If you’ve been finding that lots of written content is getting weirdly difficult to parse, there’s a good chance it was put together by AI. As a recovering environmental journalist, I’m against this on so many levels. And that’s why anything you read on my websites (this one or this one) will be 100% written by a human. Unless otherwise noted, written by this human.
Why do I feel so strongly about this? Let’s get into it.
using your brain preserves your brain
First, I like writing. And it’s a skill one maintains with practice. I have plenty to say, and this is one of the least complicated ways for me to say those things.
But also, going through the process of coming up with an idea, going down research rabbit holes about that idea, and then figuring out how to express that idea does good things for the brain.
Conversely, outsourcing thinking leads to what some are now calling “digital dementia.” This 2023 review from Frontiers in Cognition looks at what happens when people rely too much on AI. Their findings include negative effects on attention, memory, decision making, critical thinking and learning abilities. They also discuss the real risks of addiction to these tools, creating a negative feedback loop impairing our ability to use our own brains — and maintain them.
There’s a ton of concern about the effects of AI on students, both in terms of what and how much they learn — and how that is impaired by how easy AI has made it to avoid doing the work themselves. Here’s one podcast (with transcript) from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject. But talk to any teacher and they’ll tell you it’s a big problem. If people don’t learn how to learn, how will they make their own decisions in an increasingly opaque world?
protecting our planet
When I talk about my journalism career, I don’t always mention that I primarily covered environmental issues. But of course the AI tsunami is a huge issue when it comes to sickening our planet.
Right now, AI data centers are becoming the biggest hogs of energy and water. Here’s one article about AI energy consumption. Here’s another.
As of mid August 2026, the New York Times (gift link) reported that Amazon is building a gas-burning power plant to fuel its enormous Texas data center — and that plant could become the biggest source of climate pollution in the United States.
There may be occasions when an environmentally expensive technology is worth the cost. But for the most part, that’s not how many of us are using it. We’re using it to summarize (often incorrectly) the results of a google search, when a google (or Brave, or DuckDuckGo) search would give us more accurate and actionable information. And don’t get me started on using it to draw people as medieval princesses or muscle-bound octogenarian dictators.
is it worth it?
Of course AI has valid uses. But I believe those should be used thoughtfully and sparingly.
I have played with it a little, as a scribe during patient visits. It gets things wrong so frequently, I’m not convinced it’s a time saver and thus worth the cost.
And you’ve probably noticed that writing coming from AI is often weirdly organized, difficult to read, and sometimes just makes no sense at all.
We can do better.
my pledge
This is why I’m pledging here, and in the footers of all my websites, that all the words you’ll read here are 100% written by a human.
I’m saying it explicitly because I do have a tendency to abuse em-dashes (and parentheses,) which are sometimes considered flags that something is AI generated.
This means all the mistakes are my own, and I am good with that. Because that’s part of how we learn. And I’d like to keep my brain in learning mode, on a habitable planet, for as long as possible.
Consider joining me.
