I mentioned on Instagram that I’d spent several hours copying over multiple different calendars for the upcoming school year to my master (Google) calendar, which I live and die by. I put everything in there — addresses for playdates, phone numbers and names of nannies who will be with the kids at the playdate if need be, field names/numbers for sporting events and practices, etc — so I can be out and about and have everything at my fingertips. (Lan and I share this calendar so it’s also helpful that we can cross-check with one another.) Anyhow, this past Saturday, I copied over every single sports practice, game, tournament, religious ed/CCD class, school event, vacation date, etc from about seven different calendars into my own. I couldn’t believe how many Magpies responded to that post with: “Have you thought about using Claude for this?”
Confession: I’m a luddite on the AI front. This is partly, vaguely ethical, i.e., I will never use AI in my writing practice and therefore have created certain (possibly overly-obstinate) walls between myself and the technology, but it’s also a bit…lazy on my part? Incurious? I feel strangely lackadaisical about wanting to learn and use it. My sister keeps telling me I need to get on board, that by using it to take care of mundane/repetitive/low-leverage tasks, I can free up time to do more important and meaningful stuff. And I like that idea.
Even still, I wondered about the use case of Claude with the calendar task. Wasn’t there something intrinsically useful to me in the manual copying over of dates and places? It helped me see that not all of Hill’s Sunday baseball games are the same time this year — a detail I may have glossed over if just skimming the calendar — and also oriented me in the flow of the next couple of months. I’ve now mentally wrapped my head around their breaks, their random days off, their sports schedules. I don’t know. I feel braided into the routine in a way I’m not sure I’d feel if I’d just looked across the Claude-loaded calendar. The risk of a date or time being incorrectly copied over also nagged at me. I mean, I can always cross-check against the master calendar the day before, but doesn’t that obviate the entire effort?
I’m aware, in tapping this out, that I’m nit-picking in the way of all laggards. (The lady doth protest too much!) I want to replace that flinty circumspection with curiosity. So here is my attempt to begin to learn:
Are there ways that Claude and other tools have made your life easier, simpler, better?
Has it freed up time to spend with your kids or focus on more important strategic things in life?
Post-Scripts.
+Magpies weigh in on planning a smooth rentree into the school year.
+My morning rituals and routines.
Shopping Break.
+The $128 dress I want to wear right now. Loose and airy, but on-trend in that fun bandana print!
+Today is the last day to order from the Cadets sale! 40% off sitewide (!) – discount appears in cart. I placed my order yesterday, buying Hill basically a pair of shorts in every color available in the club style (plus a new pair of Cardios and mesh shorts) the next size up. Take a spin through their women’s section, too – pretty picked over, but there are still some fun statements, like this striped rollneck.
+Meant to mention that THE Donni pants were restocked in the good gingham colors on Monday, including green and blue. Try code SARAH10 or GABS10 for a discount.
+Have this new Faherty blouse in my sights. It has a Nili Lotan quality to it and would look so cool paired with Ruti pants / Nili Shon pants.
+OK, I might not use Claude yet, but I do have a very actionable motherhood shortcut I swear by: I order multiple of the same birthday gifts to dole out each year vs. scramble to buy a new gift each time a child is invited to a party. Last year, I got sooo many eight and nine year old girls these Hill House x Wetbrush hairbrushes, hair clips, scrunchies, etc (<<actually, these are all on sale now! Buy in bulk!). This year’s go-to gift is Roller Rabbit’s cute little coin pouches. I just ordered four different prints for the season ahead using code RRTHANKSYOU for a discount!
+Just got these cargo pants in and they are INCREDIBLE. Wow. J’adore. A great alt to the viral Flight pant if you’re a petite like myself; they hit right at top of foot. You can see me in my pair here; I cuffed them because I like to show a little bit of ankle.
+I put together a little Anthro Fall Favorites Edit here!
+Hello new SoldOut arrivals! I’m loving so many of their just-launched items, including this striped tee, this knit polo in the cherry red or demure charcoal, and this chocolate brown rugby! Every time I visit their site, I just want to wear sleek, elevated basics. AND – they restocked the tee in azure!!! The blue is so perfect for fall paired with navy, chocolate, marigold! Use code jenshoop.
+The coolest shoe I’ve seen on the streets in a long time. (Spotted in Norway.) Also LOVE these fringed loafers as we head into fall.
+Just got my navy blazer down for the attic. I just love her so much. The elongated, trim silhouette; the glossy gold buttons. Actually would like phenomenal with the aforementioned cargo pants and lugsole boat shoes. I love to throw on with basically everything in the fall months. Perfect for back to school night, teacher chats, meetings, etc!
+Trending among Magpies right now.
+Added the Cyklar sensorial body wash to my shower and howwww did I wait this long? As you know, I’m addicted to the luxe body lotion in this scent (HOW is it only $29? I keep thinking they’ll bump up the price to like $56 and no one would blink because it’s that good), and to the scent in general — I brought the purse rollerball with me on the plane and rolled it on my wrists multiple times during travel day, which is bound to have…unpleasant scents and moments. You can get all three of these products in a bundle at a discount here. Treat yourself!
+Fun short sleeved sweatshirt. Love it in the sky blue.
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I’m in the same camp of being deeply anti-AI–I think even the most innocuous uses are still ethically shady, given the environmental and big data concerns, and as an attorney the privacy situation really terrifies me. We also see clients using it and frankly, especially in rapidly evolving legal fields like my own, answers are more likely to be extremely wrong or misleading than not.
The best quote I’ve seen about it, and I cannot find attribution for it, is that AI is a snapshot of the past masquerading as the future–it’s definitionally unable to tell us something new, and it isn’t even good at sorting the current landscape from previous ones. I also am disturbed by constant admonishments to “get on board,” like it’s some sort of prerogative to use it or be left behind. In this moment, I think it’s really important that we remember we are in control of how prevalent it becomes and to discourage use wherever we see it!
Also a reminder if you feel similarly to shut off Siri, voice to text, etc. on your phone, and know that any recordings using those apps are no longer your own–that also goes for AI meeting notes, another thing I find really disturbing from a confidentiality perspective!
I love and agree with these comments, like another commenter I have stepped back from
Google lately because of the inescapable AI and it has been great to be absorbed in cookbooks, encyclopaedias and national geographic magazines again! I have to use it for work admin sometimes but the things at home which I feel DON’T particularly deserve my attention, like laundry, cleaning, maintenance can’t be done with ai – planning what we are doing with our time, planning what we will eat etc are acts of love I don’t want to delegate.
Hi Clare (and other Magpies who might be interested!)! If you don’t want AI results in your Google searches, type -ai after your search terms (note the minus sign!), and it will only give you regular search results.
You can use TenBlueLinks to set up Google with no ai as your default, or I switched to DuckDuckGo with AI turned off!
As someone who works in tech, these were not the comments I expected to see. They really made me realize the bubble I’m in! Thank you for this post.
It looks like the general consensus here is anti-AI, and since I am not, I’ll chime in with some examples of how I use it.
– my job requires quite a bit of outreach. I use ChatGPT to update contact information and organize a priority list based on titles and roles.
-I upload a picture of my living room and ask AI to show me what the walls look like painted a different color.
– I ask Siri to add milk to my grocery list. Siri and Alexa are AI too!
-I write my packing list and have AI organize it according to category to streamline the manual packing process.
Using AI doesn’t have to mean using AI to write for you. I think that gets a lot of the bad PR and rightly so, but there are plenty of great uses that don’t stunt creativity. I wouldn’t ask Chat about my health or discuss private matters, but organizing my thoughts or creating lists just doesn’t feel all that criminal to me.
I don’t use it and have absolutely no plans to use it. Besides the moral objections (of which there are many!), it’s always provides incorrect answers. I feel like this “get on this otherwise you’ll be left behind” nonsense is sheer propaganda started by those who heavily invested in AI. Why would I get left behind if AI is constantly producing something incomprehensible, incoherent, and incorrect? And even if I am “left behind” in this future, I honestly do not want to be a part of it–in any way, shape or form.
I don’t care if it takes me longer to program my child’s school calendar, or think of recipes, or plan a trip. All of those acts that *I* do on my own are a form of love. I’ve even stopped Googling things because of the prevalence of incorrect AI information. I’ve turned back to books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. And isn’t that a good thing? It’s less convenient, that’s for sure, but it’s also getting me off my phone and into the real world–and it’s modeling good behavior patterns for my child, demonstrating there is knowledge out there that is accessible to them, and showing them how to access it.
Me alone (and the other fabulously like-minded Magpies!) may not make a significant difference in the world turning to AI, but I’m forcibly reminded of Margaret Mead’s quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Recovering Luddite here too! I generally don’t default to using AI. Writing is such a thinking tool for me, and I really need that piece of the process. While I have tried using it a few times, reading the results made me feel like, “these are not my thoughts”. I really need to put my thoughts down on paper (actual paper, or digitally).
And! I once tried to use AI for a task at work out of curiosity, and the results were honestly so unreliable. My colleague shared that the tech term for this is “hallucinations”, which I found pretty comical. So for that particular task, I still needed to re-do most of it anyway. People say results are getting better and better, but I haven’t been convinced enough to use it. To this day I don’t have ChatGPT on any of my devices.
While I have my own misgivings, I am trying to learn about different sides as well. A colleague recommended the book Empire of AI by Karen Hao.
What is more concerning for me (along with the environmental impact) is the news about young people turning to AI chatbots in place of therapy, with really tragic and heartbreaking results. While there are so many issues at work here, I feel there should be more people sounding the alarm on ethics and safety for children and youth. Innovation without ethics is not a road we (collectively as humans) should go down on.
But can AI be used to solve world hunger or slow down climate change, perhaps? One can dream.
I dabbled in putting a few task-based/organizational things into ChatGPT/Claude when it first became mainstream, but given what I have learned and observed over the last year or so, I now give it a hard pass for any personal use (if someone is using it to find a cure for cancer, it’s a different story…I am not!!). Many reasons have already been mentioned, but I will add the human rights issue of people in developing countries being paid next to nothing to consume extremely disturbing content in order to train the models on what is “appropriate” or not, and the fact that I do not want the “voice” of LLMs to enter my brain, as far as I can control it. If you haven’t read it yet, Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is excellent food for thought (and extremely readable compared to many other encyclicals!).
Lisa, I agree with you on so many fronts. I work in academia in Silicon Valley which is a very interesting combination. Along with the issues you mentioned, I am very concerned about the ridiculous amount of water usage to cool the data centers that power AI. However, there are people that argue that the data centers that power AWS (which everything nowadays seems to run on) use exponentially far more water than one person’s casual use.
I have dabbled in it to see if it does help with efficiency for certain tasks. Our university has its own AI environment which I very occasionally try out just to learn what happens, and to possibly keep up (I use “keep up” here very loosely) with how students might be using it. It is problematic though how the language from AI tool all starts to sound unoriginal and predictable.
And yes to Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas! I must admit I haven’t felt compelled to read an encyclical in a long while, but this was a great read.
This!! That’s the other thing, I’m Catholic and the pope is vocally anti AI in a way that I think shows so much empathy and love for humans and humanity.
I’m so thrilled to see like-minded people on being anti-AI. I hate it. I am deeply concerned on the privacy issues involved with uploading information on my children’s school schedules and extracurriculars. It’s also not reliable so I feel like that lessens use value. This may be stupid, but I honestly also pride myself on my ability to keep our home calendar running, identifying logistics issues, navigating conflicting commitments. I’m good at it and I don’t want a robot taking that lol. Like everyone here, I could use 10 more hours in my day everyday. But this ‘efficiency’ gives me the ick. The most i ever use any AI for is when i google random ingredients in our house and Google AI spits out some recipe I can make for dinner.
I’m personally not interested in AI both for the privacy and ethical concerns around data centers etc and the resources they use but also, my husband has an AI tool at work that summarizes meetings for them and he often speaks of inaccuracies. I would be hesitant to rely on it for even mundane tasks without checking everything.
AI gets a no from me. At its most mild, I’ve seen it chip away at the reasoning and resilience abilities of people around me. At its most harmful, I’ve seen someone descend into AI-induced psychosis as he increasingly depends on it for answers to an unsolved medical condition. Most AI inevitability rhetoric is driven by those who stand to benefit most from it- founders and leaders of AI companies. If it really was such a magic bullet, it wouldn’t need such hard selling tactics. I also chafe at the deeply cynical feminist angle of some of the selling- telling women they’ll be left behind or behind the ball if they don’t adopt, playing at already present insecurities around the persistent gender pay gap.
For mundane and repetitive stuff, I do think parent solidarity is useful too! My friends have younger babies than me, so I offered to buy triple of the back to school supplies when I went so each of them could stock their kids’ backpacks off the list too. As long as they don’t care what I get, it works well, and only one person had to track down the textbooks and pens and very specifically sized white boards! A mom bud at baby group who doesn’t speak French was stressing about getting her daughter’s school uniforms, and I walked her up there that day and told the sales lady what was needed. I’ve asked our school if they can bill us for the textbooks next year instead of making each of us go buy them.
I am deeply deeply anti AI, and also, there are generally not-AI tools for savvy people to do the things most normies use AI for. Why ask AI about medical stuff instead of WebMD, Cleveland Clinic, CHOP? why give AI a picture to make a coloring page, when I remember using web tools to do a similar thing in 2004, while a literal child myself? Why use AI to join your calendars, when I’ve been using IFTTT shortcuts for well over a decade? I just think people are too willing to abdicate decision making, especially for low lift things, besides my issue with the energy and water use of it all. We are in drought conditions where I live, and expect to be so for the next two years. France just had the most destructive summer of wildfires ever. I do not think consumer facing generative AI should be allowed to exist. And, as a writer, I’m salty that every single one of my books has been mined for AI. I’m a tiny indie romance writer who consistently makes less than a thousand bucks a year.
I think the thing is, ask AI about something you’re an expert in, and you’ll realize very quickly that it’s simply a language model, Lorem ipsum on steroids. My husband really laughs at the investment advice it gives. I ran down a Stanley druckenmiller quote in an article the other day that had been hallucinated: it linked to a real druckenmiller interview as the source, but appeared nowhere in the complete footage/transcript, but I knew enough to know it rang false and run it down; many wouldn’t. had a mom I know following (very unsafe!! Opposite of what to do!) chatGPT medical advice about her son’s food allergies, which I happen to be expert-ish in from my own son. My friends who now are mandated to use Claude at work rather than the standard design and development process find it exhausting—the wrangling with it uses their muscles for frustrating social interaction, and keeps them from entering the glorious flow state where they can create and maybe even listen to music.
Even if it wasn’t an ethical quagmire, I simply don’t like it, so it’s an easy trade off. I’m an edge case user of many services (think 70K Pinterest pins, 60K Etsy favorites, 6200 Evernotes, 2000 kindle books) and every time they try to implement AI search rather than keyword search it makes it unusable for me. It’s so un-chic too.
I might have to borrow this as my go-to response when AI comes up: “So un-chic.” I love that!
The only personal perk I attempted with AI has been uploading a screenshot of an excel XC schedule and within seconds, Gemini imported all events, times, and locations to our shared Google family calendar. I have been laissez faire about exploring AI in any other facet of my career or home because I don’t want to hand over anymore “data points” for the software to learn about me albeit, I sure I am anyway much to my chagrin.
Another good point — the privacy issue! I was thinking about that recently when a friend was talking about using AI to figure out how to navigate a complex issue that had medical / legal implications. I wondered about what it meant to upload/include information about the situation.
Complex!
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I have also heard people sing the praises of Claude but I genuinely have ethical concerns about data centers and the environmental havoc they create (as a local, I’m sure you’ve heard about the outcry in Loudon county). I can not, in good conscience, add to this issue for my convenience.
Hi Sandy! Absolutely, thanks for bringing that aspect into the conversation as another point of consideration when using/if using.
xx
Hey Sandy! If you know people arguing against it right now, this article was a really good breakdown of the real impact (much higher than claimed in energy, though I admit water scares me even more at the moment…France had to reduce our nuclear capacity by 20% over the summer because we didn’t have enough water to keep reactors cool). https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-energy-use-of-agentic-ai
Following! I am also lagging with regard to AI use. I get satisfaction out of the exercise of creating our master calendar, and it also flags conflicts (“I need to adjust that work meeting or get a sitter at that time,” “arrange carpool for at least one of these two conflicting activities”) On a more emotional level, it makes me feel aligned to and prepared for the next season, instills a sense of ownership over the events and activities that weave together to form the fabric of our life.
(But I do want to train myself to use AI to streamline or get started on tasks that don’t need my attention… I’m just not entirely sure what/how I should be using it!)
Same page on these matters, esp the note about feeling “aligned and prepared” / having a sense of ownership. I sometimes feel that way even when packing the kids lunches/snacks? (It’s basically the only good thing I can say about that monotonous task — lol.)
xx