I use AI. I’ll be upfront about that. I’m also fully aware of what that means: the data annotators working in difficult conditions, the communities whose voices are underrepresented or outright missing from the training data, the structural exclusions baked into the labs that build these systems. None of that disappears because the tool is useful to me. Pretending otherwise would be two-faced, and I won’t do that.
So I sit with the contradiction. I use it anyway, and I say so, and I keep thinking about it. That discomfort feels important to hold onto.
“You can’t think critically if you’re not curious. Curiosity has to come first.”
Here’s what’s changed for me, though, and why I keep coming back to this: the output of any AI interaction is almost entirely a function of how you think. Not your prompts, exactly. Your thinking. Your capacity to be curious, to push on an idea, to ask what’s behind the answer and then what’s behind that. The tool reflects the mind using it.
For me, that has been quietly profound. I think in ways that don’t always translate cleanly into words on a screen. But I can look up at the ceiling, speak, let my thoughts move the way they want to move, and then look back down at something that has shaped itself into language I can actually work with. That’s new. That matters. It means I can finally articulate things I’ve always known but couldn’t quite hand to someone else.
If you’re nervous about AI, I understand. But my invitation is this: be curious about it. Not credulous. Curious. Push the button, then push the button behind that button. Turn it back on yourself. Use it to find your own blind spots. That’s where it gets interesting, and that’s where the real work begins.
The people who will get the most from this moment are not the ones who are most comfortable with the technology. They’re the ones who are most willing to think.
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