AI tools can ruin a lot more than your fundraising

Last week, I talked about the threat bad use of AI tools poses for your fundraising.

There’s a bigger threat. For you personally, and maybe even to human culture itself: AI saves us from the agony of thinking.

And thinking — the kind that’s difficult, agonizing, with no success guaranteed — that’s where most human greatness comes from. Including the greatness you have in you.

Over-use of AI can make you a smaller, more shallow, less effective person.

Here’s how a recent piece in The Atlantic put it, at The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI:

Why sweat over the introductory paragraph of an essay if an AI program can sail over whatever argumentative obstacle you have in the space of 15 seconds? But the effort and the hang-ups are, as they say, a feature of the human thought process, not a bug…. [I]t is the process that makes human writing sensible and meaningful.

The struggle itself is necessary. When you know approximately what you need to say but haven’t found the approach and the words — there used to be no way around it, other than plagiarize or pay someone else to do it. You had no choice but to hit your head against a wall. Wrestle with a snake. Follow trails that turn out to be wrong. Feeling like a failure.

But ultimately, the struggle led to what you meant to say.

The struggle leads to new understanding. Even new knowledge.

Any difficult communication task benefits from the struggle. Not just trying to persuade total strangers to give their money to support your cause. How about personal challenges: Trying to express the depths of your love for someone. Making a difficult apology.

These tasks usually have a struggle phase. It’s miserable. You hate every second of that phase. You’d do just about anything to escape it.

Now, you have an escape. An AI tool can give you a first draft. It’ll probably be decent. No struggle. You can move on.

But you didn’t make it your own.

And you didn’t achieve any self-improvement. The moment passes. You completed the difficult task, but you’ll never get the insights and strength you’d have gathered by going through the struggle.

You’re like an athlete who never exercises.

Where will your masterpieces come from? Your breakthroughs? Your life-transforming insights?

And not just you. Everyone who uses AI to escape the struggle.

That’s what worries me about AI. It creates the illusion that you no longer need to struggle to communicate.

My advice: Go ahead and use AI as a tool. But no matter how useful and fast it is for you, don’t make AI your only tool for thinking and writing. Keep doing it the hard way, the old way. Embrace the slow and difficult approach.

The younger you are, the more important it is that you do this. You become a master through repeated struggle and experience. AI can remove that from your life. And leave you weaker and less capable.

AI is a powerful tool. Maybe too powerful. I wouldn’t tell you not to use it. But I hope you’ll not always use it. Go ahead and struggle now and then.

That’s how you’ll become your best.

More posts on AI and fundraising.

Over at Moceanic, we’ve built (and continue to refine) an AI fundraising tool. It’s called Copy Koala. It has a great track record of producing superb response in direct mail and email fundraising. It combines powerful training, smart input and prompting, and expert human editing. And the cost to use it is shockingly low. It might be right for your organization. If you have budget and the authority to spend it, consider setting up a quick online meeting with Sean Triner to see if Copy Koala might be right for you.