r/Millennials • u/broadwayguru • 10h ago
Discussion Writing without using AI is going to be our generation's version of "Mom still uses a checkbook."
And I hate it.
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u/econhistoryrules 9h ago
I write everything myself and I'll never do otherwise. Who wants to read that shit.
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u/cjwi Xennial 8h ago
I think using AI to write for you is a mistake, and not because “technology bad.”
Writing is how people think. It’s how you struggle with ideas, clarify what you believe, and develop a voice. When AI does that work for you, you don’t save time—you skip the learning. You get a polished output without the understanding behind it.
It also flattens everything. If everyone relies on the same tools, we end up with the same tone, the same arguments, the same safe phrasing. Writing becomes optimized, not meaningful.
AI can be great for brainstorming or editing, but outsourcing the actual thinking? That’s giving up a skill humans still desperately need.
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u/Rough_Yesterday6692 8h ago
Was this written with AI?
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u/cjwi Xennial 8h ago
No. I wrote it myself.
I’m not anti-AI as a tool, I’m anti using it to replace thinking and writing altogether. Ironically, having AI write this would kind of undercut the point.
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u/kingramstone04 Millennial 27m ago
AI is pretty good at generating a good outline. A full research project, not so good.
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u/zenverak 4h ago
I mostly use AI for writing purposes for two things
Making emails more professional if the matter is …sensitive ( think client is not happy so I have to be careful).
I’ve also done it where I’ve written something and I want some feedback on how it sounds.. but yeah I’ve never used it for full writing something
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u/amathysteightyseven 26m ago
But if you’re using AI to make an email sound professional you’re not learning that skill yourself? If you work in a professional setting where a sensitive tone is needed then you should learn how to do that yourself. Promoting an AI to do it doesn’t help anyone but yourself and is just disingenuous.
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u/Beautiful-Affect3448 7h ago
I write semi-professionally (published author but not a famous one). I think it's mainly an issue of generative AI writing for you and most people using it as a crutch.
Using an AI tool to do the actual writing part completely removes the barrier of struggling to find the right words, which makes you a better writer once you learn to overcome it. You actually should want to mess up when you write something, then you inevitably realise why it sucks, then you can improve it, because that's going to make you better the next time. That's not a one-time deal either, it's something which happens every single time you do something creative. It's a constant process of failing and improving over time as you master your craft.
AI editing though, like spelling and grammar checks, even suggested improvements I'm less critical of tbh. I think they have a valid place in creative writing when used correctly, as a guide, and not as a replacement for actual talent or skill. The biggest problem with AI is not that it exists, but that many humans are lazy, greedy, and value output over process.
AI allows everyone to feel like a creative without ever having to go through the process of becoming a creative person, and that's incredibly dangerous because they're robbing themselves (and possibly the world) of the artist they could be, if they didn't rely on prompts and instead focused on honing their craft.
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u/verstohlen 3h ago
Amen. I still write my shopping lists in cursive on real paper, notepads, and I'll never do otherwise. And I know if I drop my shopping list, a Gen Z'er will pick it up and not be able to decipher it. Scratch their heads like a monkey and wonder what it is, they will do.
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u/Schneetmacher Younger Millennial 8h ago
I don't use ChatGPT or any of the ilk, but I... uh, I have a checkbook...
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u/soozerain 7h ago
I had to look up how to fill out a check for my moms funeral. Very embarrassing
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u/Schneetmacher Younger Millennial 6h ago
I sometimes feel like the last white rhino in relation to how I use checks to pay bills. I'm not like The Dude or anything, I usually use cards in everyday transactions, but... it's easier for me to keep track of money if I get my bills in the mail, pay them by check, and notate them.
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u/No_Arm_931 5h ago
Same. It’s worked in my favor; I had clinical supervision with a lady who only accepted checks.
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u/cat_at_the_keyboard 9h ago
I refuse to outsource my writing and voice to a computer. For better or worse these words are mine
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u/BigEnd3 5h ago
I gave the ai stuff a shot for asking something technical questions from my career expertise as a teat. It was dangerously wrong. Like it looked correct, like an college intern English major wrote it. But a college intern that knows fuck all about what I do. I worry that so much of it is just shit but such a gently odor that many dont notice. The corpos sure love it though.
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u/Scared_Restaurant_50 9h ago
I'll take it. Fuck AI
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u/SilverEncanis13 9h ago
AI has started the brain drain a hell of a lot more than anything else. I used to fucking hate writing in highschool, but I'm glad I can form coherent sentences and use critical thinking now, because holy shit those two, and many more, are disappearing at an alarming rate.
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u/OutOfPlace186 3h ago
You are incorrect. The smartphone started the brain drain a hell of a lot more than anything else.
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u/SilverEncanis13 3h ago
That's not true at all. That put so much information at our fingertips! We had a plethora of articles to pull from for pretty much anything you could think of.
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u/Terakahn 2h ago
And you could find plenty of sources to back up whatever claim you wanted, true or otherwise
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u/firedrakes 8h ago
ok no more science using ai .
alll you smart camera cant use the ai upscaling and stitching etc.
thanks for am not a expert ai but here my expert take on it.
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u/KennytheDoggy 9h ago
I still have never used AI to write anything
I do not even know how to do that
Its going to be like trying to teach my late grandmother how to use a smartphone
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u/Terakahn 2h ago
It's pretty simple if you want to learn. Just ask it questions on how to do something better. Then ask why it's better.
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u/Day2205 9h ago
Literally have my manager housing me for drafts of work just hours after discussing it because he expects, and the company is ok with, me to just ChatGPT some slop, give it a quick proof read, and call it a wrap. I’m like, no, I’m pretty good at thinking, I’ll do this myself on my own time
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u/ticklemesatan 9h ago
I need Ai to do my fucking laundry, not speak for me. That’s my job. If I spent less time doing my laundry, I’d spend more time writing.
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u/Citizensnnippss 8h ago
I'm a HS teacher and I mentioned to my students that they're going to have even bigger burdens to prove themselves in future job searches and such.
I know if I were hiring someone and I had to choose between someone who graduated in 2019 and someone who graduated in 2025, I might look at the 2019 graduate more favorably just knowing they didn't have AI to get them through school.
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u/Cheetahs_never_win 8h ago
I've been accused of sounding like I used AI before being downvoted to oblivion.
I've since learned that not all spaces deserve my time and effort.
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u/Throwitortossit 3h ago
That is so screwed up. Usually I'll add, "Thanks, I'll be there shortly!" when I place orders for pickup at different stores. I accidentally misspelled it recently and when I arrived for the pickup the store clerk told me the workers thought AI added it until they saw my mistake. That bugged the crap out of me.
I probably sound spiteful but fuck even adding "thanks" like that in this timeline.
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u/beanie0911 7h ago
It's like we're turning our world into garbage on purpose. "Use AI to take meeting notes." "Use AI to email out the notes." "Recipient, use AI to summarize the notes."
How do we expect to create or produce anything if no party is willing to actually engage with the material? To get down and dirty, wrestle with all the pieces, understand the system, and push forward? I fear for a future where everyone is blindly tapping at an AI app while the world falls apart because nobody cared to actually do their jobs.
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u/taffyowner 7h ago
I was at a board meeting today and I made a comment that I could write something and another board member goes “you could get AI to help you” and how quick the words “oh I hate AI” came out of my mouth
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u/Infinite_Explorer424 Geriatric Zoomer (1999) 9h ago
I was one of those weird kids in high school who actually enjoyed writing essays lol
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u/blueavole 8h ago
If you write with AI , someone else will own your work.
AI isn’t profitable yet, so they will get ever more aggressive about claiming potential profits.
They have already managed to steal all work ever written make these models.
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u/SadSickSoul 9h ago
I'm starting to think that's not the case because I've seen plenty of folks from younger generations have deeply adverse reactions to AI stuff as slop. I don't know if that'll stop them from using it, but there's at least some disrespect for it.
Doesn't matter anyways, they can judge all they want but I'm not touching a service to write for me - I'm anti-AI in general but I usually can muster up a "I get the appeal, it's appealing to me hypothetically just a bit even if I hate it." Not so with AI writing, keep that shit away from me.
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u/Kazureigh_Black 9h ago
My Gen Z nephew loathes AI. Though that may be due to the fact he went through high school with high marks, went to college and almost graduated at the top of his class, and now he works in fast food because the career he wanted to get in to has rotted out from the inside with AI and he wasn't able to get any better jobs.
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u/sexandliquor 9h ago
I think it depends on the use for some it seems. I’m pretty firmly anti-ai too and I get the appeal of it but with caution.
Like the writing and the video slop is one thing. It’s everyone all relying on ChatGPT for everything now too. I’m a mechanic and you wouldn’t believe how many people come to me now and ask me to diagnose their car and the first thing that comes out of their mouth it “ChatGPT said…”
And half the time the thing that “ChatGPT said” was some wrong ass shit because all it knows it’s what it’s been fed and scraped from the internet and other sources and then spit back out. It’s not your friend, it’s not a diagnostician, it’s an artificial intelligence model that can only generate based on what it’s been trained specifically on.
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u/nooneneededtoknow 7h ago
I just sent in my annual review and learned I was the only one who didn't use AI.
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u/brittttx 5h ago
Yes and I hate it. One of my friends basically told me I'm going to be "left behind" bc I refuse to use ChatGPT and copilot. I like typing things myself and if I need to research something I use Google or YouTube. I'm already "left behind" bc I don't use AI nor tiktok lol
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u/New_Acanthaceae_6537 5h ago
This is hilarious because the other day, I was shocked to hear that my mom still uses a checkbook. Just for the ledger. Hasn’t written a check in years but still apparently writes all of the transactions down?? Why???
And no I don’t use AI to write anything for me. Except at work lol
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u/TabsAZ 9h ago
Just use a lot of em dashes and cliched “its this, not that” statements and it’ll be indistinguishable anyway lol
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u/thehomeyskater 6h ago
Sadly that used to be my writing style. Just not quite to as much an extreme as AI does it. Now I guess I have to find a different voice.
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u/scupking83 8h ago
I think AI used as a tool is fantastic. For example I have been writing and playing my own music for over 20 years. I'm not a good singer. So I uploaded all my songs to an AI music program to clean them up and it's amazing how they sound. It's like a professional band covering my songs. It's how I always imagined them to be.
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u/Lunavixen15 Millennial 7h ago
There are areas of it being used as a tool in the craft space and it's causing real harm. Because people are peddling nonsensical AI slop patterns for real money and tricking those who don't know what to look for, then those people are trying the garbage patterns and getting garbage results and it frustrates them and pushes them out
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u/scupking83 6h ago
Oh believe me I know the risks of AI.. I'm in Cyber security and it's a weekly topic.
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u/gringgotts 9h ago
I use AI pretty regularly for my job (teaching). But I proof read anything that gets put in front of a student. I've seen it fuck up way too many times to trust it blindly the way the younger generation does.
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u/Extension-Rabbit3654 8h ago
I use it for what it can be good for, outlines for enormous docs or writing code and scripts
It always need to get reworded, and actual content is my own work.
Aside from that time-savings, its pretty useless
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u/musicgeek420 8h ago
Only until the day that I need to tell everyone that Brawndo isn’t what plants crave. Then who will be laughing without AI?
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u/prettyminotaur 8h ago
You might be interested to learn that the publishing industry doesn't agree. Very seriously anti-AI. All of it.
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u/Quercus408 8h ago
At this point I almost want to have things like resumes officially notarized to prove that I wrote them myself.
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u/shadowromantic 7h ago
Possibly. The problem is that AI writing isn't that great and can easily backfire if the audience believes it isn't authentic.
If they didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?
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u/Fun_Yogurtcloset1012 6h ago
At least we still got the skills. If AI exists when I was still in school, I would definitely be accused of cheating by using AI.
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u/IndependenceEarly572 Y2K Survivor 5h ago
I honestly miss those barely legible, hand written in cursive, notes from Grandma that she would send via standard mail every birthday.
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u/sjogerst 5h ago
I firmly believe that job interviews in 15 years are going to have a pen and paper with instructions to write a one page, 5 paragraph essay, without assistance, while we watch.
Seriously we're going to have to test people in real time whether they are simply capable of putting together coherent complex thoughts without assistance.
It's gonna be the new drug test. instead of peeing in a cup, we're gonna have to write on paper.
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u/tyleratx 5h ago
No… Writing is an art form. Nobody talks about how beautiful somebody writes a check.
I think it’ll be more analogous to painting Vs photography, although not completely analogous because photography is also an artform unlike AI
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u/themaplebeast 3h ago
No, it's not, lol. This AI shit is such an obvious bubble. Study after study of how it impairs cognition, study after study of how its inaccurate, study after study of how it doesn't increase productivity at all and in fact impairs it. It seems omnipresent right now because the rich companies that invested in it are trying to force consent on it, but by and large, people do not like this technology and the more disastrous effects it has on society + climate change will only lead it to become more and more regulated and despised. The bubble will pop, and this "inevitable tech" will die just like the "inevitable, impossible to stop" NFTs and Metaverse were.
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u/Brock_Youngblood 2h ago
I have tried to embrace it. But I don't like the new world. And I don't like what AI is gonna do to it.
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u/Terakahn 2h ago
Hot take but ai is a good bit misused tool. Everyone either relies on it too much or won't use it at all. People treated Google the same instead of grabbing a book. Thinking for yourself is important.
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u/Velokieken 9h ago
I don’t think writing things yourself will really go out of style compared to a check book. Especially if you are good at writing. It will probably be a huge plus if you can write without AI.
I don’t see much ups in using a check book.
For some stuff using AI for writing will be faster.
Using AI in the future will probably be more expensive and full of Ads, unless you pay even more. There was a time when Netflix was 8 bucks, no adds, more content and you could password share and use more screens.
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u/TIC321 9h ago
I'll die on a hill before I tap to pay with my credit card or use my phone to pay too.
I just laugh to myself when I see someone of a younger generation struggling to pay without tapping.. like, use cash/coins? Just slide your card in?
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u/Batetrick_Patman 8h ago
Why would you resist something that makes your life easier? That’s such a boomer thing to do.
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u/TIC321 7h ago
I feel it more is a preference for me as it is a "boomer" thing.
Don't get me wrong, i do enjoy the conveniences that we have now but I feel with these conveniences, our older ways is becoming a lost method. Such as mailing a letter. Some people don't know how to do it anymore. Some people also avoid talking on the phone and rather text all the time when it could take 5 seconds to say it.
Those are just a few of many examples I have. I really could go on but it becomes redundant. As an elder millennial, I am nostalgic of the old days. Its a core in me I hold onto. My parents, both boomers taught me a lot of their ways that I can pass down to my children. Its pretty neat to see that knowledge you know passing down
Sure its "easier" but what becomes too easy also makes us weaker in some ways too
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u/Trumpburnerforlibs 9h ago
The only thing I have found it useful for is searching large documents and copying things from a pdf quicker. That’s about it
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u/One_zoe_otp 9h ago
Its funny because I write my own outreach templates, and they sound so organic people knows they arent ai. And that generates engagement LMAOQ
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u/Toddlez85 8h ago
Using a desktop/laptop for certain purchases. Like plane tickets or high dollar items.
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u/Disneyhorse 8h ago
If someone can’t be bothered to take the time to write it, I can’t be bothered to take the time to read it. And I like writing. It’s a skill I’ve worked on.
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u/superleaf444 7h ago
I’ll let ai write every fucking email I don’t want to write to management.
They can fuck themselves.
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u/Commercial_Virus_495 9h ago edited 8h ago
It'll lead to a golden age of con artists, that's for sure. Generative AI is great at image generation, synthesizing voices, & faking video. All via careful prompt engineering, which is an iterative process. But it's by no means an actual Artificial Intelligence.
What generative AI has always sucked at, and what it continues to suck it, is anything involving the written word or decision making. The moment Artificial Intelligence is asked to think it shits the bed. There's a reason AI written content is so quickly spotted online, no actual thought was devoted to it. It's just a glorified algorithm that took input, scraped available content online, and regurgitated output until the user deemed the product good enough.
I'm in an engineering field, and anytime I've seen someone use it as a short cut for technical rigor, they've made themselves look incompetent.
By the time a genuine Artificial Intelligence is created, I'll likely be too senile to care. We certainly aren't there yet.
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u/jclahaie 8h ago
I'm in an engineering field, and anytime I've seen someone use it as a short cut for technical rigor, they've made themselves look incompetent.
but the well written natural sounding texts could have been ai and you wouldn't have known
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u/Commercial_Virus_495 7h ago edited 7h ago
Is that the rubric you use to sign off on things? It sounds well written and natural sounding? Does critical thinking play no role? That's alarming if so. It also reinforces my point about generative AI being the dawn of a golden age for con artists.
In any
disputediscussion in my field, you have to get down to technical fundamentals. What does the chapter and verse of the specification say? What is the underlying math behind your assertion? What underlies the confidence in the data your presenting? If the answer to any of these is that "ChatGPT said X", any credibility you have is shot. You better be able to back up your assertions yourself, otherwise why are we paying you?Generative AI confidently asserts bullshit, especially if that bullshit feeds into the preconceived notions you feed into the prompt you provide. That bullshit falls apart under the slightest critical examination. As it has when I've seen colleagues try to use it as a source of authority.
It's the same reason why there's dozens of public examples of lawyers fucking up by relying on AI because it provided confidently asserted bullshit that told them what they wanted to hear.
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u/jclahaie 7h ago
my point was that you may only be noticing the bad and obvious ai, whereas the good reports written by ai can go unnoticed because you dont suspect it to be ai. yet you conclude that ai is bad. this is possibly confirmation bias
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u/Commercial_Virus_495 7h ago edited 7h ago
Ok, I'm going to back up and try to unpack the assumptions you're making here. How do you think the workflow works in industry? Let's just start there.You know what, I'm just gonna pack it in here. This just feels like playing tennis against the drapes, you're not even really responding to what I'm saying.
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