September 5, 2025

The Unexamined Life, Brought to You by AI

I think about a profile of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a lot. Amidst the fawning typical of these kinds of puff pieces, a particular passage stood out and lodged itself in my brain. In trying to show that he is all-in on AI beyond Microsoft’s financial interests, Nadella talked about all the ways he has incorporated generative AI into his own life. There is of course the obligatory managerial uses of it to summarize emails and messages (heaven forbid he pick up on any details). But then he talks about podcasts. “[Nadella] likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.”¹

That is a wild admission. How exactly are you having a conversation with ANYONE about the contents of a podcast if you are forgoing actually listening to it? On one hypothetical hand you are simply asking the “assistant” to tell you what was talked about in the podcast. On the other, you are just bullshitting your way through a conversation about a topic you have not actually learned anything about. In either case I do not think you actually enjoy listening to podcasts.

What I think Nadella does enjoy is feeling like he knows a lot, feeling like he is learning and on the bleeding edge of important things. For that, this method of “listening” to podcasts is well suited. I am sure that uploading these transcripts and getting the lowdown from an AI² bot is faster than having to actually listen to podcast episodes. I am sure you get through them at a much faster pace, allowing yourself to get through even more podcasts. But this is not the behavior one exhibits for something they proclaim to enjoy. If you say you like movies, but then tell me you only consume summary videos on YouTube, I am calling you a liar.

This mindset speaks to a bizarre and frankly scary insistence on the part of CEOs and the managerial class and those who spout the “rise and grind” mantras to offload every aspect of your life in the name of optimization. It would be one thing if this desire for efficiency remained within the confines of the corporate world. Instead it must touch all aspects of one’s personal life, to the point where there are now AI services built around having AI call your parents to talk with them so you don’t have to.³ They specifically market the product towards people too busy (or who consider themselves too busy) to have those conversations themselves.

Offloading as many aspects of your life as you can is not new. Tim Ferris wrote a whole book based on the concept, but back then you had to offload it onto underpaid assistants or loved ones. One of the many issues with Ferris’ approach is that it feels deeply sad. All relationships become transactional, and yet there is no benefit being derived. You can have someone else argue with/apologize to your wife or go to therapy for you, and this will save you time, but you also lose the ability to learn anything from those interactions.⁴ Furthermore, if the goal is to optimize your time the question becomes what are you optimizing it for?

The version of AI being promised allows anyone to delegate away any and all tasks. Phone calls, planning parties, listening to podcasts. It can now all be done without you. And that is the core problem that is never addressed when AI proponents talk about how much more efficiently the technology has made their lives; they never go on to talk about what they are doing with that new found time.

***

I think about a post from the Stable Diffusion subreddit a lot. For the uninitiated Stable Diffusion is an AI image generator. In the wake of image generators like this becoming more accessible a great many debates have raged over whether or not an AI generated image counts as art. Proponents in favor argue they are tools that can help one achieve their vision. Critics (and so as to be up front, I am in this camp) argue that there is no intent behind what the AI creates, it simply fulfills the prompt by guessing based on images it has come across before, and it does not care how the final result turns out.⁵

“Aha ha!” the proponents may say. “But there is intent in the prompt!” This is where the post from Fabulous-Ad9804 comes in, because I find it an illuminating example of why I believe the critics are correct.⁶

Generating over 200,000 images without any idea what to do with them does not describe someone acting with intent. At best it is someone acting on compulsion. It has the air of a junkie still holding out hope the next hit will make them feel good again even as every previous attempt left them feeling just a little bit emptier. When an artist engages with their craft there is a purpose to their energies, even if it is simply to sharpen their skills. They find meaning in the act itself, the whole process of creation, so when a piece is completed they can sigh with a sense of relief and accomplishment in bringing it to fruition. Even if no one else lays eyes upon the finished project there is still a sense of triumph because after all the time spent thinking about it, working on it, fine tuning and polishing it, the piece now exists in reality because they cared enough to make it so. The stereotype of the impoverished artist exists because there is an understanding that people create art for reasons beyond financial gain and recognition.⁷ There is an understanding that a deeper meaning exists behind the drive to create.

All of that is missing with AI. Sure, one may come up with a prompt for the generator to spit out, but at best that is a delegation. There is a belief that having an idea is the part that counts, where the true genius lies. But to be blunt, ideas are cheap. Two people can start with the same idea and end up with two completely different endpoints. And that is because every step that occurs between the idea and the final product is a self-contained choice that drastically alters the path one takes to completion. Even deciding to give up on a particular approach and start over (or start something wholly different) is a choice, and one that can still impact any number of decisions down the line, whether as part of the same project or a separate one. Every decision is an opportunity to learn more about the process and more about yourself, and all these lessons are reflected in the final presentation. None of those opportunities exist when you merely come up with a prompt to enter so that AI can do the rest. They are replaced by a simple input/output mechanism, one that turns the whole endeavor into a task to be performed as quickly as possible and nothing more.

This is why the Reddit poster struggles with all the thousands of images they have generated. Rather than make something in order to express an emotion or belief, rather than engage in the act of creation and guide a piece from conception through execution and all the messy steps that entails, they pushed a button and let that process be carried out in a Black Box. There is a nothingness to the endeavor, the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment lacking. Fabulous-Ad9804 doesn’t know what to do with all these images because there was no reason for them to be created in the first place. They were merely a Thing To Do. Something that appropriates the appearance of creating art without understanding the reasons people engage in the act in the first place. It is a microwave, promising that you too can be a Michelin star chef simply by setting the timer and pushing the “Start” button.

***

I think about a quote often misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut a lot. In actuality it is from a Tumblr user that goes by the handle Three-Rings, commented in response to a post sharing a letter Vonnegut had written to a high school student.⁸ Yet it often makes the rounds online as a Vonnegut quote, largely because it does sound like the kind of story he would tell and largely because it feels more profound to attribute it to someone like Vonnegut as opposed to a random Tumblr user, accuracy be damned.

It is a great quote though, so I will share it in its entirety:

When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject?  And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.  

And he went WOW. That’s amazing!  And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them. 

I love this quote for the way it reaffirms what makes us human. It cuts against the capitalist mindset that reduces things down to how productive they are or how much of an advantage they produce over competitors. Life is about much more than what one does to make a line go up on an executive’s graph. It is fun to do things, even if in the end we maybe didn’t do them that well. We still did them, and the experience gets collected into the story of who we are.

This is what I find so insidious about the push for generative AI to breach every aspect of our lives. It looks to “solve” the inconveniences of being human. To remove all friction and make any task as simple as pushing a button or entering a command. To allow everyone to be a CEO of their own life, dictating desires that become reality without the individual needing to do anything.

This is boring and fundamentally misunderstands what it means to live. Yes, spending years learning the skills to draw and practicing them daily take a lot of time and effort. Yes, actually studying medicine or history or software engineering can be very difficult. Yes, we all have tasks that we don’t always feel like doing. It is natural, I believe, to occasionally think it would be easier if you could just snap your fingers and have tasks be accomplished. But when you no longer have to try, no longer have to struggle, what kind of experience have you gained? What kind of story can you tell about yourself? What kind of an identity can you have, what kind of a life can you live, when you have handed off more and more of that life to an outside party?

As the above quote illustrates, doing things makes you interesting. In fact, failure makes you interesting. Even successful people have failures on their path that inform who they are today. And this, I think, is what the AI boosters have been unable to understand. When I see the way they talk about generative AI and “democratizing art” or no longer being at the mercy of “intellectual elites” I see people who are jealous. People who spent their lives avoiding difficult things and instead focused on what would get them the best return for the least amount of effort. The American Dream. But especially with the explosion of social media, it became clear that most people do not find turning money into more money all that interesting. It’s the musicians and the writers and the people who are experts on niche or unusual topics who are interesting and cool. The people who decided to do things because they thought it was neat, who had genuine curiosity. People who do things because they enjoy them, and in the process have something different and worthwhile to talk about when they meet someone new.

AI provides a short cut, a way for people who looked down on hobbies as a waste of time to catch up and be able to say that they can do cool things too. Who cares about the musician who has been playing guitar their entire life and pours their soul into writing songs? I can prompt an AI bot to Frankenstein together a song that kind of sounds like The Killers! But just like Satya Nadella using a conversation with an AI bot instead of listening to podcasts, just like Fabulous-Ad9804 and his 200,000 AI generated images, this misses the entire point of a lived existence. It is in actually doing things, the spending of time and taking things in, that make us who we are. I am far more impressed with someone who spends hours to make a badly drawn illustration of a house than I am with someone who had an image generator spit out a theoretically better looking one, because the former actually tried something. The former made an attempt, and made decisions, and if I asked them about it they could tell me why they used this color or added that window. They may even be able to tell me what they would do differently next time to make it look nicer. I could have a conversation with them. The latter pressed a button, and there is very little one can say about that.