Why I’m Not Afraid of Being Replaced by an AI Training Plan

My Reason for Waiting to Share an Opinion on AI Training Plans

I’m not big on hot takes. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to current events, or have opinions—I just prefer to speak (or more often, write) when I feel I have something worth adding. I usually wait until the noise dies down. If my perspective seems different enough to be useful, that’s when I chime in.

Still, people who don’t know me well often expect a take—especially on the big stories.

When American distance runner Shelby Houlihan was suspended for a doping violation, some guy I didn’t know messaged me on Facebook, eager to hear what I thought. I said something like, “I hope she’s innocent, and I’m disappointed if she’s not.”

That was the end of that conversation. Around the same time, another stranger wanted my thoughts on super shoes. I said I didn’t love or hate them and trusted that the sport would regulate itself in a way that, overall, worked out. Silence.

 

Then Came Along AI Training Plans

Natural language tools like ChatGPT, with minimal prompting, can spit out a fairly competent essay or an endurance training program in seconds. A close friend, always up for a little mischief, sent me screen recordings of one of these tools doing both—writing an essay and drafting an endurance training plan.

I think he was hoping to give me a minor heart attack by triggering fears of AI training plans and AI-driven apps taking over my job. Nice try, Jake.

 

AI Training Plans Only Resemble What’s Already Been Said and Done

To be honest, my heart did skip a beat. But that moment quickly gave way to deeper reflection.

So here it is.

Despite how powerful these AI training plans and apps already are, and how much more powerful they’re likely to become, I’m not afraid they’ll replace me as a writer or a coach. That in itself isn’t surprising. What might be a little less surprising is why I’m not afraid.

At their current stage, most AI training plans only reassemble what’s already been said or done, in new combinations. However, we know very soon AI will be able to produce output that’s indistinguishable from the best human work. If your sense of security rests on, “Sure, AI writes well, but I write better,” you’re probably not sleeping very well.

AI already composed a fake Nirvana song that, while not exactly Smells Like Teen Spirit, wouldn’t be the worst on their B-side.

 

An AI Training Plan Might Write Like Me, But They Can’t Write Me

Here’s how I see it: No matter how sophisticated these tools get, they will never write exactly what I want to write—before I do. They might write like me, but they can’t write me.

Take my book Chasing Mastery. In what universe could a machine have written that book for me? Maybe in the future, an AI could make it more polished or even improve some passages based on readers’ preferences. But it can’t replicate the experience of writing it: the long stretches of deep focus, the moments of breakthrough and doubt, the joy of getting a sentence just right.

As Michel Foucault said, “When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not think the same way as before.”

 

 

I Write and I’m a Coach Because I Love It

That’s the deeper reason I’m not threatened: I write because I love it, because it changes me, and because I still have something to say. That’s never going to change. If the existence of better writers were a reason to stop writing, I’d have given up a long time ago.

The same goes for coaching endurance athletes. No algorithm can coach an athlete the way I would, not because I’m special, but because I bring my own blend of experience, instinct, and personal investment.

AI may change how I coach. I’m sure it already has. But it won’t rob the work of its meaning. I coach and build training programs because I enjoy it, and no AI training plan or AI-driven training app is going to take that from me, nor can it share that enjoyment and raw passion with its athletes.

 

There Are People Who Do Things Better Than Me, But I’m Still Here

Whether athletes or readers still find value in what I do when AI training plans get even better—well, that’s not really up to me. But again, there are already people who do both things better than I do. And I’m still here.

Freud once said that technology doesn’t improve or degrade human life—it just changes the way we live it. “If there had been no railway to conquer distances,” he wrote, “my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.” I suspect AI programs won’t be much different.

 

When I asked my close friend for his take on my take, he said something that stuck with me. To paraphrase: “in nature, one thing rarely replaces another. More often, the old makes room for the new”.

And I think I’m okay with that.

 

For more musings by Coach Matt Fitzgerald and his take on technology, read The Less You Need Your Smartwatch, the More Useful it Becomes.