In case you missed the last one, I’m back to writing Unfiltered after 10ish months. Before the break, I churned out 17 issues with probably a week or two's gap in between.

This time, it took me 10 months to come back.

Half of me felt like I lost my groove. In reality, I was extremely consumed by life outside of these letters. I was running around for work, grinding myself physically, which left me with very little time to think and write. Any free time I could find, I was watching some reality TV show (brain rot) with the missus and completely tuned out podcasts and books.

The other half of me took a step back because of technology. AI, to be specific. I saw a trend of creators getting into the email newsletter space and within weeks, I noticed many creators churning out AI-generated newsletters. I’ll be the first to admit that was quite annoying to see.

But why? AI slop, basically. But let's unpack this.

The same tool that the world was fearing would take our jobs is also stealing our spark. Yes, AI can enhance and facilitate your creative journey. But what good is that if we all sound the same? Does it help that, depending on these tools reduces our attention span and also our own “context window”? Think of the concept context window as active memory recall in your threads with ChatGPT, over a period of time. It’s annoying when ChatGPT misses some detail from a PDF you attached 20 prompts ago, right? Now imagine if that was you…

While I was away, I knew I wanted to get back to writing these newsletters. And as always, I wanted to write them intentionally, offering high-quality content. If you spend 5 minutes reading these, my goal is that you enjoy them. Even if you don’t in any given week, I want to know why, so that I can make them better for you.

In the past 10 months, I formed some thoughts on what we need to be conscious of when leveraging AI. I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to be mindful of 4 key things:

What we derive from the help of AI is only as good as our exposure levels. Yes, exposure to the world around us.

I believe what we consume (books, podcasts, interactions with people etc), directly dictates what we produce or rather aim to produce. The more thoughtful we are with our ideas and, therefore, our words (input), the more effective our final product (output). Instead of patiently ideating and expressing some curiosity over problem statements, we jump to writing a prompt and expect the model to just know. Once we receive an output or answer, we need to critically analyse what is it that we have received. I say human skills above because some of us might not immediately deploy critical thinking towards the output nor empathy towards the end beneficiary of said output.

For 7 of these 10 months, I didn’t even try to write anything because the idea of AI taking away my spark was crippling me. Made me think, what's the point? Thankfully, the conviction in Unfiltered was strong enough to not let go. So I just kept doing my thing. Reflected on my own actions and inactions while interacting with various AI tools and came to the conclusion that at each step of the way, as technology evolves, we need to be self-aware. We need to reflect and ask ourselves: what is the best, most ethical and impactful way to use this technology?

This graphic above was designed by AI. The TL;DR is AI-generated, too. I used AI to help me communicate my idea more clearly. And definitely used it to spell check (not always though).

This isn’t some massive discovery that I have shared and there are many studies showing how we might actually become dumber from using ChatGPT etc so often. But as I’ve said before, this is an idea which I feel needs to be spoken about, remembered and referenced every time we’re feeling stuck due to rapid innovation.

Or maybe its just me. I’m more EQ than IQ, anyway

For now, I’ve understood the assignment: let it facilitate your art, not replace your art.

Goodbye