The making of the true us

At our last semestral faculty meeting for the Department of Communication, our conversations revolved around the unfettered rise of artificial intelligence (AI). We were concerned that our students were walking into a world that demanded their presence, but not their skills.

Our worries worsened when an instructor, an advertising veteran, told us, “When we prepare a client brief, more companies demand a section that tells them exactly how to make all the ads, copy, and publicity materials using AI.”

A gasp thundered across the room.

“We always warn them that their customers can detect when something is made with AI,” she went on, “We’ve had customers tell us that they actually reject brands and ignore materials that use AI. The companies answer the same way each time: we don’t care. AI will save us money.”

I have witnessed firsthand how people have expressed their disgust at anything that smacks of an AI prompt gone public, whether a written piece, static visual image, or video. There are tells that scream shortcuts: AI-generated writing often follows a cadence that tries to be witty to everyone while addressing no one; AI-generated publication materials tend to look too polished and dream-like regardless of the message; AI-generated videos can sometimes look heavy, unnatural, with staccato movements that give away lifeless scripts in the guise of humans.

My students have walked out of restaurants with AI-generated menus. They’ve discarded emails or chat messages that sound like a machine spit them out. They’ve ignored parish announcements when they see AI-generated graphics, especially when Pope Leo XIV himself has called for stricter AI oversight!

My colleagues have marked AI-generated papers with a zero (yes, we can tell even with the paraphrasing!). Ever since I caught a group using ChatGPT to brainstorm an idea during my class, I have ordered my students to put away all electronic gadgets for all creative activities.

We do not hate the technology, but we despise when it is touted as the only tool in an empty toolbox—the only skill that one needs when the world demands that we use many.

Learning how to write, read with high comprehension, compose visual images, shoot videos, act on camera or onstage, speak in public, and craft messages all take time.

However, the process of learning how to write and the act of writing itself hones a person’s empathy, as they strive to reach another human being. The process of reading a whole text sharpens one’s ability to understand and analyze another person’s point of view and the reasoning that led there. The process of learning how to create visuals and the act of creating visuals itself trains one’s ability to collect, organize, and make sense of large amounts of information from a variety of sources.

No process here is useless. No lesson is ever literal. No learning is ever instant. And all the skills are necessary in all industries: logic, empathy, understanding, organization, and analysis.

We are not angry at AI itself. We are angry at those who use it for profit and convenience, who overuse the technology for tasks that could have given jobs and income to artists and professionals—all while ignoring how AI data centers can potentially deplete precious water reservoirs and energy resources. We are angry at those who surrender the most basic skills for functioning in a literate, democratic society, all for saving time. For results. For content.

AI has reduced art to convenience, and the human experience of creation to a burden. We are angry at the stigmatization of hard work, effort, and patience as separate from the art itself.

We do not equate effort with good work, mind you, because even with maximum effort, bad work will always be bad. Conversely, effortless execution does not always mean a good product.

But the willingness to invest time in first listening to people? The wish to undergo the rigor of editing, rewriting, and endless permutations of an idea to get to a finished product that speaks sincerely to a specific person and thereby addresses the experiences that unite us? The motivation to read a text from start to finish because someone once wrote it to speak to the world with their own voice—and their voice therefore deserves to be heard?

That is human. That is the story of us all.

These ideas grew more poignant as I listened to the homily of our parish priest at Our Lady of Pentecost. Fr. Herbie Santos opened last Sunday with “We are meant to fall in love with God, not the benefits of God.”

These words echo across many aspects of life. We are meant to fall in love with people, not the things that they can give us. We are meant to fall in love with our capacity to create, not the results of the effort.

We are meant to fall in love with the process and its travails and its depths and its adventures—not with merely achieving an end.

For what good is the ending if we do not know, live, and understand the story that led us there?

—————-

iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu