Well, I Messed Up
It’s never easy to look back and realize that what you are saying doesn’t match what you are doing.
AI Disclosure: This post is 100% organic content generated by a real human. No generativeAI was used at any point in its creation.
A few days ago, I had a disagreement with my spouse about morality in tech. Of course, we didn’t frame it like that; it was more about, “You use Claude when you are so anti-AI, and it’s really hypocritical of you.” Hearing that was like a gut-punch. I’ve done so much thinking about genAI and the morality of using it. I can’t be hypocritical, I told myself, because I’ve thought about it.
The argument was resolved with me apologizing for being obnoxious about my views on technology and promising to tone it down a little. I’m sure everyone reading this is shocked that I have strong opinions about tech, and that I can be… enthusiastic. So I took the feedback, and we moved on from the argument.
But I didn’t move on from the hypocritical comment. It lingered. It settled in the back of my head like an itch I couldn’t reach. Why had this bothered me so much? I ‘scratched’ at the mental itch for a few days. I poked and prodded as I tried to figure out why the comment had stuck with me.
The answer, when I found it, was obvious. After enough mental gymnastics and contortions to win me an Olympic medal, I honestly asked myself the most important question: did the comment bother because it was so obviously untrue, or because it was so obviously true?
The answer that I arrived at was that it was true—I was acting hypocritically. On one hand, I was decrying the harms of generative AI, and then using it because it was easy. I have been using Claude as a brainstorming partner for posts, for the book proposal I’m working on, to point out weaknesses in my writing. These are all things that AI is really good at. They provided me value, but not as much as a conversation with a real person. In addition to lukewarm value, I was causing harm. Every prompt consumes energy, uses water, and relies on stolen work to provide its one-dimensional value.
I made a few mistakes that resulted in my approach to engaging with genAI.
I assumed that value was an important metric. It’s not—just because something is valuable does not make it good.
I overstated the value I was getting to justify my use. In my head, using GenAI was more valuable than my actions showed. When I stopped to think about what meaningful changes I’d made, it was close to none. Claude gave me almost no value, but I felt like it did.
I allowed Claude’s convenience to blind me to other possibilities. I said I didn’t have anyone to brainstorm with, and Claude filled that gap. But the reality isn’t that I didn’t have anyone to brainstorm with, but Claude was easier, less scary, and more convenient than finding a real person to help me.
I told myself that because I was only using it a little bit, it was OK. But that’s not really how morals work. I only cheated a little bit, or I only plagiarised a little bit, doesn’t fly. I only benefited a little bit from the stolen IP of an entire civilization, I only contributed a little bit to the energy and environmental crises, I only supported a little bit of psychological trauma—that doesn’t make the harms less harmful. Wrong is wrong, regardless of scale.
I had been trying to occupy what Dr. Emily Bender called the untenable middle ground of responsible AI use. She defines this as “a position where people try to recognize the harms of this tech but also hold space for ‘responsible’ or ‘ethical’ use.” That hit me hard because that’s exactly what I had been trying to do - giving equal weight to the value and harms when they clearly weren’t equal
The wonderful thing about being a reasonable human being is that I can change. So change I shall. Starting with this article, nothing I write will touch generative AI, period. Not brainstorming, not reviewing drafts. Nothing. The molehill of value I got from Claude doesn’t justify the mountain of harm it causes.
It’s never easy to look back and realize that what you are saying doesn’t match what you are doing. I glazed over it above, but it was about a week between the disagreement and the realization that I wasn’t being as true to my morals as I thought I was. That was a week of me wrestling with the rationalization that I’d built up, struggles with how I saw myself and my actions.
There’s an argument against this as well, what I think of as “The Good Place” argument — that in our increasingly complex and mediated society, it’s impossible to exist without causing harm. But we can try to improve every day, to be better tomorrow than we were today. And that has to be enough.
I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes, from Stephen Spielberg’s Taken: “Hope is the biggest lie there is, and it is the best. We have to keep going as if it all matters, or else we wouldn’t keep going at all.”