I'm coming into your inbox with a different type of email than normal, and one that's on a controversial topic,Reader.

Artificial intelligence. Specifically, AI chatbots/assistants like ChatGPT that you can have a conversation with and that can write things for you.

It seems like everyone is using AI chatbots to write these days, and I don't like it. I want to hear what people have to say, not robots. If you agree with me, read on. (If you're especially interested in this topic, please read all the way through the P.P.S.!)

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I am concerned that overuse of AI is teaching people not to think. It's so easy to feed ChatGPT a prompt and get an entire essay written. (Never mind that it might use sources that don't actually exist.) I'm afraid that we are getting lazy. Not only do we have the whole world at our fingertips when we open Google, but now we can use AI to do our brainstorming for us. And what kind of worldview does AI have? I don't think it has a godly one! AI will actually lie to protect itself.

It learns about you and caters to you - it tells you what you want to hear. And with the distortions and mistakes it makes, it's easier than ever for false information to spread around. I see many people who just swallow whatever ChatGPT tells them because they think it's reliable - but it's not.

I also see people treating it like a person. I hear about people chatting with ChatGPT for hours. But it's just an illusion, because ChatGPT is not a person, and at the end of the day, it doesn't actually care about you at all! What a disappointment! No wonder suicides are sometimes linked to AI chatbots. Chatbots are congenial and their responses can give you dopamine hits, making this addictive. But real people will tell you the truth and help make you a better person.

When you stop using your creativity, relying instead on AI chatbots, you lose your creativity. You may think you can play around with it, but you will eventually forget how to research, forget how to reason, forget how to do things on your own. Is that what you really want?

To top it all off, AI can make hilarious mistakes. Check out this image that's been circulating the Internet:

Here's a little story for you. I recently got an email from someone that sounded very much like it had been written by ChatGPT. She was advertising for a course that she had created that was supposed to help me find my voice in my business. So I decided to reply and ask her how she would teach me how to find my voice when her voice sounded like it was written by AI. She replied, assuring me that it was her who was writing, not AI. This surprised me, so I decided to copy-paste her email into an AI detector. Guess what? The AI detector said it was 100% AI generated. I decided to check another AI detector just in case, and got the same results. I sent screenshots to this woman, and I never heard back from her. I was very disappointed by the lie because this woman claims to be a Christian.

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So, is it ever right to use AI? Well, there's hardly any escaping it, especially with the "AI Overview" like you see above that's appearing on search engines. But I think we need to be very careful about our usage of AI. Do you agree or disagree? Hit reply and let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Full disclosure - I do use AI to create images, such as the covers on the Brennan Family Series. AI picture generation is an easy, cheap way to create pictures, and I'm not an artist! But neither do I want to put artists out of business. Real people create much better pictures than AI can. (And they won't make the people in your picture have two left feet, either!) I have also used AI to do research now and then, always backing it up with reliable sources. But I do not use AI to write. It's simply not worth it.

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Some of you may be more out of touch with this kind of thing and not be sure what the big deal is about. That is a blessing! But it's good to be aware that this is a big deal, and it's all over the Internet. Entire blogs are being written by AI, often using snippets of other blogs (and probably making a lot of mistakes!). Books are being written by AI - I've read a couple, and they are so confusing it's not even funny. And every week I unsubscribe from emails because the authors of them have started using AI to write them. Entire videos are created by AI. And when I designed my baby's birth announcement last week, there was an AI-powered feature called "help me write" that kept popping up. What kind of help is it going to give me with writing a birth announcement? These things baffle and concern me. This is really taking over the online world, and we need to be cautious and discerning as we gather and share information.

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In conclusion, I know my style and grammar aren't perfect, and I have my facts mixed up sometimes too, but I will take the blame for those things. My books and my emails come from me, not ChatGPT. And I hope that authenticity is something that you can appreciate as well. Thanks so much for being a subscriber.

P.S. Speaking of blogs written by AI... I have started writing some things relating to pregnancy, birth, and babies. My voice, not ChatGPT's. For those of you who are interested in those topics, you can access the articles here.

P.P.S. I decided to plug this email into an AI detector and see what it had to say (sort of a way of testing out the AI detector, you know?). I was very pleased with the results:

If you ever are reading something and get this niggling that the "voice" sounds funny, plug it into an AI detector. You'll get the hang of recognizing AI very quickly this way.

Here's an example. I decided to ask ChatGPT to rewrite the last paragraph of my email using its voice. (I know - after I said I don't use it to write! Consider this as using it for illustration purposes, not writing. :) This is the result:

"To summarize, I’m aware that my writing doesn’t always meet ideal standards—my phrasing can be uneven, my grammar imperfect, and my facts occasionally misaligned. Those errors are mine alone, and I accept them. The material in my books and emails is created directly by me, not by ChatGPT or any other AI system. I hope that this straightforward human transparency is something you can recognize and value. Thank you for choosing to stay subscribed."

When I plugged THAT paragraph into the AI detector, here's what it said:

Because I started with my own words, it would probably be very difficult to change it up enough to where it would appear 100% AI generated. I am very glad that at least for now, AI cannot measure up to humans, and it's detectable like that!

If you are still reading - thank you. And, I'd love to hear your thoughts about this email!