Frank Chimero, in an exhortation to treat AI as an instrument, with a focus on practice:
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my use of AI as a kind of spatial relationship. Where do I stand in relation to the machine—above it, beside it, under it? Each position carries a different kind of power dynamic. To be above is to steer, beside is to collaborate, below is to serve. […]
Without skills, the model’s limits become your own, no different from anyone else typing wishes into a text box. Take what the AI gives without question and you’re not producing, you’re consuming. Eventually, that passivity gets used against you. We’ve seen it before: streaming services flattened art into algorithmic averages and background noise, newsfeeds rewired attention toward outrage because engagement meant growth. Each time, the machine attracted us with individual customization while quietly taking control of the terms. The same will happen with AI if used for passive consumption, even if that consumption is dressed up as execution.
It’s up to the human using the machine to decide which skills are worth nurturing and which they can forego. Skills evolve with tools — some de-skilling could just be seen as a form of re-skilling. Kwame Anthony Appiah, writing in The Atlantic:
Most forms of de-skilling, if you take the long view, are benign. Some skills became obsolete because the infrastructure that sustained them also had. Telegraphy required fluency in dots and dashes; linotype, a deft hand at a molten-metal keyboard; flatbed film editing, the touch of a grease pencil and splicing tape, plus a mental map of where scenes lived across reels and soundtracks. When the telegraph lines, hot-metal presses, and celluloid reels disappeared, so did the crafts they supported. […]
More radical, new technologies can summon new skills into being. Before the microscope, there were naturalists but no microscopists: Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had to invent the practice of seeing and interpreting the invisible. Filmmaking didn’t merely borrow from theatre; it brought forth cinematographers and editors whose crafts had no real precedent.