An essay titled “Please Use AI” offered a deliberately ironic argument about the growing habit of using generative systems for ordinary decisions, personal writing and creative work. Rather than evaluating a particular product, the piece examined what can disappear when a machine becomes the default intermediary for tasks that once prompted conversation, effort or reflection.
The writer began with routine examples. Asking an artificial-intelligence service to build a meal plan may be quicker than calling a friend who enjoys cooking. Yet the call, the essay argued, could also reveal important parts of that friend’s life: illness in the family, loneliness or a garden damaged by frost. Planning a camping trip through software could similarly replace an exchange with someone whose outdoor experience might lead to a longer conversation or an in-person meeting.
Those examples framed efficiency as an incomplete measure of value. The requested information might be obtained faster through automation, but the unplanned human exchange surrounding it could matter more than the answer. The essay repeatedly contrasted a clean transaction with the unpredictable disclosures, shared memories and imperfections found in relationships.
Personal expression formed the second part of the critique. The writer imagined a parent using AI to prepare remarks for a child’s wedding, even though that parent possessed years of intimate memories involving care, worry and family life. The same concern was applied to books, essays, art and photography. Instant competence, in the writer’s view, could weaken the slow process of learning a craft and accepting work that initially feels awkward or inadequate.
The commentary extended that point to mourning. It pictured future relatives assembling a funeral song from an obituary, social-media posts and assorted quotations processed by a chatbot. That scenario was presented as technically polished but emotionally sanitized because the system itself had not experienced loss, reconciliation, physical decline or affection.
The closing perspective was explicitly personal. Approaching age 50, the writer described a youngest daughter sleeping nearby, older children moving away, a changing body and stories that had never reached the page as intended. These details supported the central contention that frustration, incompleteness and vulnerability are not defects that technology necessarily needs to remove.
The personal essay did not provide research findings or propose a ban on AI. Its contribution was a cultural argument: convenience can solve the stated task while quietly eliminating the encounter, practice or personal voice that gave the task meaning. That position remains the author’s interpretation, grounded in autobiographical examples rather than independently tested evidence.
