How a machine I didn’t trust taught me to be bad at things again.Monet’s Impression Sunrise would not have existed if someone hadn’t invented the right medium (Source)I was a skeptic.Let the record show, I too, was against it.When Ted Chiang wrote in The New Yorker that AI isn’t going to make art, I felt vindicated. I forwarded it. To people who had not asked (as I often do).His point was that art is the sum of thousands of small choices, and a machine that makes most of them for you has removed the art. I summarized this at dinners as “it’s a vending machine with ambitions,” which got a laugh and some confused looks.Writing is my home turf. I own about 14 favorite pens. I have opinions about semicolons. So when a machine showed up promising to write for me, I reacted the way a cat reacts to a new cat: I sat very still, judged it from across the room, and waited for it to leave.I...