Just go lie in the sun a little bit

One of the good things about going on holiday is that I almost forgot that AI existed. Sure, my Claude Pro subscription drummed steadily along, extracting my hard-earned dollars without giving anything in return, but that’s a low price to pay for comfort and joy.

Some things you only notice when it’s gone, like the sound of your kitchen ventilator when you switch it off. And what I noticed when I left my laptop was the low hum of anxiety that the very existence of AI tends to produce in me (and I suspect in many like me). It was such a relief to be reminded that there exists a world out there, inches away from the edge of my screen, where AI is a non-issue. The sand will be too hot, the cappuccino just as gloriously bad, the beer as cold and the people, don’t get me started on the people, will still be there in all their wonder, whether Claude has anything to say or not.

It’s not hard to see why AI should make academics anxious. My job is basically two things. I produce PDFs that appear on the internet, and I teach students. The first task is exactly what LLMs promise to be good at. I still think I’m a better writer than an LLM, and more importantly I’m a different writer, but it’s clear that the newest models can produce PDFs that on the surface look pretty much like the PDFs I’m trying to produce. In a tiny fraction of the time. So of course this technology is going to change this part of our job somehow, but we don’t yet know how. I think this combination is a powerful source of anxiety.

The second task, teaching students, is threatened in a different way. We’ve all read a thousand thinkpieces on how AI upends education, and I’m not going to rehash those endless discussions here. It’s clear that AI introduces a paranoia on the part of teachers and evaluators that wasn’t there before. It also introduces a temptation to take cognitive shortcuts that even the most conscientious students must fight and which didn’t exist before. In sum it makes teaching less fun. I suspect it makes learning less fun, too, just like reading has become less fun for me now that I have to constantly fight the temptation of my phone.

Partly because I don’t like the feeling it gives me, I’ve been pretty restrictive in using AI for my own work. I’m not dogmatic, I subscribe to Claude Pro and think vibe-coding can be fun, and there are obviously no-brainer use cases out there. But I think AI, today, on balance, makes academic work less rewarding and more stressful. I don’t have solutions, at least right now, but I have a reminder.

Remember that another world exists. Not in an imagined future, but right now. It’s OK to go outside and lie in the sun a little bit without your coding agents running some pseudo-productive task on your half-open laptop beside you. Get a little drunk with your friends, listen to the new Phoebe Bridgers album, go look at a flower. Sorry to be trite, but these are valuable things.

My own little resolution is to write, every now and then, in other formats than the academic article, and put it up here on this website. It starts with this right here. Obviously (and you can hold me to this promise) I will write completely unassisted by AI. I don’t expect anyone to read it, and I don’t know what it will be useful for. But some things you can just do.