Mini essays are an act of defiance

I recently stumbled upon the idea of a mini essay as a fun learning exercise. Mini essays are short expositions on a single idea. Due to their brevity of 200-500 words, they must inherently only cover one thesis. They can serve as short summaries of other sources or a seed for a new idea to explore further at a later time. They are not long works that require detailed editing. Mini essays are meant to be light and fun.

What's the point though? Why write down things when there's already so much information in the world? Writing a mini essay each day is a way of keeping the brain moving through ideas. It's easy to simply consume information without capturing it meaningfully. We can simply let information wash over us. When we don't meaningfully capture information, we cannot create new and unique works.

Even worse, AI and large languge models increasingly are becoming a replacement for idea generation and thinking. In seconds, they could spit out a complete mini essay, but it would never be original. It would never be informed by years of life experience. By relying more and more on AI, we are giving up the pinnacles of humanity, thought and meta thought, in favor of efficiency and, dare I say, laziness. Each time I write a mini essay, I am sharpening my mind. I'm engaging with ideas and formulating new perspectives in a way that AI cannot. Mini essays are a mechanism for sharpening our minds and maintaining our humanity separate from AI generated slop. They are an act of defiance, a declaration that some forms of creation are beautifully human.

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