TL;DR:
I use AI as a collaborative tool in developing and shaping some of my work. I remain the author and final decision-maker, but I also recognize that AI carries real environmental and human costs, including unresolved concerns about the use of artists’ and other creators’ work in training these systems. I don’t believe my individual use is consequence-free, nor do I have a perfectly clean answer for what responsible use looks like. My current commitment is to use AI intentionally, retain my own judgment, avoid generation for generation’s sake, and remain honest about what it makes possible, what it consumes, and the creative work from which these systems have benefited.
And if you ask: “So why use it at all?”
Because I find genuine utility in it. Because I enjoy it. It helps me excavate my ideas, communicate them, build things I otherwise might not build, and spend less time on parts of the process that do not hold meaning for me.
I don’t believe the existence of a cost automatically makes every use unjustifiable, any more than finding something useful makes its cost disappear. I also don’t believe in constructing a perfect set of “should-bes” and thinking myself into paralysis before I am allowed to engage with the world. I can make an imperfect choice consciously. I can find value and enjoyment in something while remaining honest about the systems that make it possible, even while saying that now, I can hear a crowd in my head, “Do better. You don’t need it.” Honestly, that’s not my voice, and I have to honor that, even if this is a mistake.
So for now, I use AI. not because I have resolved every ethical concern, and not because I believe my reasons cancel out its impact. I use it because it contributes something meaningful to my life and work. My responsibility, as I currently understand it, is not to achieve moral or ethical purity, but to keep the choice visible, intentional, and examined.
What follows is some of my perspective and current usage. This is not an argument. This is my story, and what I am sitting with.
Effort as Proof of Value
I used to be so obsessed with proving I was capable. I’d burn myself out producing output that I thought people wanted, but never ever could they ever see me sweat. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wanted my effort to be known, but more so that I wanted my work to be respected, and while I always look for efficiencies, when it comes to things I produce – I had put a lot of value on effort.
I am not convinced that effort is necessary component to “prove the value” of something that I put out into the world.
Long before AI entered popular culture, we were already romanticizing craftsmanship and placing mastery on a pedestal. And there is something deeply meaningful in developing a craft. I can’t help but wonder when the appreciation of mastery becomes an insistence that someone must master every part of a process before they earned the right to make or share something.
To its extreme, when all craftsmanship is taken out and it is all about the volume of output, that’s where I can see the commodification of an artform to the point of overproduction and a waste of resource.
Where I Stand
So where can I find that line for myself? Where do I locate myself in the field of possibility between the poles of craftsmanship and commodification?
Here are the questions I find myself circling around from different angles:
- If effort is not the arbiter of value, what value does my work bring?
- What parts of making something must I personally master in order to claim authorship?
- How can I engage with what AI makes possible without obscuring its environmental and human costs (including its use of other creators’ work)?
Naming my fears:
- I won’t be respected
- People will dismiss ideas they might otherwise have engaged with.
- I am constructing an ethical justification for something I simply want to continue doing.
Remain Examined
The ethical question of my impact permeates so much of my life, and across the board, I am looking at how I spend my resources. I heard a concept a while back “vegan plus bacon” – and it was about how if the love of bacon was the only thing preventing you from becoming vegan, than be “vegan plus bacon”. Very “don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.” And perhaps there’s a underlying implication that it will eventually be no bacon, but perhaps that’s as a far as a particular person will go. For me, I will never settle the question. I won’t get stuck in some sort of non-movement because I haven’t figured out the most righteous action. I understand I may wish I had done things differently. I also know that I am able to learn and adjust. I am letting go of perfection, but I’m not letting go of the questions.
What AI does (and doesn’t do) in My Work
Collaborative thinking and untangling ideas
I will often send over a stream of consciousness voice note, especially when I have several ideas moving around at once. I love that AI can grab every thread and find a potential pattern underneath that I am not seeing. It often centers around some contradiction that I can’t quite name, a phrase that is almost there, an image, or an ethical discomfort. I am not looking for a definitive answer from AI. It holds the tension with me, helps me see where it is especially tangled. Makes a guess on where I am going with it, and it gives me clay to respond – to say, “oh yes! That’s it! and…” or “no.. now I realize where the distinction is”. It feels like an excavation of my ideas. The final authority for anything that I take into my own worldview or share remains mine.
Formatting my blog and Podcast descriptions
Use AI for formatting my blog. I was doing it manually at one point and it took so much time, and it does not feel like time that is adding value to the world. I experimented and found that I was able to train AI to format my posts in the way that I would do it manually. Additionally, I use it to help be create a description for the my podcast conversations after they’ve been recorded.
Building small HTML/JSON tools
I have used (and will probably again) use AI to build little hmtl/json tools on this site for divination or look-ups. In some cases, I’ve gone in made edits after the fact. I used to build things by googling and looking things up on substack. This is where I have let go of this idea that building the thing itself is somehow this impressive notch I can put on my belt.
Light Editing and shaping language (especially in frameworks)
I have a very specific way I like to speak, but sometimes, I can’t quite get the rhythm where I want it to be and I sometimes use it as a thesaurus on steroids. There’s something flat about the out of the box responses, but it does give me some little gems that is enough of a spark for me to use. Additionally, the ideas that I have are feel complex to me. My instinct is to share every little building block, and AI helps me to frame it in a way that could potentially be digestible to others. Overtime, this is building my own muscle to be able to do this on my own. There is a level of mastery here that is important to me, it is just that sharing the ideas themselves are more important to me.
NOT Poetry
The poetry section on my blog remains untouched by AI. This is the one area where I feel that my craft is in the actual writing of the thing and it feels like it takes something out of it to use AI. Poetry and short prose is where I feel there is a energetic aspect that I do not want AI involved in.
Unresolved Costs
This is where I do not yet have satisfying answers.
AI use does have material consequences. It requires energy, water, infrastructure, hardware, source material, and human labor. Those costs are not distributed evenly, and my use does not become consequence-free simply because it is personally meaningful or comparatively small. Scale and comparison are relevant, but neither one resolves the question of my responsibility.
I have been recently starting to look into whether running some tools locally could become one way of changing my relationship to those costs. I don’t yet know enough to claim that localization is necessarily the more environmentally responsible answer. It may offer greater control over what I use, how often I use it, and where my information goes, but it still depends on hardware and energy. For now, it is an avenue I am examining rather than a solution I am claiming.
I also cannot dismiss artists who say AI has stolen from them. I understand why that word is used, even if I feel it compresses a lot into one very charged statement. The concern for me is not only whether something I publish accidentally reproduces another person’s work. It is also that artists’ work may have contributed to commercial systems without their knowledge, consent, attribution, or compensation. The risk of unintentionally echoing someone else’s work existed before AI, but AI introduces a different scale and structure to that concern.
I don’t think “it learns like a human” resolves that concern, though. Human inspiration and industrial-scale data collection are not equivalent simply because both can be described as learning. At the same time, I don’t think every person using an AI tool is personally plagiarizing every artist represented somewhere in its training data.
I am still locating my own responsibility within that system. At minimum, I do not want to prompt for the imitation of a living artist’s recognizable style, present generated material as handmade, or use AI to erase the contribution of a human creator whose work I can identify. Those choices do not resolve the ethics of the underlying training system. I also look for opportunities to support artists when I might otherwise use AI.
Honest Standing
The line for me, at this time, is to practice what is already core to my work: being honest with what is. Not so I can declare my choices justified, “enough,” or settled, but so I can remain in the tension and keep the line open to examination. If my transparency puts people off, I respect that, but I will no longer allow the possibility of their disapproval to move me away from where I honestly stand now.
I still deeply value craftsmanship, especially when the practice of making is itself part of the meaning. What I no longer believe is that mastery of every step is the price of admission for creating something valuable. I am no longer willing to use unnecessary effort to prove that my work has value. I am also unwilling to use that realization to pretend that the tools reducing my effort have no cost.
I do not have a clean answer. I have a boundary that remains visible, honest, and open to examination.