My Diet for AI-Generated Content Has Increased Significantly, and Here’s What I Am Doing About It

Morning pages #1

Photo by Joana Abreu on Unsplash

Just last night, I was reading this wonderful story on Medium by Tony Stubblebine on how AI becoming so omnipresent is motivating him to pursue morning pages.

To be honest, I didn’t, at first, know about the origin of the concept of morning pages, but after I researched a little about it, I genuinely fell in love with it. Not that it was some ground-breaking discovery that I’d made, or something that I didn’t know about. No.

I appreciated it because it couldn’t be more relevant or helpful, and it provides directions if you’re feeling lost, in a way.

While my mind is tinkering with the very same thought, I can’t help but observe how my diet of AI-generated content has increased 100x. At least.

And no, with “AI-generated content,” I am not referring to “AI slop”. I am referring to well-labelled AI-generated content from chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Oh, and in recent times, I have become a huge fan of Perplexity.

Before I wake up, Perplexity already prepares my news briefings and a revision deck of all the previous day’s classes, since I currently have its Pro plan. I can’t complain, as the briefings are tailored exactly to my needs and, as I have instructed, i.e., to focus on the “legal” perspectives and updates, as I am a law student.

After that, the classes begin at my uni. I upload relevant study materials on a chat thread, as they call it, on Perplexity. As the class progresses, I chat with it in case I have to understand or get a primer on any concepts that are being taught in the class. It’s way more accessible and efficient to let AI do the heavy lifting on the PDF than to manually open it and find everything that’s relevant for the class.

As classes end around 5 in the evening and I have little to no time (and mental capacity) to read anything but to revise what was already taught in the class that day and prepare for the next one.

God, that’s so hectic, and I have absolutely no shame in confessing that I miss the targets on most days.

But, at this point, I think it’s okay. I’m not a machine that can come after 7–8 hours of rigorous classes and then read 5–10 case laws (across all subjects), each running anywhere from 10 pages to 200 pages or more.

It goes without saying that I use AI to revise and read the cases for the next day, most of the time.

That leaves little to no room for reading any “human” writing, if that’s a term. If not yet, it’s high time human writing became a term given how little of that is now discoverable on the internet. Everything feels like a perfectly curated, perfectly presented AI-written, emotion-lacking piece of writing, especially if you’re mostly reading digital media.

This fact has been bothering me for a long time. It feels deeply unfulfilling only to read AI-generated content all day.

And I wanted that to change. So, here are a couple of small steps that I am taking:

Firstly, I have started reading newspapers, especially finance-specific news dailies (Business Standard or Financial Express) in their physical form. I used to read the same occasionally through their digital format, but now I have changed that.

Secondly, I have started taking notes in my notebook instead of relying solely on audio transcription software (quick shout-out to an app called TwinMind // not sponsored), along with Google Docs for note-taking. Though they are helpful, at this point I’m not relying solely on them, and instead use them just for reference.

And lastly, I have indulged in reading niche blogs and writing on Medium to keep my cognitive skills sharp and feeling good about reading and writing in “not-so-AI-way.”

That’s all for today. See you soon.