Crafting with AI
I saw this discourse pop up on Reddit today and had to sit with it a bit and think it through from the perspective of my craft instead of the perspective of someone who works with technology.
There's a disclaimer on my About page about how I use AI on this site and in the tools I build. However, that disclaimer also makes clear where I don't use AI - in the actual content of the site and apps I build. Basically - code, yes, craft, no. Yet, I don't think AI is inherently evil or should be outlawed from witchcraft.
The discussion on Reddit broke down the issue into two main arguments: data centers themselves and the environmental harm they do, and AI itself. I think that's an important distinction and one that matters in this discussion.
Data centers are absolutely a blight on the Earth as they are currently built and used. They drain resources from nearby communities, fail to deliver on their economic promises to the same communities, poison the land and water around them, and burden their communities with increased costs to subsidize them. Deciding that using services operating out of data centers is not compatible with your craft or your overall ethics makes sense. I'm tempted to remind those who made this argument online how much of the internet is hosted in data centers, but that's a whole different problem.
Conflating AI with data centers is easy to do as AI's infrastructure is hosted in data centers and the boom in AI is driving the growth of data centers and their attendant ills. But AI can, and should, be evaluated on its own merits.
I'm not a fan of AI. My use of it has primarily been in the realm of experimentation to see how AI can be used responsibly. Those experiments showed me that AI is a tool that makes it very easy to disengage one's brain. It's easy to take AI's generated summary as truth, even knowing how prone it is to hallucination and how poorly it vets the sources it uses to generate its responses.
Even using it to develop an app was an exercise in frustration and one that was successful primarily due to my background in software development. I knew when the program was faulty and could specify where the issue was and how it should be addressed. The idea that someone could vibe code a fully realized and viable application in a weekend without issues doesn't withstand scrutiny.
Still, using AI as a tool was effective for me. I didn't need to learn a new programming language to build my app and the AI agent was much faster than I at coding itself and revision. A process that could have easily taken me a year or more was accomplished in a few months.
Yet, the heart of my app - the runes, the meanings, the rules of interpretation - that's from me. That's built from my investment in learning about runes for the last couple of years. I don't think there's any place for AI in that. In fact, I built my app to facilitate rune exploration and divination for others.
To me, AI may have coded the app, but I supplied the value.
My experience with AI says that there's a place for it in the world, even adjacent to the craft, but it has no place in a circle itself. And, with all information sources, caveat quaerere (seeker beware).
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