Letter to my Pre-AI Self

You think you are going to be a physics major. You’re not the CS type. Your dad spent your whole childhood coding in his office, and your mom said you are far too creative to spend all your time staring at a computer screen.

You thought she was so right.

You took CS 106a. Wait, you had more fun than you thought you would. That kind of thinking scratched your brain perfectly, right in that spot that you used to scratch with Rubik’s cubes, and before that, Minecraft redstone contraptions, and before that, legos.

"You took CS 106b. Maybe you were wrong about your dad."

You took CS 107 and 103. Maybe your mom was wrong about you.

You took CS 109 and 110 and 142 and 161 and 154, and before you knew it, you were a CS major.

You were really good at it. You would finish the problem sets early and be frustrated that you couldn’t already work on the next one. You understand your dad now.

You realize that two-thirds of college have somehow passed, and you’re chest-deep in the CS quicksand. You wonder if you even want to do CS as a career. Nothing about working for some large tech conglomerate excites you. You wonder if you only like CS for the way it challenges you intellectually. All of your friends are studying AI, but none of them even enjoy it. They all just want to make money, and you can’t blame them.

You remember that you’re also an artist and that AI scares you. It scares you because you don’t know what it will even mean to make original art when the space becomes so saturated with artificially created art.

Maybe, you wonder, people will learn to value only human-created art. Maybe your art always has a place because people enjoy the emotion that goes into it. Maybe people will always value the process.

But part of you is still scared, so you take AI classes in the hopes of being ahead of the curve. You apply for the CS coterm with the purpose of integrating music and AI. You find out about a new class, “Music and AI,” and you take it.

But after you have done all of this, you will sit and wonder what it was all for. As you’ll sit and spend all your time doing AI homework, your songs will be left unfinished on your hard drive; your band will practice less than ever before; your walls will be full of the same paintings from years ago because you haven’t painted since.

You will wish you had more time to make art: not for anyone else, but just for the sake of it. You will miss having the temporal and mental capacity to pour yourself into something. You will realize that it doesn’t matter if AI replaces the entire art scene because the most important thing about your art is how it makes you feel: how it makes your life make sense.

Only now, as you spend all your time trying to stay ahead of the curve, can you see how you have fallen behind on the things that matter.

So, always remember to leave space in your life to do things for you.

Sincerely,

You now