Finding Authentic Joy in an AI Dominated World

The Unfulfilling Rise of AI Powered Hobbies

It's a depressing new trend: people are now using AI to get ahead in their hobbies. According to a recent report from The Cut, this includes everything from solving escape room puzzles to cheating at trivia nights. As one TikToker aptly put it, it's like entering a corn maze and just wanting a straight path to the exit—it completely spoils the fun. The article even features a reader who uses ChatGPT as a substitute for a book club, scraping the internet for “stimulating opinions.” While that sounds bleak enough, his shortcut backfired when the AI spoiled a major character's death in a fantasy epic he was enjoying.

Why AI Generated Content Lacks a Human Soul

This trend extends into the creative space as well. Substack, a platform known for its artisanal, writer-driven content, is reportedly becoming cluttered with AI-generated essays. Outsourcing the very act of writing to a bot seems to defeat the entire purpose. Writer Will Storr, on his own Substack, explores this baffling phenomenon. He points out the tell-tale signs of AI writing, such as a reliance on what he calls “the impersonal universal”—sweeping statements that sound profound but are ultimately hollow. He notes, “A white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over.”

It's hard to understand how anyone could find joy in using a large language model to sound vaguely clever or to hack their way through a hobby. While this isn't an existential threat, it is a threat to fun. Let the bots handle our tedious work, but they shouldn't take our joy. While I'm certainly no expert on fun, I've been thinking about what makes me feel most alive as my personal fightback against this wave of the “impersonal universal.”

Rediscovering Joy in the Real World

First, there is singing. An AI could probably compose an ethereal robot madrigal, but it could never replicate the eccentric entertainment of my small choir, which is composed of unique and particular humans. We aren't the most polished group, but the act of listening to each other and blending our voices creates an intense sense of connection. Research confirms that group singing fosters speedy social bonding. On the rare occasion everything aligns, we produce a moment of surprising beauty. And when it doesn't, it's still fun.

Next is my fascination with other people's stuff. The idiosyncratic things people collect and discard are endlessly stimulating. I often visit York’s weekly car boot sale, a wonderful jumble of poorly stuffed badgers, old Power Rangers merchandise, and ceramic mice dressed as Victorian washerwomen. This appreciation also extends to finer things, like the textiles in Renaissance paintings. I recently spent ten minutes alone in a room at New York’s Frick Collection with Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More, mesmerized by his fur collar and red velvet sleeves, imagining their texture and significance.

The Irreplaceable Beauty of the Particular

Ultimately, as a committed introvert, I find that most of my joy comes from other people. One of my most reliable sources of pleasure is simply wandering through a strange city and observing its inhabitants. What are they wearing? What are they arguing about? What kind of dogs do they have? It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of human behavior. The documentary I Am Martin Parr captures this perfectly. Parr, now in his 70s, remains driven to document people in all their beautifully strange specificity, saying he is “still excited about going out and seeing this crazy world we live in.”

That, for me, is the secret. AI can aggregate data and explain us as a collective, but in doing so, it blends all our vibrant colors into a dull, muddy brown. It can never capture the pure joy found in the absolutely particular.