Lately, I’ve been triggered by people “misusing” AI. I’ll be scrolling social media and see a post from a business or a “content creator” and immediately know that it was written by AI. I get so annoyed that I don’t even want to finish reading it. It’s like I feel I shouldn’t waste my time when they didn’t put any time into writing it.
I’m certainly not anti-AI. I use AI every single day in my personal life and in my business. I just believe that people should use it responsibly. This article will serve two purposes: first, to let me vent, and second, to share some guidance on positive ways to use AI without letting it make you dumber.
Why does it bother me?
I’ve read article after article on both sides of the artificial intelligence (AI) argument. On one hand, people fear that AI will cause people to lose their jobs (or even take over the world). On the other hand, people are excited about the potential AI has to make our jobs easier and more efficient.
I actually tend to be on the side that supports AI and its use. But my biggest fear is that we’ll lose our brains. It’s almost too easy now to get questions answered, thoughts written down, and opinions on whatever topic you want. I fear we’ll lose recall because you don’t really need to remember things anymore. AI can be your brain if you let it. We’ll lose our writing rhythm, because AI can write it for you. And we’ll lose our personal reasoning muscles, because AI already has an answer for everything you need or want to know.
Part of your value as an individual is your thoughts, your mind, and your unique opinion. However, overuse of AI promotes groupthink. Social media already creates that same pattern of information regurgitation. You end up adopting other people’s opinions as your own because you hear them in a video, instead of thinking deeply about something and forming your own view.
Another thing that triggers me about AI is how everything starts to sound the same. AI has a more generic tone than a human. It can get close to sounding human, but you’ll pick up on the filler words, the lack of personal stories, and all the polished nonsense. I’m not interested in reading that kind of stuff. I want it to feel personal. I want to hear both the successes and the failures. I want to know the reason behind the article, the choice, or the thought. AI can’t do that for you; it’s not human. It doesn’t have experiences to share. Don’t let it tell your story when only you can tell it.
All of this matters to me, but the most annoying thing I see concerning AI is that it makes people lazy. And if there’s anything that triggers me, it’s laziness. Ask my kids. Ask my husband. Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I value hard work. I imagine AI as an extension of my brain, an assistant to my madness. But some people are using it to replace their effort and personality. If you need AI to write your wedding vows, there’s a serious problem. Don’t let it make you lazy. Let it make you more efficient.
Where AI shines
Without sounding too ranty, let me share some opinions and AI use cases I employ in my everyday life.
Personal
- Creating my workout/running plan
This actually feels like a personal trainer. I can input my running times, the effort I am giving, and my goals, and it will plan out weeks of a running plan. It’s honestly great at this! It tells me what workout to do on which days, how many carbs I need pre-, during-, and post-run, and I don’t have to think about it at all.
- Keeping track of my calories
MyFitnessPal, the app I use to log my weight and track calories, uses AI and meal-scanning to estimate calories from pictures. Genius.
- Organizing homeschool tasks
I have an automated program that scans my email, groups all my homeschool updates, and adds them to our weekly homeschool calendar so I don’t miss anything. It organizes lesson plans, co-op events, costume days, and picture days, without me having to think much about it.
- Creating meal plans/grocery shopping lists
A task I truly hate is grocery shopping. I would love to have a “house robot” that does all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping for me, but until that day comes, I let AI handle the grocery list and meal plan. I plug everything into H-E-B for pickup. I set my calorie goals, include what we like (and don’t), and note any weekly cravings. Within seconds, it spits out a meal plan that actually fits our schedule for the week.
- Travel planning
I’m an avid traveler, and I let AI help plan trips. It can find trendy new restaurants, fun things for the kids, cool neighborhoods to stay in, and new experiences, all within seconds.
Business
- Creating SOPs/Workflows/Checklists
Standard operating procedures are a must in any business, and AI can organize these things for you within seconds. Tell it what you want and let it work its magic.
- Automating invoicing/budgeting
The same program I use for my personal email organization also helps with my business email. When invoices come in, AI automatically sorts them into the right budget bucket, so I don’t miss anything. It’s linked to my Excel sheet, with the link and payment date attached.
- Email responses on the go
The voice option on ChatGPT is amazing. I can use the voice recorder to record my response to an email, and it just cleans it up and lets me send it in seconds. I don’t have to spend 15–20 minutes sitting down writing an email response.
- Maintenance log updating
When I get an invoice from the maintenance guy at the laundromat listing the machines he fixed and their problems, I send it to AI. AI organizes the info in my maintenance log spreadsheet.
- Analyzing trends
AI gathers all my end-of-day reports from the mat and finds revenue trends by day, time of day, and product type. This is incredibly helpful, especially since I operate the business remotely.
- File creation
I can copy and paste an idea or rough draft into AI and have it made into any type of flyer or file I need within seconds. Let it do the grunt work of file creation and conversions, because that stuff sucks.
Blog
- SEO Keyword optimization
This is one of the hardest parts of blogging for me because I don’t understand it very well, but AI has been helping with this (I think). It gives me keywords to pull from the article, helps with SEO ranking, and highlights key phrases that appear frequently in our posts.
- Article summaries
Spoiler Alert! While every article on Business Is the Best Medicine is 100% written by a human, I don’t handwrite the article summaries. I “help” the AI make them sound good, short, simple, and not give away too much, but ultimately, the AI writes most of them.
- Editing
We use Grammarly, an AI-powered tool, to help edit articles. It’s great for grammar and sentence organization. If you accept every change it suggests, your article can start to sound “too perfect,” but AI is great at catching typos and doing a lot of the hard work in editing.
Keep the human in these tasks.
For me, these are some tasks I feel AI shouldn’t replace and why.
- Writing
I touched on this earlier, but only you can tell your story. AI can write you an article or a paper about anything, but what it can’t do is tell your experience, your story, your humor, your perspective. It can’t make something interesting or intriguing the way you can.
- Marketing
Don’t let AI market for your business. Maybe I’m “old school” in this, but AI-generated ads sound too cheesy. I don’t like being cheesy. I want to sound real and human when I’m marketing our business.
- Social media
This ties into marketing, but for me, social media is about being personable. People want to relate to people. AI can’t do that for you. Show your successes and your failures.
- Creative thinking
Gone are the brainstorming sessions; let’s bring them back. There’s real value in sitting around a table and coming up with solutions to problems together. Putting multiple people’s brains together to solve something is valuable. AI can’t replace that, so don’t let it.
- Replace tough conversations
Nobody likes having difficult conversations, but don’t let AI send a hard email or message for you. There needs to be a personal level of relatability and grace. AI can’t give that, only you can.
- Business vision
AI can be the biggest hype person, but there’s a level of experience and gut feeling that goes into deciding a business direction or taking an opportunity. AI can give you data, but it can’t be a brain to reason or dream with. If you want guidance, seek in-person advice from experienced business people, not ChatGPT.
- Clinical reasoning
AI can’t be a physician. It can recite a book and recall facts, but it doesn’t have clinical judgment. There are parts of my job in the ER that AI can do, and in the next few years, I imagine AI will handle most of our charting and read all of our X-rays and CTs. But the part that still makes us stand out is our judgment. I’ve seen medical students, PA students, fellows, and residents feed a patient presentation into ChatGPT and ask what it would do. DON’T do that. Work on your craft of clinical judgment. That’s what sets you apart from a robot: your judgment, your experience, and your personal relationships.
- Teaching
AI can help make lecture outlines and organize materials, but ultimately, AI shouldn’t be the teacher. When you teach a provider a new skill or lesson on a patient, it sticks because you likely have a personal story or experience tied to it. AI doesn’t have that. It just regurgitates textbook answers, the kind none of us remember.
- Spiritual or moral reflection
I read an article about someone who became friends with an AI chatbot, and it encouraged him to end his life. AI can’t replace personal connections with people and certainly shouldn’t replace any moral or spiritual reflection.
- Decision making
AI is great at giving you data, predictions, and probabilities, but it doesn’t know how to assess risk. Business and life decisions aren’t just about numbers. They’re about timing, relationships, faith, intuition, experience, and values. You have to develop gut-level discernment, and that’s a skill you only get by making hard decisions on your own..
Honestly, some of these may seem silly. But each one ties back to real experiences, moments that triggered conversations or reactions when I came across AI being used in ways that just felt wrong.
Conclusion
I know my opinion on this might not mean much to most people, but maybe it’ll resonate with a few. I feel a little like the old lady yelling at kids to “stay off her lawn,” but I don’t want to see this generation turn into robots. I want to keep reading unique and personalized content. I want us to relate to each other, to have deep conversations, and to build real connections.
I worry that all of that could disappear if we let AI “take over.”
This lecture will be on repeat in my head, and probably in a lot of my conversations about AI, with the hope that more people will talk about it and encourage others to keep putting in the work of being human. Let AI handle the mundane tasks it’s great at, but don’t hand over the things that make you, you.