AI has come to stay. That is no longer news. Like colonialism, it arrived with fanfare, promising light and progress, cloaked in the shimmering fabric of convenience. And just like colonialism, I fear, it may leave us emptied, thinking less, dreaming less, becoming echoes of machines we once invented.
Here in Nigeria, we have a peculiar gift for bastardising beauty. We take what was meant to elevate and dilute it into caricature. It is happening with AI too. What should be a generative companion, a tool for refinement and sharpening, has become a crutch. A prosthetic for the intellectually lazy. A new oracle for those too impatient to wrestle with thought.
I am no fan of AI. Not because I fear technology, but because I love the mind. I revere the quiet nobility of a well-formed sentence, the sacred struggle of writing, the art of shaping meaning out of chaos. AI does not write. It assembles. And what it assembles may sparkle, but it lacks soul.
Once upon a time, we knew our thinkers. Their voices rang with conviction, their writing bore the scars of contemplation. You knew who was a writer and who was merely literate. But now, everyone tweets like Soyinka and posts like Chomsky. We are drowning in borrowed brilliance.
Even more alarming: the future engineers and surgeons of this nation are outsourcing their academic labour to machines. One day, a hospital building may collapse not from poor cement but from poor intellect. One day, a scalpel might cut too deep not because the surgeon is wicked, but because he never really learned how to stitch.
Today, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between genuine brilliance and AI-masked eloquence. I know of political aides, once glorified errand boys, who, not long ago, could barely string two correct sentences without committing a grammatical crime. Now they wax philosophical in paragraphs, puffed up by prose that didn’t come from their own heads. Let them be called upon to speak without script and their true self is laid bare: stammering, scrambling, searching for wit that isn’t theirs.
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To be clear, it is not a crime to use AI. But it is shameful to wear borrowed robes and claim them as your own. It is disgraceful to shine on the page but falter in speech.
I remember my first semester at the University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom. One of my results came back: 22 out of 100. I laughed, not because failure is funny, but because I knew it wasn’t mine. I wrote to my professor. I told her something was off. I had never failed, not in secondary school, not in my polytechnic days, not in my first degree. An F didn’t fit me. Maybe a C, I might have swallowed. But an F? No.
She stood by the grade. I stood by my truth. A panel was constituted. Investigation followed. Turns out, my essay had submitted twice due to a technical glitch, one version overwritten by the other. They apologised. They re-marked. Oh! You are wondering what the result would be right? Yes! I scored 72%. An A.
If I had not written that essay myself, would I have had the courage to challenge the system? If I had fed my soul to a machine, would I have recognised my voice well enough to defend it?
Fisayo Ajala had just bagged his Ph.D. in South Africa. He is my best friend, although my ABURO. That fateful night when the name of my supervisor was released, he was the first person I sent it to. He read her profile and remarked, “Oh boy, you go work tire o.” I laughed it off and replied, “She go know say she meet student too,” trusting in my ability to twist lines and wield words that would make her fall in love with my work. But by the time we began, and she unleashed her rigorous drilling, I nearly cried. But as an “Omo lile na” how would you feel if the news reached you that odindin omo Odolaye cried atop academic drilling? Disappointment! You want madam Kikelomo to mock Odolaye niyen 😆. Even the amala-eating Ibadan people like Prof. Saheed Aderinto and Baba Oloye Abiola Iyiola and co. wouldn’t spare me from the sharp blades they carry as tongues.
My supervisor had a First Class in English, a Distinction in Communication, and an award-winning PhD dissertation in Gender Studies. How on earth was I supposed to deceive her? Me, with my respectable but modest 2:1 in English, still hustling to round off my Master’s in Communication. She had already written a paper on the very topic I chose for my dissertation. She had walked that path, planted flags on it, and published them. I wasn’t just working under her. I was writing in her territory, with her map, her compass, and her eyes watching.
The day I graduated, my supervisor hugged me. Three lecturers took photos with me. Of five students under my supervisor, I alone made it to convocation, others could not. They had extra semester. Not because I was the smartest, but because I stayed present. I showed up for my learning. I fought for my words. I carried my own cross and it crowned me.
Originality is not a luxury. It is the spine of achievement. Without it, all you have is noise.
Consequently, I ask again: Are you thinking, or is something thinking for you? Are you writing, or are you copying thought dressed in digital silk? Let AI assist you. But never let it replace you.
Inset: My lecturers and my supervisor, one of the leading professors of Feminism and Gender Studies in the UK (na her gown get pink! Mama Agbalagba 🙌🏼, you see as she grabbed my suit 😆. Dah woman no dey gree! She no Dey sleep, she go read every lines and words. She go challenge every statement ).
