Human Agency

The Delegation Audit: What Should Stay Yours

AI can draft, summarize, and organize almost anything you hand it. That does not mean it should. A six-question delegation audit — consequence, authorship, relationship, skill, privacy, reversibility — sorts tasks into keep, assist, delegate, and never, with ten worked examples.

New to AI

What Deteriorates When You Outsource Thinking

Letting a model write the first draft of every essay, email, and argument feels efficient right up until you notice you can no longer produce the first draft yourself. A skill-preservation audit — baseline, unaided attempt, assisted phase, independent check — keeps the effort where the learning actually happens.

More in this topic

AI Is Not Your Muse

A generative model can flood you with options, phrases, and images. It cannot supply taste, judgment, or authorship. Why treating AI as the source of creative direction creates dependency - and how to keep it as a tool that reacts to choices you already made.

New to AI

5 min read

An Edit Pass That Preserves Your Taste

AI edit passes often sand your work toward the mean. A taste-preserving edit loop: criteria first, local suggestions only, side-by-side keep/reject, and a final unaided read that protects what makes the piece yours.

5 min read

Refuse to Let AI Ghostwrite Your Public Voice

When AI-assisted prose stops being help and starts being a public substitute for your voice, the cost is reputation, trust, and skill. A strategic decision framework for which surfaces may use drafting help - and which must stay unmistakably yours.

Faith and Spiritual Reflection: Use Questions, Not Synthetic Authority

AI can compare translations, summarize a commentary, or generate reflection questions on a passage you choose. It cannot hold faith, offer pastoral authority, hear a confession, or issue a doctrinal verdict. A source-and-authority checklist keeps the model in the role of research assistant, not religious leader.

AI and Loneliness: Useful Contact Is Not Mutual Relationship

A chatbot is available at 3 a.m., never bored of you, and always responsive. That is real accessibility for some people and a real risk of displacement for others - and it is never mutual relationship, memory, or care. A benefit/risk/displacement table and a weekly connection plan draw the line without shaming anyone for using it.

Use AI to Clarify Values Without Asking It What You Should Value

AI is genuinely useful for testing whether a decision is consistent with values you already hold, and for surfacing tradeoffs you have not named yet. It cannot tell you what to value, and asking it to is a different, riskier request than asking it to help you think. A values-conflict worksheet keeps the two separated.

Writing Through Grief Without Simulating the Person You Lost

AI can help you write a eulogy from your own memories, organize a funeral program, or draft a thank-you note when you cannot find the words. It should never be asked to generate what your person would say back to you. A safe-use table separates administrative and writing help from impersonation, with no exceptions for how comforting the impersonation feels.

Keep Your Name on AI-Assisted Work

AI-assisted does not mean fraudulent, but silence about it can become misleading fast. The bodies that actually govern authorship — the US Copyright Office, journal-ethics groups, major publishers — converge on the same two rules: only a human can be the accountable author, and appreciable AI use must be disclosed. A practical disclosure norm for everyday work, not a plagiarism panic.

9 min read

Keep your taste: AI in a creative practice

AI can accelerate almost every stage of a creative practice. That is exactly the problem: convenience does not ask whether a stage was where your judgement lived. A map for deciding what to accelerate, what to keep human, and how to handle copyright, consent, and disclosure along the way.

8 min read

Raise Children Who Remain Authors of Their Own Lives

App-level screen time rules answer 'how much AI.' They do not answer the harder question: which of the choosing, deciding, creating, and relating that childhood is for should stay a child's own, even as AI becomes ambient in homework, friendship apps, and games. A practice framework across six domains gives families and schools a decision rule, not just a time limit.

Refuse to Rank People With AI

It is tempting to ask AI to score candidates, rank a team, or rate who is the 'best' friend, employee, or date. Regulators, courts, and one well-documented corporate failure all point the same direction: scoring people with AI, without an accountable human process and an audit trail, produces bias that is hard to see and harder to undo. A refusal checklist for everyday life and work.

Why Repair and Apology Stay Human

AI can help you find the words for an apology you are struggling to write. It cannot feel the regret, deliver the apology, or do the ongoing work of repair that makes an apology mean anything. A checklist keeps AI in the drafting role and the relational accountability where it belongs — with you.

20 minutes

Connected, but alone? | Sherry Turkle

TED. MIT's Sherry Turkle explains how devices offer 'the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship' - the foundational argument behind AI companionship risks.

15 minutes

Griefbots offer AI connections with deceased loved ones

Scientific American. A Science Quickly segment interviews a researcher about ethics and psychological concerns around 'griefbots' that simulate deceased loved ones - useful caution beside the article.

13 minutes

The era of blind faith in big data must end | Cathy O'Neil

TED. Cathy O'Neil's TED talk popularizes 'weapons of math destruction' - opaque, high-impact scoring systems - as a caution against ranking people with black-box models.

8 minutes

Is Using ChatGPT to Write Your Essay Bad for Your Brain? New MIT Study Explained.

TIME. TIME summarizes reporting on an MIT Media Lab study about cognitive effects of AI-assisted writing - useful context for the article's 'what deteriorates' question, not a final scientific verdict.

8 min read

The dignity of work when machines can do more of it

A practical job-redesign assessment for SME leaders: examine worker voice, retained judgement, skill paths, workload, monitoring, and appeal before declaring an automation successful.