Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
I have been writing this column for about ten years now, on and off. So, it makes sense that some of you will ask: ‘What do you think about AI?’
So, I had a conversation with someone I used to know at a café in Cary, NC. I went to this place a lot to do these meetings with long-lost colleagues, acquaintances, former friends, internet new friends from my writing community and while rekindling family ties. Each was good. Each wound about and took us places, like any good conversation or trip or life chapter will. Today’s conversation ended with this very question. What do I think about it. The whole AI thing.
Well. I guess it’s time to talk about it, finally. After all, I’ve had a little bit of time since it blew up and then became called ‘slop’ and then was treated indifferently by many in my personal writing circles or detested by others. I don’t know very many people who love it or love to say out loud that they love it, but I’m certain those folks are out there, and in my communities, too. I guess we all have different opinions. I usually keep mine to myself but today is a different sort of day as I am writing this. I’ve had some time, I think, to sort out my emotions around what I feel. Maybe it’s time to share.
The short answer is, ‘I have no idea what I think about this because each use case is so, so different.’
Information is just information. It’s not really ‘intelligence.’ And information is only high-value if it provides something new. How did someone put it once, let me try to remember. It’s not high-value info if it’s, ‘The sun will rise tomorrow,’ but it is very high-value if it’s, ‘There will be an elephant crashing through the ceiling in five seconds… four… three…’
Yes, I recall now, it was in Copenhagen, at the office of an internet acquaintance there.
I’d come by to talk about game design, or at least inquire about it, not that I know anything about this, and they’d said, ‘Sure.’ This is what I like about meandering and wandering into unexpected tidbits, and finding my way in the world requires me to go and ask a lot of questions to a lot of people and this used to be easier when we didn’t have AI, because people still asked questions of one another. A practice that helped so many of us who were curious and wondering what fresh new next direction we might take, well, it used to be better before because people still were like, ‘Sure, I can help you. What would you like to know?’ And they’d point you to their favorite bakery on the way to whatever museum you’d asked about, and there you were, having a fantastic croissant. I miss this.
I love laughter and spontaneity in conversations. ‘You can program that, though,’ someone said to me, once, in response to this long-winded monologue from me about how fun it is to blunder into unexpected conversations and make eye contact and spill something and there it was, the unexpected just there, just then moment that led us to the next, and the next next after that. He said, ‘You can program AI to laugh.’
Then it got really sad when I told this to a dear friend who said, ‘You can. You can program it to laugh.’
What happened to my friend, my acquaintance, the wider world? Where were we going if we weren’t going to be able to feel safe enough to relax enough to say a thing, let go, laugh a little, unwind, and be ourselves?
Here. Reality and 2026 and the things to come that go along with those changes, incremental, bit by bit, as we change and move and discover that what we want to know is findable on… AI, or so we are led to believe.
What’s really there is incomplete. The nuance, delight, and localness of information that is found only when you leave your phone at home and ask people for directions and follow a paper map made by someone who knows the place and cares about you. Little things mean a lot. The missing pieces, the small details… I miss those.
AI writing is boring because it doesn’t know what it’s not got; it might tell you it does and sound as if it could invent a way to fill in the gaps, but it’s just using other people’s stuff and rehashing, and mishmashing and giving you the things you think you want to hear and that’s not really interesting, is it? I mean, I guess the bar of what counts as ‘interesting’ has changed a lot, too. Selfie-getting has become dangerous, and we… still… ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘subscribe.’ Is anyone else so tired of hearing those things from the YouTubers? Me, no. I don’t want to hear them anymore. I don’t want to like, follow, and subscribe.
I want to wander. To laugh, make my own blunders, hit the wrong keys, play, and be.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
