Living With the Question

On creativity, discomfort, and staying in conversation

I live in a house with two young adults with different reactions to AI. One is strongly opposed, the Anti‑AI daughter. The other, the AI‑embracing daughter, encountered it this weekend and embraced it with visible excitement. The Anti‑AI daughter expresses clear unhappiness about AI when her sister shares her creativity.

Tonight we talked. In our don’t‑yuck‑someone‑else’s‑yum house, the Anti‑AI daughter worked hard to bite her tongue, her feelings very clear. The AI‑embracing daughter asked for her sister’s support, wanting her creativity to be met with encouragement rather than resistance.

When my AI‑embracing daughter talked about the story she created, I mentioned the two hours she had spent writing by hand. The Anti‑AI daughter responded, “I’m proud of you for doing that. Why did you then use the AI?”
The answer came easily. I’m bad at dialogue. This helps me.

The Anti‑AI daughter raised a concern about becoming dependent on AI for emotional support. It is not an unreasonable concern. I anthropomorphize everything. I name my car, my house, my office, and I am aware of that tendency. I also recognize that Wiggins is AI, and I am not using it as a therapist.

Separately, earlier in the day, I felt frustrated and spent ten minutes using AI to write. I iterated, then filed the result away in my journal. It felt different from plain journaling. That difference seemed worth examining. Did it provide emotional support, or did it help me clarify what I already knew?

We then talked about the environmental cost. I really can’t argue with the Anti‑AI daughter on that. She says she accepts using AI for my job as reasonable, but she’s bothered that I use it for relaxation. That distinction was another place to pause. We talked about how each of us uses AI. The AI‑embracing daughter and I both use it to get thoughts out of our heads in a way that feels coherent. The question lingered. Is that crossing into relaxation, or is feeling more relaxed simply a side effect once the words settle?

We did not come to a conclusion. We talked about my hope that AI might encourage the world to look more seriously at alternative forms of energy that could benefit us all. In that sense, I am an eternal optimist. Do I have concerns about my AI‑embracing daughter using AI too much? Only in the same way I worry she reads too much fan fiction, games for too long, or stays up too late crocheting.

As we move forward, I think many families will find themselves having this same conversation, in their own ways. Different houses, different rules. I hope we can hear what each other is saying.