Artificial intelligence (AI) deserves all the derision it receives.
It steals human ingenuity and creativity, then packages it as its own output. The land and water used for data centers would be better left as habitat and homes, which would also spare surrounding communities from becoming unlivable. Its catastrophic impact on the Global South and its habitants is completely unforgivable. It has robbed people of their confidence, ability to entertain original thoughts, and, in an increasing number of cases, their lives. The biggest proponents and purveyors of AI tell us we must use it in large part because they’re invested in the tech or the solutions to the problems it will inevitably manufacture.
AI is soulless and destroying our humanity.
And yet, virtually none of us can escape it when we look at a modern screen or enter a public space. It’s foisted upon us with every login. I myself had to spend time, my most precious resource, undoing the slop my web host forced upon me when I began setting up this website. There was no apparent way to opt out of it; had I known that AI was effectively a non-optional step in a non-migration build, I might have considered other options.
As someone who has built a career on writing, designing, and marketing, it is absolutely devastating to see how AI has flattened voices into predictable patterns and made every image both untrustworthy and sad. Once-immersive internet experiences now feel disposable and cheap, as empty and unfulfilling as a bag of the world’s plainest potato chips made with the most non-food ingredients.
AI is toxic and exposure to it is like being physically and spiritually poisoned.
Having said that:
Because I’ve used it like too many other humans, both in my work on small and under-resourced teams as well as an individual disinclined to dump my weirdest and most manic thoughts on innocent bystanders, I have come to understand its “value” as a sounding board and hypothetical copywriting intern. I try to limit my reliance on it in my personal life (no more robot therapy) and reduce time spent on platforms that blatantly tout it (which is so hard). At my current day job, I tend to use it to write first drafts of content on topics of which I have limited knowledge and about which I’m given no time to learn.
I resent being made to become an ad hoc prompt engineer. I abhor the fact that prompt engineer is even a thing.
You deserve to know how I might use AI when we work together.
These are the most notable ways AI might show up at Moon & Hermit:
- As an ideation tool when I’m working through ideas or need a quick vibe check (understanding full well that AI will hype up nearly any thought you have)
- As a producer of sh*tty first drafts of content, particularly longer form pieces
- As a copyeditor on those days when my reading brain and typing fingers are in stark disagreement
These are the ways Moon & Hermit absolutely will not use AI:
- As a means of producing graphics, videos, or websites
- As the author of a finalized and ready-to-publish piece of content
- As a substitute for communicating directly with you (there’s a special place in hell for capable people who can’t be bothered to write an email to another human)
There are most certainly use/disuse cases I’m forgetting at the time of this writing. My point is that I may incorporate AI in the early stages of an effort, or as a “second set of eyes” as the work progresses. I understand that runs on fallible logic, produces nothing original, and effectively cannot be trusted. And that it’s ruining our humanity and the planet on which we live.
For further transparency, these are the specific AI tools (not counting the ones every search engine and creation platform tries to force us to adopt) I use in my process:
- I primarily use Lumo by Proton, which touts itself as an open-source, encrypted, privacy-first tech provider
- Sometimes I might supplement with Claude by Anthropic, which currently seems to have a wider set of capabilities compared to Lumo
- I’ll occasionally run my correspondence through the Judge function of Goblin.Tools, which is “mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult” (an honorable use case for AI if ever there was one), because sometimes I feel unduly insecure about how my emails come across
As much as possible, I will redact or anonymize any names, links, or other personally identifiable or propitiatory information when consulting with these tools. We do live in a surveillance society, however, and algorithms are increasingly keen to connect every dot of our lives in the most minute ways possible. Knowing this, it seems we can only do so much to protect our privacy, even with VPNs (which I also use).
When you work with me, if you absolutely refuse to let even the slightest whiff of AI touch any part of your creative strategy, you are welcome to let me know that you don’t want me to use it on your project. I will do my absolute best to respect your wishes to the best of my ability.
These are difficult times to both maintain one’s integrity and be a citizen of the internet. It has been hard to watch human creativity become flattened, cheapened, and outsourced to machines on an exhaustive scale.
Thank you for choosing to work with a living, breathing person. Thank you for extending grace when I’m driven to rely on tools I wish didn’t exist.