At 42, I finally learnt how to float on my back. It’s been a long time coming. For various reasons, I’ve never learnt to really let go in the water, though the last half decade when I had the chance to play in water, I’ve at least learnt how to do a deadman’s float.
But yesterday was the first day I floated on my own, with no support. And this morning I realised how much of learning how to do that mirrors my preferred learning experience.
I’m the kind to like having guidance in the early stages. Whether that’s watching videos, reading guides, or even having my hubs coach me, I thirst for the theoretical knowing first. Once I’ve started to attempt to practice, I echew all outside noise, preferring to apply my understanding of the theory and adjust it from there.
I actually told off the husband yesterday to just let me try and not give me any more advice, because I felt that I was close to getting it but my head was being filled by noise. I knew I was prone to overthinking, and in floating, well… that was the opposite of what one wanted.
The first time I had to abort suddenly because it felt like my nose was getting filled from a sinus backflow. I still had a cold, so that was to be expected, honestly. I tried a few times after, and while the backflow didn’t happen again, I still felt a bit off.
The hubs had earlier suggested I plug my ears because the sound of water could be disconcerting, and I took his advice now. It worked, multiple times in succession. So I continued until I felt comfortable opening my eyes while I floated and that was when all the possibilities of this new skill I had began to practice surfaced in my mind.
Knowing what I know now of how my mind operates, I decided to keep things simple and focus on only what I could do now, in the moment. And the next step was to try without the earplugs. Would you consider that increasing the difficulty level? I wouldn’t, but I would consider it as removing training wheels on a bike.
And like riding a bike, it was about letting my body instinctively apply the lessons we had just learnt, while my brain focused on where we should go next. We never quite think about the actions we do until we need to explain it to someone else.
Which is why I am writing this.
The problem with GenAI is that it removes that instinctual, basic first step. The “grunt work” is how you learn the basics of the field, and while businesses are happy they are getting adequate words for the cheap, they soon quickly go back to their previous copywriters, demanding the writers to become editors of AI slop because the words they got the machine to output isn’t being effective.
This is both extremely cheap and expensive on the part of the business. Cheap because they refuse to pay the actual writer for their writing skills and think instead that just editing will be enough to get them the crazy profits their own risk-taking impulses have demanded (because let’s be real, aren’t all businesses at its core, a risk to take by the founder? And demanding that others pay for your dream to be reality is the height of hubris but really what do I expect out of the same colonial mindset driving GenAI adoption never mind).
Expensive, because this trend directly impoverishes the next generation of writers and thus all the possibilities language has to offer. As Minas Karamanis points out in their blog, the “grunt work is the work” because the human who has undergone the process learns instinctively and by muscle memory that something is off just by looking at it.
Not unlike how digital artists back in the early days could tell when an artwork was AI-generated because their eyes knew what to look for even if they couldn’t immediately pinpoint it. Not unlike how writers could look at a piece of writing on a website and tell “that sounds too fake” even as others fell for the virality of the story.
I’ll leave you with a story I’m sure a lot of you would have heard of before.
A necessary machine in a factory had broken down. The manager tried all sorts of manner to get it working but it continued to defy even the expensive consultants he had hired to get it fixed. In the end, someone suggested they get the old engineer who had retired a few months ago to take a look. The old engineer came in, listened carefully, took a hammer, and tapped hard on a specific spot. The machine began to work again. All in the span of five minutes.
The engineer handed over a bill for the fix – $25,000. The manager screamed.
“But you only took five minutes to fix it!”
“And it took me over 25 years to learn how to fix it in 5 minutes,” the engineer left.