My thoughts on AI
No clean answers here
So where do I actually stand?
It’s 2026 and people want me to pick a side. Is AI going to save us or end us. I don't think that's the right question and I think asking it the wrong way is exactly how we end up sleepwalking into the wrong answer. The conversation moves fast enough that this may read differently in a year.
Both options are true
Here's what I actually believe. AI is Schrödinger's cat. Both outcomes are true at once, dangerous and world-saving, right up until we open the box. And what's inside that box isn't decided by the technology. It's decided by what millions of individual people, companies and governments choose to do with it, one small decision at a time. The tipping point isn't a moment in the future. It's every choice being made right now, including the ones you're making about whether to learn this thing or turn away from it.
Don’t blame the tool
Because that's the part I keep coming back to. AI is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. A hammer builds a house or crushes a skull and nobody blames the hammer either way. Refusing to learn how to use one because you disagree with what someone, somewhere, might do with it doesn't make the world safer. It just means you're not in the room when the house gets built and someone with worse intentions than yours is.
Hiding under the duvet
So I chose literacy over avoidance. Not because using it makes my hands clean and not using it makes someone else’s dirty, that's not a judgement I think anyone gets to make. I just don't believe hiding under the duvet is the best way to co-create our future. Learning AI by actually using it felt like the only honest way to go about it. Just like the way you learn a language by speaking it badly before you speak it well.
The real costs
I take the climate cost seriously and I'm not going to pretend data centres are free. But I'd be lying if I said AI was the exception in how I live. I fly. I drive. I buy things I don't need from companies I can't be sure about. If I'm honest, my footprint looks like most people's footprint: good intentions sitting next to daily choices that don't always match them neatly. AI isn't a special case in that story. It's just the newest one. Books cost millions of trees and nobody wants to be without them. That was once new tech too, with damage and enormous value at the same time.
What I won't do is pretend otherwise to look better and I won't pretend that if I personally stopped, the shipping industry would stop being exploited, or that the data centres already going up would stop being built. They wouldn't. So instead of performing a purity I don't always have as a messy human, I'd rather be honest about the mess I'm part of and clear-eyed about what actually worries me.
And what worries me isn't the planet. The planet will outlast all of us, indifferent to whether we're on it or not. What worries me is what we're doing to the conditions life needs to be liveable, for all of the life forms trying to survive alongside us right now. And I choose to believe AI can help us with exactly that.
Unboxing the future
So where does that leave me. Genuinely undecided about how the story ends and completely decided about my part in it. Not naive about the risks. Not romantic about the upside either. I'd rather be skilled with the tool and awake to what I'm building than standing at a safe distance, hoping someone else gets it right.
What goes in and what stays out
Creative work goes in. Drafts, structure, code, research, the arguing-with-myself stage. That is where these tools genuinely help.
Client customer data stays out. Confidential material stays out. Coaching notes stay out entirely, no exceptions.
When a project needs AI to touch anything sensitive, we agree it in writing first and I use business accounts with proper processing agreements behind them.
Transparency here is not decoration. If you cannot say what went into the work, you cannot stand behind it.
Grounded in reality
That's the whole philosophy, really. No faith, nor fear. Just showing up as literate as possible and doing my best to make sure my hands are on this thing while it's still being decided what it becomes.
Written by Leoni Selby, September 2026. Thought, drafted and argued out with AI as sparring partner. The position is mine.