So what changed?

The sensory overload

No free space to think

To listen to the silence

Letting my imagination fill in the gaps

Because there are no gaps

Everything is noise

Lights

Lies

AI

The world has been robbed

Of independent thinking

Of imagination

I no longer see kids making up games

Involving imaginary horses and knights

Cops and robbers

Now I see them glued to screens

Of all shapes and sizes

Hunched over with glazed eyes

Attention span destroyed by fleeting images

While the algorithm tells them what to think

Who to believe

Who to love and who to hate

With no room for independent thought

For imagination

Where will the future writers,

Painters, and inventors come from

When free thinking and imagination

Have abandoned us?

Or rather, we have abandoned them

In favour of mindless scrolling and

AI-generated content

...

When the blank page stares at me

And my cursor hovers over the opened AI tab

I resist the temptation because

My thoughts and imagination

Still linger in my old stories

The stories of my ancestors and

In my dreams

Maybe if the blank page and I

Stare at each other long enough

If I’m silent long enough

The words fill appear

Like before

To fill the blank page

With stories untold

Rather than reimagined

- - -

I read an article recently about how AI and having all the answers available to us instantly are affecting our thinking skills. Not that one really needs to be a rocket scientist to realise how damaging it could be in the long run.

I write content for other people, for their blogs and websites, and lately, many clients have asked me to draft with AI and then edit. The idea is to speed things up - and pay writers less because AI is doing some of the work.

Since I've been using AI more, I have already noticed how it is changing my ability to just create stories out of thin air - like I used to. So the blank page premise is real.

Luckily, there are still clients who prefer and understand the quality of fully human-researched and written work.

And maybe it is time to ditch those clients who demand AI...