In 2024, I quietly added a footer to my website saying my business was AI free.
I wrote a short blog on the topic but nothing more.
As AI takes a hold and just about every coach out there is celebrating the speed at which they can create content, courses and coaching programmes with the help of AI, I felt it was time to put some meat on the bones more publicly.
AI is here to stay and it will get better at mimicking humans but it can only do that with the participation of humans.
The key word in this sentence is not participation but mimicking.
AI can mimic thought and ideas, but it cannot feel and it cannot create. In this respect it can make some tasks easier, but it cannot create the solutions that will build us a healthy future.
AI can produce solutions that are within the constructs of what is already known. Anyone who chooses to listen to their intuition knows that there are more solutions in the unknown than the known. AI cannot function on this level. It is data driven.
The leading edge of science also exists on the boundaries of the known, testing theories and hypotheses about what has been observed but not proven.
How can AI even begin to contribute at this juncture, when it has no soul.
Soul, for me, is the crux of the issue. We have constructed societies and a global model of economics that disconnect us from our soul and lead us to fail to see soul in other forms of life. The earth becomes a resource for materials, not a living ecosystem that supports all life. Animals become farmed at industrial scales, precious resources are ripped from the earth, deadly poisons are spread upon the land, whole habitats are decimated in pursuit of more money and less soul. And people, with soul, become cogs in the system with no individual value. The detritus of this system litters the world for all to see, but no one to take responsibility for.
This is the birth place of AI. A messy, messed up world where more solutions are engineered to make more money rather than choosing a simpler path of truly living as part of the world.
AI cannot understand the meaning of being alive in the truest sense of the word. It is a series of zeros and ones that takes all the thoughts, ideas and facts it finds and constructs them without reference to the forces of life.
AI comes with a huge direct environmental price tag, one that I feel is too big to countenance. Data farms are springing up left, right and centre demanding huge amounts of fresh drinking water to keep the exponentially increasing numbers of servers cool enough to process the vast amounts of data being pumped through them.
AI is a major consumer of electricity too, using 2% of global electricity in 2022 before it began to boom. GPU’s for modern AI processors now use more electricity than before so this percentage is going to increase hugely.
The boom in AI is perpetuating the extractive, resource intensive dynamics our home cannot sustain.
As for the creators of the world who put their content into the world wide web of knowledge, how much does AI value their creativity and ingenuity? Does it protect their intellectual property rights no matter how their content makes it into their learning sets?
We are in the early stages of thrashing this out both legally and morally. Barely a day goes by without seeing someone advising loading up all your IP to AI to create a new course or programme, sketch out your book and more. Yet, the minute that content is loaded up your ability to assert copyright is at risk.
Or when some unscrupulous consumer of your content loads it into AI to re-work it under their own name, your ability to prove your ownership is brought into question.
There is an imbalance of power that jeopardises any individual’s ability to craft their own life, on their own terms.
AI, like many modern “advancements” brings with it a raft of moral and legal questions that we are ill-equipped to deal with inside of our existing power structures, because they favour sustaining the current economic models no matter the cost.
And this is why I chose to eschew AI. It’s not a cost I am prepared to contribute to.
I don’t feel I will be left behind, as so many would say. It gives me freedom to create on my own terms.
Of course, I use all kinds of tech that utilise AI and I cannot avoid this without taking my business 100% off line. I have to be mindful of my settings and how I use that tech to maintain my values of creative expression and supporting the earth.
I also accept that it has its place in our society. Many in my community have told me how helpful it is to them to organise thoughts, plans and ideas. For those who are neuro-divergent it can be so valuable in helping them function in a neuro-typical world.
There is a difference between using it as a tool to support and it becoming an all-consuming factor in every aspect of life.
For me, I want to be seen to be human and real. I feel this is what people will be looking for as we move further and further into the murky realms that AI brings with it of deep fakes, cloning and more. The boundaries between real and AI have blurred so much in the last year alone that showing yourself to be human is more important than ever. It’s a question of trust.
All those things we have sought to edit out of our content in the pursuit of perfection, will become the very markers of our humanity. Typos, word stumbles, losing track – these are part of being human. As AI polishes life to a flawless version without soul, perhaps it is time to celebrate what we always thought of as flaws within ourselves.
AI is just one of many challenges we face as a global society. As each challenge arises, I will take responsibility for my own decisions and choices. It is my belief, that the more we take on this responsibility, the better equipped we will be to restore meaning and global wellbeing to all life.