How ChatGPT Hijacked My Creativity and Intuition

I’d love to be having a real coffee with you but unfortunately that’s not possible. Instead, I wanted to have a heart-to-heart conversation on ‘Does ChatGPT really know best?' and how it hijacked my creativity.

The promises

The promises were exciting: work could be done whilst we relaxed on the beach or reading a book, whilst our favourite AI bot would sort out our lives, write just like us, and take over our entire personality, brain, thoughts, and spurt out the words just the way we do instead of us sitting slavishly at a computer. 

It would tell us what to post on Instagram, when, how, and in what order so that our figures and businesses would soar and we would be floating on that bright pink mattress on a calm Mediterranean sea or sipping coffee in Venice. 

The rabbit holes were endless, and, like anyone curious to see what this AI thing was, I put the camera down and jumped in. I bought a standalone app that lived on ChatGPT that promised to be ‘me’ on Instagram and wrote things that made me cringe and I deemed unpostable. ChatGPT promised that the secret sauce to selling anything on the internet was telling a story about every print I had ever made and the thoughts behind them that would have clients hitting the buy button quicker than you can say ‘I’ve gone to the printer.’

Who wouldn’t want to make sitting at a computer obsolete when there are tomatoes to be picked, photos to be made, rooms to be dressed, swims to be had, and a million new and exciting things to learn, like how to propagate a hydrangea or where I should go to shoot my next series of photos?

I didn’t want to miss the dinghy

I will give anything new a go. I have missed out on so many technological advances simply because my romantic soul likes to live in the old world, likes the old ways and the safety that comes with this knowledge. But I have missed many ‘boats’ so to speak because of this, and I decided this time I would push myself out of my comfort zone and get on the ChatGPT dinghy for an easy life and problems to be solved. 

Let’s face it, there are some things I love, like putting furniture into a barely finished room to see that the colours, shapes and sizes are going to look OK, to research some complex bureaucracy of living in a country where you can hardly speak the language yet figure out how to do that research yourself.  

Cracking the code

My friend and I had cross-Atlantic discussions every other day to see if either of us had cracked the Instagram code or discovered something that would have both of us sipping Aperol Spritzes instead of trying to figure out the Instagram algorithm yet again. 

Here’s what I noticed: Dear old Chat dished up to other creatives in the same niche as me, exactly the same menu, the same ‘secret sauce’ suggestions of what they should be saying, doing, and posting, as though they had copied and pasted it directly from their own supposedly private chat. 

I watched and learned from my niche mates; I saw what others did, and I could see that Chat actually didn’t know best. The times I dipped my toe into the Chat waters and went with a suggestion, I could feel my soul recoil, but I gave it a shot because the promise was there, and who isn’t confused by the Instagram algorithm (and what do I know about how it works after all?)

After a full year of living in a world where I asked ChatGPT and his mate Claude (although I do like Claude for a bit of strategy and trying to unravel some of my messy ideas), I found my creativity hijacked.

The saddest thing that happened was that I started to lose my intuition, to trust what to write, when to write, and what to do next.

The AI slop

Yes, I had laid down my camera, put down my pen, and handed over my decision and voice to a machine. I discovered Chat doesn’t really know who I am and what is going on in my head. He thinks he knows who I am but he doesn’t. He uses the word ‘quiet' for everything. I am not quiet,  and there are other words to use other than quiet: what about 'hushed', 'peaceful', 'silent', 'muffled', and I could go on and on. I see it uses the 'quiet' word for everyone else, too: 'quiet nobility', 'quiet consideration', or 'quiet reverence', and fill in your favourite version.

I am tired of seeing generated 'fake Amish' people (I want to see a real one) on YouTube selling me some potion, or a fake woman telling me to do Asian Pilates, and fake cats dancing to the tune of Dirty Dancing. And what's up with the ‘em dash’ — this long hyphen that you can’t even find on your keyboard (and you need to do a Google search to get) hasn’t been used in writing since the dark ages — is now in every sentence it pumps out.

And writing with the Rule of Three that I naturally loved was chucked into the rubbish bin in the corner as Chat decided for us what rule we were now writing in. 

My body knows the instant it's fake and I switch off so I figure you probably do too. 

My creativity was hijacked

So my big realisation is that the dishes still need doing, and I stopped doing the fun part. The thinking, the writing, the photos and instead I found myself spending more time on Chat on my computer, abusing it sometimes. 

When all I wanted was to add one extra white linen chair to a room that was almost complete and Chat gave me, without asking, a fake olive tree in the corner that drove me crazy! 

When I started losing it and giving it my full opinion, all of a sudden it would do what I asked. Are we being encouraged to lose our manners and become aggressive? 

This was truly sad 

The saddest thing that happened was that I started to lose my intuition, to trust what to write, when to write, and what to do next. I had relied my whole life on my intuition and trusting the ideas, the passion, the thoughts that came when I gave myself space simply ‘to be’ all of a sudden was gone. 

So the last couple of days the fakeness has gotten too much, the physical rejection of being entertained by machine-automated creations that are wasting our time and lives. I have switched it all off. Today I went for a swim and decided to swim till I had an idea. In the rhythmic space in the water, the ideas and thoughts came flooding back. I picked up my camera and started photographing for the fun of it. 

Today, I am starting from the beginning, going back to the things I love to talk about, the subjects I care about, and the relationships with my community, who I dearly love, who too have an opinion, a voice, and so much creativity to share. I'm staking out what is truly important to me in life: my voice, the joy of taking photos, and having real people in my world having real discussions. 

What’s your take on it? Have you felt your creativity was hijacked? I’d love to hear from you.