"Naming what you feel with more precision predicts how well you regulate it, research indicates. AI-assisted work may create in its users feelings that typical workplace vocabulary does not yet handle. What remains mine, for now, is deciding when the work is done."
"I am writing this paragraph slower than the AI assistant on my screen would write it, and I know that, and the knowing is part of what I am trying to describe. For three decades I built a career on ideation, drafting, research, and editing-the early stages of intellectual work where the shape of an argument gets found. Those stages are the parts I used to love. A few years into intense AI use, I do not love them anymore. I do not even dislike them. Something flatter than that has replaced the feeling, and I cannot yet say what it is."
"The word that arrives first is . That is not quite right. I am bored because what I enjoyed has been taken from me, and that is a more specific state than boredom-boredom is the absence of stimulus, and this is the presence of a stimulus that no longer belongs to me. Numb is closer, but numb implies I am protecting myself from something painful, and I do not think pain is what is here. Redundant and useless are the words that show up at three in the morning, and they are about role, not feeling. None of them is the word."
"That does not, in my view, make it useless. Often it is startlingly useful. But the usefulness is part of the problem: It can reproduce the shape of thought without sharing the cost of having one. Much of what it does well is retrospective. It renders the past with uncanny fidelity, including the mistakes built into that past. What it cannot yet do i"
Naming feelings with greater precision predicts how well regulation occurs. AI-assisted work can generate feelings that typical workplace vocabulary does not yet handle. Intellectual work stages like ideation, drafting, research, and editing once felt enjoyable, but intense AI use can replace that feeling with something flatter. The experience can shift from boredom to numbness, and words like redundant or useless may appear, often describing role rather than feeling. AI systems can sound human without having human experience, and they can be useful while reproducing thought patterns without sharing the cost of thought. The usefulness can be retrospective, rendering the past with high fidelity, including past mistakes, while limitations remain in what it cannot yet do.
#ai-assisted-work #emotions-and-self-regulation #workplace-language #creativity-and-ideation #human-cost-of-thought
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