human only

I wanted Claude to rewrite a few marketing posts that it had made for me, because it just sounded so clearly like AI. So Claude responded, "Do you have any longer documents that you've written, so I can identify and emulate the style?"

My answer was no. I mean, I'm sure I could dig some up from pre-COVID times. However it has been so long since I've written something genuinely-human outside of my personal journal that it felt like the hunt for those documents wasn't going to turn up much. That hurt my brain a bit.

My friend from college, Evan, has been writing a series about how AI is impacting our lives in tiny, often imperceptible ways, but that the compounding effect is massive. One post that you should read: https://www.evanreiser.com/blog/implicit-futures/value-injection/. This morning felt a bit like that coming true. How do I even describe my "human" way of writing to Claude when that part of me is a relic of the past? And ... is that OK?

I use the absolute hell out of AI, all day, every day. Building products from scratch, writing documents, troubleshooting, creating images and videos, you name it. But how much does this reflect my creativity?

I have always felt strongly that the two characteristics of a good Product Manager are creativity and judgement. Some will describe those two, combined, as taste. Even more lately, you can see "taste" being the top term in the PM zeitgeist. And I think there is some truth to it. But how much of our creativity have we given up to the AI? How much of our judgement is based on the hope that the data Claude has given you is grounded, and not some hallucination of a hallucination, repeat x10.

I have a utopian dream of a world where humanity has been able to refocus our time and energy on inter-human relationships. Where we can spend more time together, outside, enjoying company and nature. Where we can find quiet moments of deep focus to produce creative works that are deeply representative of our shared human experience. Where the AI has created a world of such excess in the basic needs for our survival that we can turn our eye away from 2-income parents stretched thin trying to raise a family, and instead towards the best of what humanity has to offer. My dream feels poised on a knifes edge; that we could just as easily, maybe more easily, end up with a singularity that finds human weakness disgusting (instead of amazing) and manufacturers the end of our species.

What a time to be alive...