Outsourcing To AI?
Updated: Aug 25
They say there’s no therapy, no endless numbers of seminars or workshops, no books or insight that can get you remotely close to the personal learning and confrontation we get when we run our own business.
And it’s bang on.
I’m wearing the truth of that in the scars of every iteration of my business past. Closing my 18-month old, sell-out yoga studio in the pandemic. Reducing my live classes from fourteen a week to none. Yoga coaching. Nervous system coaching. Other teachers coming to spy on my classes, dramatics from members when I stopped teaching daily, bone issues from teaching daily, and endless, endless marketing that made me feel like I was selling-out.
Especially when we’re running a business that’s us. When we’re selling ourselves, our mission, our entire souls, instead of plumbing hardware or tyres or blankets for dogs (not that there’s anything wrong with selling these things). When it’s us, we’re forced to look ourselves directly in the trauma and figure shit out.
And the most recent iteration of my business, as is always the way, is more me than anything that’s come before. I’m a writer, I always have been. I just needed the permission of a few learned souls to realise it. And in that’s the problem: I needed the permission.
And I don’t think it’s just me — we all need the damn permission. We’re scared to demand the thing simply because it’s right for us, because it feels right in our bones. No. We must ask first. We must ask the opinions of others, get feedback from as many sources as possible. More info is better, right? Until it’s not. Until we realise we’re outsourcing our innate ability to feel and know, to trust and judge.
And AI is exacerbating the problem.
There’s a wonderful non-fiction writing coach I love, and, until I got out of the habit, I was asking Claude to act as this coach and critique all my work before I’d publish it. Not write it for me — I get enormous pleasure out of this myself (and can we really call ourselves ‘writers’ if we are, in fact, not doing the writing) — but giving me the signal that’s it’s good enough to ship.
Sometimes, I’d learn things. I’d agree with the changes it suggested and see the glaring error of my ways. Most of the time, I disagreed with what it told me. Poetic or not, abstract or not, that sentence or ending or opening makes me happy, and that’s alright by me. But every single time I used AI like this I was doubting myself and allowing the doubt to lead me. Scratching that itch. Soothing the pain of uncertainty. Taking a pill to make it all go away.
I’m the first to pipe up for the brilliance of AI in a chat down the pub. As a team of one, sometimes less than one if I’m in luteal and want to strangle the postman (no offence, Clive), having a tool that helps me work out Wordpress problems, plan some aspect of marketing that doesn’t make me want to be sick on myself, or work out complicated spreadsheet formulas is an absolute miracle. Thanks, AI. May the robots note my appreciation and treat me kindly when they eventually start farming humans.
But there’s a counter to this. AI is highlighting all our weak spots, like perfectionism, hustle, over-productivity, permission-seeking, lack of self-worth… We see our weakness, and we lean on the robots to help us patch the holes and soothe the irritation. Except all it’s doing is exacerbating our weaknesses.
Let’s consider an article — like this one — that I publish without getting the ‘it’s good enough’ permission from AI first.
I’ve spent an hour, two hours, writing and editing it and a little extra time to fluff the formatting and hit publish. And here it is: that little knot in my stomach telling me that it’s not quite okay. I’m calling myself a writer, and this isn’t worthy of that, actually. And wow, does that hit the wound right in the middle.
But I’m here, feeling that friction anyway, and every single time I hit publish without getting the permission I need to undo that knot is a tiny step toward trusting myself more. Because my writing — whether you think it good or sloppy, whether my favourite writing coach thinks it could be improved upon or is a work of utter god-like perfection — is my damn writing. And I’ll be writing stuff next month, next year, in ten years from now totally different to this — better and sleeker and way more refined. Until then, I need to write and edit and trust in my writing and editing enough to publish without seeking permission from Claude or anyone else. This is how I improve as a writer. This is how I learn to trust myself.
It’s been brought up around Substack’s new AI feature, too. We’ve now the ability to check if the work of those we find and follow on the platform has been written with AI. AI is checking how much AI is involved. Two robots pointing the guns at each other. For what, exactly? So we can prove that author with the opinions we don’t agree with has been a non-writing charlatan all along? So we can feel morally superior for a moment? And let’s not forget the AI checker gets it wrong, too…
It’s absurd. Another example of bypassing our own ability to know and feel and trust for ourselves.
You’d know if this article you’re reading was written with AI by now. There’d be too many tells. It would feel stilted and inorganic and… something would be off. Or, perhaps you really wouldn’t. Entire books (and TV shows, and music, and podcasts, and businesses) have been created using AI and we often can’t tell. But we need to improve our sniffer; we need to get better at noticing and flagging content as AI ourselves, not trusting in another AI robot to do it for us.
As long as we’re outsourcing to AI, we’re not evolving ourselves; we're staying stuck. As long as AI is writing your work, checking your work, checking for AI, giving you permission, cheering you on (the sycophant that it is), we’re doing none of these things for ourselves. I see a bleak future in which we lose all ability to trust in ourselves and our intuition because we’ve outsourced it for so long.
Fuck outsourcing to AI. Publish the imperfect work. Make the typos. Make it weird and fruity and slightly off-key. And can we learn to trust in ourselves for once. To make a stand for anti-productivity, anti-perfection, anti-hustle, and anti-AI. Stop the outsourcing and bring it back in-house. This is how we maintain our humanity. Until you want to learn spreadsheet formulas, of course. In which case ask the robots. No one needs to learn that shit.
Want a more joyful inbox? Come join me — I write the good stuff twice a week.
