{"id":282725,"date":"2025-11-10T06:20:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/282725\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T06:20:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:20:15","slug":"im-a-committed-introvert-but-no-ai-will-take-away-the-joy-i-get-from-other-people-emma-beddington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/282725\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m a committed introvert \u2013 but no AI will take away the joy I get from other people | Emma Beddington"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is depressing: according to the Cut<\/a>, people are using AI to solve escape room puzzles and cheat at trivia nights. Surely, that is the definition of spoiling your own fun? \u201cLike going into a corn maze and just wanting a straight line to the end,\u201d says one TikToker quoted in the article. There\u2019s also an interview with a keen reader who uses ChatGPT as a book club replacement, scraping the internet and aggregating \u201cstimulating opinions and perspectives\u201d. All well and good (actually, no, it sounds bleak as hell) until he had a character\u2019s death spoilered in the fantasy epic he had been enjoying.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Substack seems to be clogging up with AI-generated essays. The nu-blogging platform is an earnestly artisanal space where writers craft their stuff; subcontracting that to a bot seems like the acme of pointlessness. Will Storr, who writes about storytelling, examines this boggling trend and the tells that give it away on his own Substack<\/a>, including a penchant for what he calls \u201cthe impersonal universal\u201d: sweeping statements that sound deep but aren\u2019t. There is, he says, \u201cA white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m baffled how anyone could enjoy using a large language model (LLM) to sound blandly \u201cclever\u201d or participate in any AI-hacked hobby. It doesn\u2019t matter much, I suppose \u2013 this isn\u2019t AI as existential threat. But it matters for fun \u2013 let the bots take our work, but not our joy! I wouldn\u2019t presume to tell anyone how to enjoy themselves \u2013 I\u2019m no expert on fun<\/a>, and would definitely end up sounding like an AI-generated Substack if I did (hug a tree, speak to a stranger, laugh with loved ones). But I have been thinking what makes me feel most vividly alive and I\u2019m aiming to do more of it \u2013 my individual fightback against the \u201cimpersonal universal\u201d.<\/p>\n

The first one is singing. I expect AI can scrape the musical canon to compose an ethereal robot madrigal, but it can\u2019t conjure the eccentric entertainment of my small choir composed of very particular humans. We\u2019re not the most polished singers, but listening to one another and trying to blend our voices gives me an intense sense of connection (research agrees<\/a>: group singing mediates speedy social bonding<\/a>). Occasionally, everything comes together and we produce a few seconds of surprising beauty, earning our choir director\u2019s sparingly granted, quietly mimed chef\u2019s kiss. When it doesn\u2019t, it\u2019s fun anyway.<\/p>\n

The next is stuff \u2013 not my own but other people\u2019s. I find the idiosyncratic things people prize, acquire and discard endlessly stimulating. I usually get my fix at York\u2019s weekly car boot sale \u2013 an overwhelming jumble of inexpertly stuffed badgers, Power Rangers merch, fishing tackle and ceramic mice dressed as Victorian washerwomen that makes my heart sing. It works with more exalted stuff, too, especially textiles in Renaissance paintings: clothes, rugs, curtains, tapestries. I recently spent a heady 10 minutes in a miraculously empty room in gathering darkness at New York\u2019s Frick Collection with Holbein\u2019s portrait of Thomas More<\/a>, examining his fur collar and red velvet sleeves and imagining how they felt and why he chose them.<\/p>\n

I get a fair amount of unbridled joy from simply being an animal: walking, digging in the soil and watching other animals (OK, yes, I mean birds), but mostly \u2013 and I say this as a lifelong introvert \u2013 I get it from people. When I try to identify my most reliable source of pleasure, it\u2019s wandering round a strange city looking at its inhabitants. What are people wearing, eating, talking about; what pisses them off; what kind of dogs do they have? From toddler tantrums to displays of affection to queue etiquette, it\u2019s an all-you-can-eat human buffet. I just watched I Am Martin Parr<\/a>, a documentary on the photographer with a magpie eye for the essence of British life, and he gets it. Now in his 70s, Parr is as driven to observe and document people in all their beautifully strange specificity as ever; he is, he says, \u201cstill excited about going out and seeing this crazy world we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the secret for me: AI can obligingly aggregate and explain what we are en masse, but it blends all our colours to a muddy brown; it can\u2019t capture the joy of the absolutely particular.<\/p>\n

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is depressing: according to the Cut, people are using AI to solve escape room puzzles and cheat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-282725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}