Epistemological disappointment
I liked school. I was not the most diligent of students for the same reason I liked it: I just liked learning stuff. Not necessarily the stuff I was expected to learn, although I learned that too. I didn't care about the academics of it, the grades. I loved reading about things, I loved understanding things and more than anything I loved not understanding things. I loved talking to my teachers, who wished I was a better student (that I was "más aplicada"), and having them praise my questions and direct me to other things they thought I would like learning and were out of scope for the class.
Some other kids didn't like school so much, for one or many silly or very valid reasons. And if I had to work together with them, on a presentation or some kind of research project, for example, what invariably happened was that they wanted to half-ass it and think about it as little as possible.
I am not against half-assing school projects. I think it's fine, and in fact I was very good at that myself. But I did like to think about them, often a lot, before ultimately deciding to half-ass them. So my disappointment in those team projects wasn't that of someone with an academic disposition, who wanted to work hard and get good grades, but the result of a missed opportunity. Most of the times I thought the tasks either were fun and interesting or had the potential to be made fun an interesting. But making a school task fun and interesting when it isn't out of the box requires an investment. Not "hard work", something far more nebulous. Good faith, maybe, curiosity; a willingness to let yourself be interested, intellectually engaged. You have to want to have fun (not a given) and you have to believe that this particular thing has the potential to be twisted into something that will make you have fun.
My disappointment was epistemological.
And this brings me to the present: I like learning and knowing. I like thinking about learning and knowing and thinking about thinking about learning and knowing. I am not a "result-oriented person" and find the mere existence of the phrase frankly terrifying.
When I ask you a question whose answer I could, with relative ease, find somewhere else, I am not asking it to get the answer, or at least not exclusively, but precisely to ask you the question. I care about my asking of the question, and I care about your answering the question far more than I care about your answer to it.
So when I ask you a question and you reply "let me just ask ch4tGPT" you are stabbing a knife to my heart.
People who hate thinking and their fundamental, sneering disdain for anyone who doesn't have been around ever since someone sat down for the first time and invented thinking. But I don't think it has ever been as ubiquitous and accepted as it is now to laugh at and quickly dismiss anyone who enjoys the distance between a question and its answer, a distance to be trodden deliberately and, yes, sometimes slowly.
I refuse to use "AI" because I refuse to be a part of the unadulterated epistemological disappointment that the world has become. I refuse to use "AI" even to automate away boring and repetitive tasks. If I ever want to automate away a boring and repetitive task I will find a way to automate it myself, maybe learning something in the process. Better yet, I will not automate it away, but think about what exactly it is that makes it boring and repetitive, or the words "repetitive" and "boring" be so often used together. I will look at the thing again, more charitably, and find something about it I can enjoy. And then I will go ahead and enjoy it.