Those of you who have ever walked around Tokyo with me know that I infuriatingly walk past any number of perfectly functional escalators, looking for the stairs. It’s not because I want to torture you, it’s because my body no longer allows me to pound away at a keyboard for hours and expect to just stand up and trot to the kitchen for a cup of coffee without my knees demanding payment in pain.
When confronted with this annoying situation, my doctor was zero help. “Are you not doing any resistance training?” she asked incredulously, refusing to accept the perfectly reasonable excuse that my ingrained homesteader genes have a natural aversion to lifting heavy things that aren’t groceries, children or that chair I would like better if it were on the other side of the sofa.
“Use it or lose it,” she said. Rather unsympathetically, I might add.
Fortunately, I calculated that if I climb 30 flights of stairs in and out of the subway stations I use every day in Japan, I can get all that pesky resistance training out of the way without feeling like I’m wasting time and energy with pointless “exercising.”
WIN.
Which brings us, weirdly enough, to the subject of…
…AI.
I’m not going to blanket-declare AI innately evil and insist it be burned with fire. And I don’t despise it in a cranky “hating on all new-fangled tech” kind of way. I know you probably work in a company that requires you to use AI, and if you refuse, you’ll be in the next round of layoffs. In that situation, refusing to use it as a tool to get past a mountain of work that no mere human could possibly accomplish without it would be like refusing to use FedEx to deliver a package to meet tomorrow’s deadline.
Do I wish we lived in a world where nobody expected us to turn things around overnight? It doesn’t matter. We don’t.
But when we do have a choice…
One big thing I’ve learned from gazing at falling cherry blossoms with Japanese people is that we really do need to experience sadness if we also want to experience happiness.
That we need to know loss and deprivation to fully appreciate times of joy and plenty. That I’ll never get to enjoy the amazing shrine at the top of all those crowd-deterring steps unless I endure the burning of my quads along the way.
Making life too easy will rob me—and my readers—of the insights and expertise that allows us to deeply connect with each other and the world.
You’re not going to care what happens to the characters in my books if they only have the kind of experiences a machine mind can copy, because even though machines have a rough equivalent of brains, they don’t have guts.
They can’t feel anything. They don’t experience the visceral fear of falling, the tears that surprise us for no good reason six months after losing a loved one, that buoyant, expansive feeling in our hearts when a baby lights up with a big grin when we reach to pick them up.
Let’s outsource the impossible things, not the difficult ones.
Let’s use AI as a tool, not a crutch.
When we’re allowed to choose, let’s choose not to use it for anything we could do ourselves. Even if it’s harder.
Only you can decide where you’re comfortable drawing the line, but my current rule of thumb is: If I’d hesitate to say I used AI to do something, that’s a sign I shouldn’t be using it. Like, could ChatGPT write a nicer thank you note than I could? Probably. Would I want a friend who did something kind for me to know that AI penned my thanks? Absolutely not.
My promise to you for everything published in my name:
No AI. No ads. Ever.
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The last thing Birdie needs is to turn her life upside down solve a murder that was committed before she was born…
Birdie is a true daughter of the pleasure quarter, the chosen apprentice to Yoshiwara’s number one queen of the night—she’d rather do anything than derail her future life of wearing opulent robes and entertaining lords of the land. But when her search for the mother she never knew takes a dangerous turn, she finds herself with an impossible choice: betray her own flesh and blood, or live the rest of her life being hunted by a powerful man who won’t stop until they’re both dead.
“…a complete immersion in a world of beauty, drama, secrets, and betrayals.”
—Kim Hays, author of the Polizei Bern series
Jonelle Patrick writes novels set in Japan, and blogs at Only In Japan and The Tokyo Guide I Wish I’d Had
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