Tool or Thief

• 

• 

• 

So, I’ve been doing an incredible amount of thinking over the last few days.

What have I been thinking about?

Artificial intelligence.

AI has been around the edges of my life for a while now, but when I was first introduced to it, I honestly had no idea what people were talking about. I had no desire to use it. In fact, the first place I really learned about AI was at work, when our school division began introducing it to us and talking about the ways it could be used—both positively and negatively—and how it might impact education as the years progressed.

I slowly learned more about ChatGPT, Co-Pilot and other AI tools, but my creative side was resistant.

I am a creative person. I think I always have been.

I love music. I love to colour. I like to build, create, listen and experiment. I value the work of other creative people. And, as someone who is a musician and an author of children’s books, I have always believed that there is something important about the human process of creating.

For me, using AI to create the art, music, story or song and claiming it as your own is not right.

I don’t want a machine to create the things I am capable of creating myself.

I also have a stepson who is adamantly opposed to AI in almost every form, and I have to admit that some of the recent conversations about AI and the potential dangers it poses have frightened me. There have been very public warnings from people involved in developing these technologies, and the possibilities  feel unsettling.

But in the last year, I had become more comfortable using AI as a tool. It had saved me an incredible amount of time.

As my employer continued encouraging us to explore ways it could be used, I started thinking about how I could use it to reduce some of the workload associated with teaching.

In my Pre-K classroom, I am responsible for documenting children’s learning. One of the ways I do this is through learning stories.

Every day for a few minutes, I sit with my iPad and Apple Pencil and take notes while I observe the children playing, communicating, exploring and interacting. When I go home, I use my written notes to help me recall what I saw.

I talk.

I describe.

I record.

I tell the story.

Then I use an AI tool to help refine and edit what I’ve already created.

It isn’t making up the learning.

It isn’t inventing what the children said or did.

It isn’t deciding what I observed.

I am still doing that work.

The AI is essentially helping me take my spoken words and turn them into a polished version of my own story. It saves me an enormous amount of time that I would otherwise spend typing and editing.

I proofread everything.

I make sure it hasn’t misunderstood something. I make sure it hasn’t changed the meaning. I make sure the finished learning story reflects what I actually saw and what I intended to communicate. I ensure that it is the story I just recorded.

For me, that feels like using AI technology as a tool—not handing over the creative or professional responsibility.

---

And then came the cartoon.

I saw one of those silly AI prompts circulating on social media. You put in some prompt, and the AI creates a cute little version of what it thinks you might look like.

I tried it. Honestly, I thought it was funny.

I liked the curly-haired version of me that it created, so I asked it to keep her. I asked it to replace the fluffy dog it had generated with my dog Corb, add my two cats, Quinton and Moose, and turn it into something I could use to promote the release of my new children’s book, Moose the Cat.

I thought it was adorable. I didn’t think much more about it. Honest.

And that was where I missed something.

The book I was promoting was created by me. I wrote the words. The illustrations were created without AI. I would never have used AI to create my book because that distinction matters to me.

Yet here I was using an AI-generated image to promote that work.

I hadn’t made the connection.

Other people did.

And some of them were very angry about it.

I received comments on Instagram that were, quite honestly, shocking. Some people called me names. Some told me they were blocking me. Some ridiculed me. And seeing how many people liked some of those comments hurt.

I’m not going to pretend it didn’t.

But then a few people offered something different.

They explained, kindly but honestly, that they saw a contradiction. How could I be using AI-generated art to promote a creative project while emphasizing that the project itself was created without AI?

And you know what?

They had a point.

I didn’t have to like the way everyone communicated their criticism. I would appreciate it if people could disagree without being cruel.

But I also don’t have to dismiss criticism simply because it makes me uncomfortable.

In hindsight, I’m actually grateful that some people called me on it.

Because it made me stop.

And think.

And reconsider.

Maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this for me. There are lots of opinions about AI. Maybe it is not as simple as labelling it either good or bad.

I think the important questions are:

How are we using it?

What are we asking it to do?

What are we giving up when we use it?

And what are we choosing to protect?

For me, creativity is something I want to protect.

I don’t want AI to replace the human imagination, the messy process of learning, the hours spent practising an instrument, drawing a picture, writing a story or figuring something out for ourselves.

I don’t want it to replace the human connection in my classroom, or the professional collaboration in a staff meeting.

I don’t want it to become a shortcut that removes the very struggle that makes creating something meaningful. That makes learning, learning. I think we need to struggle to learn.

But I also don’t think refusing every use of AI is necessarily the answer.

There are ways it can be a useful tool.

There are ways it can reduce unnecessary workload.

There are ways it can help us organize, edit, brainstorm and communicate while leaving the thinking, experience, creativity and responsibility with the human being.

That distinction feels important to me now.

And maybe that’s why this experience bothered me so much. It wasn’t really about one cartoon.

It was about realizing that my actions can communicate something I didn’t intend to say.

It was about being willing to listen when someone points that out.

And it was about recognizing that my own boundaries around AI need to be more thoughtful and intentional.

I am still concerned about the potential dangers of AI. I think we should be.

But I also think we need thoughtful conversations about how we use it rather than simply reacting with fear and hate  or embracing it without question.