Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad umbrella term that refers to a range of technologies that have been deployed for scientific, medical, commercial, and surveillance purposes. Like computers, AI can be deployed for ethical and nonethical purposes and be designed, executed, and used in more and less ethical ways.
AI has numerous environmental and social concerns that have been described elsewhere. Similar to other issues of consumption, I believe critiquing AI at the institutional, corporate, and societal levels is more fruitful than criticizing how individual users attempt to adapt to a changing technological environment and go about their lives. Many of the environmental and social costs associated with AI could be averted with public policy for clean energy infrastructure and appropriate regulation of the technology. This suggests the problems with AI are largely a governance problem.
Currently, there are some uses of AI that are more widely viewed as acceptable (e.g., medical research that will save lives) versus those viewed as problematic (e.g., image generation recycling the work of human artists). While use of AI is often discussed in deeply moralized terms, the line between that which is ethical and nonethical AI is blurry and subjective. And although some people may take pride in not using AI at all, the cost-benefit analysis of making this choice differs greatly by occupation and what you might use AI for. For disabled people, in particular, many services that greatly improve quality of life and help individuals overcome accessibility barriers use AI.
I do believe there are many important and likely world-changing applications of AI in science, medicine, public health, and other fields, and in my view, choosing not to engage with AI at all is similar to choosing not to use a computer. There are in fact significant ethical problems with computers, but it can be challenging to contribute to or engage with society today without using a computer. Increasingly, most apps and systems are integrating AI, so whether you are aware of it or not, AI has become a significant part of our day-to-day lives.
On a personal level, my own policies around AI are evolving. While I attempted to avoid use for quite a while, AI has become deeply embedded in data analysis and research with clear benefits to the reproducibility and accessibility of science. Many teams now rely on Claude, for example, within their work flows. As one concrete example of its benefits, Claude has helped to democratize complex quantitative methods that only a few select “experts” used to understand and use (and who rarely explained them in accessible ways). Claude and related tools can help allow people who have not received this exact (and often gate-kept) training to engage with these approaches.
As of August 2026, I limit my use of AI tools in my professional work to cases where AI has a clear benefit (i.e., to reduce error, allow me to solve a problem I wouldn’t otherwise be able to solve, save substantial time). This use of AI aligns with my values of reducing environmental impact, avoiding displacement of creatives, and not financially supporting AI companies, while leveraging lower-impact uses of AI for intentional purposes. Some examples of my use include as a tool to get critical feedback, for structuring and clarifying my own thinking, as a tool for audio transcription, for editing assistance on routine documents, and for code review and other analytic robustness checks. I specifically do not use AI for image or video generation, and I do not personally pay for AI services (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT). I have made a commitment to not use AI to generate my publication writing, fiction writing, and visual/sound art as Lyra McMahon for numerous reasons, including that this would defeat much of the purpose and value of scholarship and art.
Personally, I don’t think it will work to just try to make AI go away. I think we need to recognize that it is here to stay, that it needs to be heavily regulated by policymakers, and that it has the potential of delivering societal benefits if we insist on this through policy. I will continue to update this position statement as disciplinary norms evolve and as my own policies develop and change.
