By ELISA TURNER

“I think, therefore I am.” A phrase many of us have heard, either from a joke about a horse who walks into a bar, or spoken by your philosophy professor. It was said by René Descartes, and its significance grows pressing in a world that has utilized artificial intelligence over organic intelligence.

I understand that AI is easy. It is easy to get AI to write your annotations, or summarize a paper, or do your writing for you. It is easy to float one’s way through education, gaslighting oneself into thinking one understands something while feeding the content to generative AI until it spits out something that resembles comprehension. And believe me, I understand that education is painful— it is a painful process of learning and building and being knocked down only to rebuild again. In the end, the goal of education is to yield creation, and creation is wholly anguish. This should not be a surprise to anybody— the idea of “the tortured artist” has been prominent ever since we started to give a shit about the people behind art. Pain is a catalyst for, a byproduct of, and an end result of creation.

I was chatting with a classmate of mine, lightheartedly lamenting about the difficulty of a particular assignment, when my peer told me something along the lines of “only a masochist would do that assignment without ChatGPT.”

I am repeatedly disappointed, disheartened, and frankly disgusted by the willingness of my peers to surrender their right to create, and their liberty to think, to AI. To shame someone for putting in effort is ridiculous as a whole. If acknowledging and accepting suffering as a vital hand in the process of creation— be it a paper, a piece of art, an article, or an insignificant assignment— qualifies as masochism, then spank me stupid and call me a pain slut. If wanting the things I put my name on to be wholly mine, wholly and organically a product of the human experience, makes me a masochist, then so be it.

Obscenities aside, I come back to Descartes. If we forfeit our liberty to think, then we forfeit our liberty to be.

I think, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I create.

I create, therefore I leave a mark on the world.

I create, and creation is anguish.

I leave a mark on the world anyways. Some part of the world will not like it, and that, too, will be anguish.

I think. I create. I leave my fingerprints on the things I touch. I am wrought with suffering every step of the way. Therefore, I am.

One day I am going to leave the world I did my damn best to put a fingerprint on. And when I leave, the people who knew me will sit in the discomfort and pain of loss as they write my obituary, my eulogy, and the engraving on my gravestone. They will use that anguish as the catalyst, the byproduct, and the result of creation that it is supposed to be. And if being proud of carrying that weight makes masochists of my mourners, then so be it. Those of you who propagate the use of generative AI warrant your obituaries, your eulogies, and the engravings on your gravestones being written by the cold calculations of an algorithm that never knew you.

Featured Image: Vivian Kopka’27