AI doesn’t belong in journaling

In July 2023, I deleted the day of the first journalization application of my phone and my laptop. Maybe it was the best thing I did as a diarist for life.

The decision was caused by Apple announcing its newspaper application at WWDC that year. In this speech, Apple said that it would use “automatic disk learning” to provide prompts according to the content of your iPhone – things like contacts, photos, music, training sessions, podcasts and location data. The idea gave me the Ick. Mainly because the application was described as a riff on the function of memories of the Photos application, which at the time had “intelligently” refused a photo of my mother’s open coffin.

I had flashbacks at this time last week when I saw a demo of Google’s vision on its new newspaper application. Except that the Google Journal Application looks stronger in AI than Apple’s version. In addition to the journalization prompts propelled by AI, the AI ​​available will also provide summaries of your entries. There is also a small view of the calendar that attributes a small emoji meaning your mood according to everything you have journalized that day.

To my demo, Google told me that the idea was to do the journalization Easier – in the way Gemini simplifies other writing tasks, such as emails and documents of documents. Sometimes I was told, it can be difficult to know what you should realize. Looking back can also be difficult. The goal of Gemini in this case was to make life a little more practical and useful.

It is good, except that journalization is not supposed to be easy or practical.

Ask any writer: a blank page is supposed to be struggled. And in journalization, the only invitation you need is “what happened today and how I feel about this?”

This is a deceptfully simple question. Some days it is abundantly obvious to which you should write. A great tragedy, a joyful opportunity, an event that you have impatiently expected – everything that triggers a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days go by without happening too much, forcing you to scrutinize trivial minute to find something that deserves to be recorded. This is the point. Dress your discernment, exercise your brain, decorate your vocabulary to find the right sentence to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy.

There is a quote in the book Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals It sums up for me. “It is not really the thought that matters, but the effort-that is to say the drawback. When you make the process more practical, you empty it of its meaning.”

I do not always agree with the author Oliver Burkeman on this subject. I find no sense to work on hand washing dishes, and I am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But with regard to the endless quest for Big Tech to simplify writing with AI, I fully agree that the struggle is that the process is worth anything.

This reminds me of the announcement of Google’s very dissected gemini in which a father uses AI to write the Perfect Fan letter to Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and ends up with the Slobe of Milquetoast Sans Coeur. There too, Google seemed to forget that the effort to write the letter, to put you there, is what makes the letters of fans of fans and significant.

I discovered that it is paying to make the journalization as “embarrassing” as possible. After deleting on the first day, I returned to writing in a physical newspaper, and it considerably improved my mental health, my critical thinking, my time management and my memory. Several studies have shown that handwriting is better for retention and learning of memory in relation to strike. Much of this is because It’s embarrassing. Your hand cramps faster when writing with a pen, the ink is difficult to erase, and in my case, my brain thinks faster that my hand cannot move. These limits offer me to prioritize the information to record and sit with my thoughts in a more intentional way. It means that when I want to look back, I have to remember When Things have happened precisely because there is no search bar. With less reasons of accessibility (in this case, voice recorders can be a good alternative), I would say that anyone interested in journalization should become analog.

Going analog also offers you intimacy. Journalization often does not concern the little things in life. (Although no one prevents you from writing an ode to this bubble tea that changes your life you have with lunch.) Many people are married with great feelings. Ruptures, deaths, anxieties, boredom and the practice of finding joy in a finished, cruel and unfair life. These are private things for people except the writer. It does not matter that Google says that the newspaper application is fully on disk, lockable and deleted – nothing connected to the Internet never really feels yours.

A summary of the AI ​​with relevant dishes from your newspaper starters is also fundamentally imperfect. You are supposed To browse entries, including sentences to the fight against dissemination for meaningless nuggets. You are supposed to remember the person you had already been and think about who you are now. It is supposed to be like finding a message in a bottle or a $ 20 ball in an old coat pocket. I doubt that reading a summary of the AI ​​of a newspaper could never give me the same feeling.

By writing this, I continued to rethink in the summer of 2009. Freshly horrible Poetry that even the most Emo Tumblr girl would never admit having written. When I couldn’t sleep or eat, I explode Adele’s album 21 And write each piece of doubt, repugnant, rejection, desire, anger, betrayal and sorrow that all loves could not last forever.

Six months after filling this whole book, I sat to read each page. It was the definition of cringing teeth, but the length process finally made me see how I got lost in a relationship that had followed its course. It helped me forgive and move on. When I had finished, I burned the book with an old cigarette viewfinder on the roof of my new shitty apartment. Looking at the pages become orange and then in black, I never felt more free in my young life. The removal of an AI newspaper application will never feel so cathartic.