The importance of attention in the age of AI

A reminder to consume responsibly

I’ve been using AI more and more, mostly for writing.

At first, I was using ChatGPT. Now I’ve switched to Pi for most things. It’s more conversational.

As a writer, it’s kind of depressing.

I’ve spent thousands of hours over the past decade practicing to continually become a better writer, and now this technology comes along that is so much faster and smarter than I can ever be.

To be clear, I maintain that AI is awful at certain forms of writing, at least for my taste. Creative writing is the chief example.

It seems to me that there is something inherently human in order for writing to be considered creative writing. Perhaps “creative” will even become an inadequate descriptor for the kind of inherently-human writing I have in mind. I can imagine a future when AI writing becomes so ubiquitous that it is necessary to change the descriptor to “human” writing.

On the other hand, AI is excellent at other forms of writing. For example, when you want to come up with a list of examples.

But this is not about the proficiencies and deficiencies of AI writing. Plenty of others have written plenty about that. AI itself could write plenty about that. Which leads us to the point I aim to make.

An AI text generator can produce a piece of writing on any topic and in any form. You have access to the majority of human knowledge ever captured in words.

But there is a bottleneck.

You are the bottleneck.

You only have so much time, only so much brainpower. Even with unlimited knowledge and creation at your fingertips, you still have to choose.

You can have any answer you want, but you must ask the question.

What question will you ask?

That is the question.

It’s about attention.

Assuming you can know anything, what do you want to know? And why?

AI will give you any answer you want, but it will only give you answers to the questions you ask.

This has actually been going on since way before AI.

Some amount of time after the printing press, books became cheaper and more widely available. You had to choose which books to read.

More recent technological advances increased the quantity and availability of audio and visual content. Spotify has over 100 million tracks. 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Content creation is cheap and easy now. And there’s money to be made from creating content. The inevitable result: lots and lots of content.

And there’s only one thing between you and all the content.

A search bar.

For AI generators, it’s the prompt bar. But it’s basically the same thing.

It’s your opportunity to control the content you read, hear, and see.

All the answers are available.

Now it’s about asking the right questions.

It’s about what you’ll focus on.

It’s about attention.

If you want to learn more about using AI for writing, check out AI Writers Academy.