Please Use AI - by Shawn Smucker - The Courage to Live It
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Please Use AI
Shawn Smucker<br>May 04, 2026
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Be sure to use AI when making<br>your next, I don’t know, meal plan,<br>for example. Definitely do not call<br>your friend who loves to cook and ask her<br>for her favorite recipes or tips or ways<br>to save time making meals,<br>because you will end<br>up talking for longer than you had hoped,<br>hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer<br>diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even<br>what she’s planted in her spring<br>garden and then lost with the early frost.<br>And be sure to use AI when planning that next<br>camping trip, the last one you will take<br>with this particular child. Definitely do<br>not text your friend who has fly-fished every<br>river in Pennsylvania and biked every<br>backwoods trail, because you might end<br>up texting back and forth for the rest of the day<br>or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing<br>how he has ended each recent night black-out<br>drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his<br>cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just<br>that he repaired his own washing machine<br>and is pretty damn proud of that.<br>And be sure to use AI when your next child<br>gets married, so that you can write them<br>the perfect toast or poem or speech or song<br>because no one wants to hear your<br>words, the actual poorly written words<br>of a parent (you) who changed<br>hundreds of diapers for said child or fed<br>them in the middle of the<br>night from your actual body. Or cried<br>when they were late home because<br>you were positive they were dead. We don't<br>want those words—we’d prefer the sterile<br>words of a machine that never lived, never<br>had an original thought, never felt<br>the pain of miscarriage or broken<br>relationships or the joy of a friendship restored<br>or of seeing spring’s first<br>robin dancing on frost.<br>And be sure to use AI when working on your next<br>book or essay or piece of art or photography,<br>and then smile or even laugh at your own<br>cleverness when you see how good it is,<br>and how easy,<br>because who the hell has time<br>to work at something, to give time to craft, to<br>create with their own minds, to spend<br>years being mediocre. Why do that when<br>mastery, or at least competency<br>is so simple<br>only a good prompt away?<br>How magnificent<br>the funeral song our children or contemporaries<br>will write for us, a song they will make by<br>taking our obituary and Facebook posts,<br>plus random quotes from our algorithm,<br>and feeding them into Chat<br>or Gemini<br>or Claude.<br>The tears that will fall in the face of such<br>sanitary sweetness!<br>Be sure to use AI<br>and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th<br>year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,<br>my arm falling asleep because I dare not move<br>lest I scare away this moment,<br>lying here melancholy about my older<br>children moving out and my middle<br>children no longer needing me, at least<br>not like they used to, weary about this body<br>that fails me now in ever increasing ways<br>that will never be restored. Sighing<br>over stories I tried to write but never hit<br>the page the way they felt in my mind.<br>But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,<br>the natural order of things?<br>the longing for something that could always be<br>a bit better<br>or the way that anything<br>worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,<br>especially at first<br>or hearing another human voice and somehow<br>realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these<br>subtle imperfections<br>The Courage to Live It is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Elizabeth Harwell
May 4
Liked by Shawn Smucker
My grandmother is basically blind, and my grandfather is basically deaf— but yesterday I called them to get a peanut butter pie recipe. My grandfather pulled a recipe card and tried to transcribe my grandmother’s scrawl to me over the phone, while my grandmother shouted corrections in the background. I wrote it all down on a piece of paper. I resisted the urge today to find a recipe online to compare it to (just in case!). Instead I made it just how it was shouted out to me. It’s lovely. Lovelier for the way it was given, and not sourced. Thanks for this poem. It also felt given.
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Charis Crandall<br>May 4
Liked by Shawn Smucker
You make real, human life seem so messy and inefficient and gloriously wonderful. May we always champion our humanity in such a way.
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