This article is featured in the 2025 Homecoming Special Issue.
I am terrified of artificial intelligence. Not in a what-if-robots-take-over the-world way, but in a what’s-the-point-of-art-if-it’s-not-human way.
I love writing. I love the process of molding feelings and half-formed thoughts into words, of grounding the noise in my mind in something slightly more tangible. I love the power that comes with creating something that allows a stranger to recognize something from my experience in themselves. It can be frustrating and difficult and still, I love it. The frustration may even be why I love it.
At Dartmouth, I’ve found additional avenues for creative fulfillment in music arrangement, video art, playwriting and more. Making art, I’ve realized, boils down to a series of decisions. What is the right amount of dissonance in this harmony? How many tenths of a second should I cut this clip by? Is my main character’s love interest interesting enough? In playwriting in particular, the decisions I am responsible for are practically unlimited. From character to plot to world to structure, the entire story is up to me — a freedom that is simultaneously exhilarating and overwhelming.
Creating is a tedious process, especially for someone who leans toward perfectionism. But to me, it’s worth it. Yes, a computer could write a play much more quickly than I could. There would be no more character-related frustrations, no more internal debates over whether I should scrap the whole thing and start over, and the end product would be of the same quality, if not better. Win-win-win.
Except for one thing: I would lose the reason I write in the first place.
AI has eliminated the struggle. Yet, the struggle is what makes the process of creating worth it. It’s what gives creatives pride in our work, what allows us to feel like we have expressed something we care about and, subsequently, to hope that our audience picks up what we’ve decided to put down.
But my fear of AI is not limited to my creative passions. I’m scared to use it to summarize readings, to draft emails, to make even small tasks easier. Without the assistance of AI, I might be sacrificing an unnecessary amount of time, but what I’m not sacrificing is the workout my brain gets when it’s forced through a challenge. What I’m not sacrificing is a mind that continues to push itself, to grow. Every choice is a sacrifice — it’s just a matter of what you choose to give up.
This past summer, I watched “WALL-E,” a classic film that depicts a futuristic world in which humans have been sent to live on a spaceship while robots clean up an uninhabitable Earth. On the spaceship, the humans are practically glued to their chairs, which transport them wherever they need to go. Robots attend to their every need, from fetching them drinks to swinging a golf club for them so they can play golf from their chairs by swiping their screen. They never have to walk and barely can anymore. Not only have their bodies atrophied, so have their brains. The captain of the spaceship uses cue cards for his morning announcements that help him pronounce words like “septuacentennial.”
It may be a fictional exaggeration, but it is not nearly as far from reality as it was, perhaps, in 2008, when the film was released. As we allow AI to do more and more, we take on less and less. I don’t want to succumb to ease and convenience. I don’t want to be so resistant to difficulty that I can no longer challenge myself and others.
It may seem like I view AI and art as opposing forces, but I don’t think they have to be. AI holds immense power and although I am certainly not qualified to speak to all of its potential applications, I do believe that power can be harnessed for the good of the arts and the human race as a whole.
I just hope we don’t let anything make our lives too easy, for we’ll lose the magic that comes with the challenge; a life without struggle is a life without accomplishment and growth. As for me, I’ll continue to relish in the frustration of finding the right word and the right harmony, and feel a little more grateful that I get the chance to work through the struggle at all.
Vivian Wang ’27 is a Mirror editor and writer from the California Bay Area pursuing majors in Psychology and Music. In addition to journalism, she enjoys experimenting with storytelling in its many other forms, from arranging music to playwriting.
