Allie K. Miller

I showered with my AI, and it was a horrible mistake. As the world gets more AI-friendly, and as we find more and more things to be productive about (and I don't want everything in my life to actually be productive), I have been testing and experimenting with AI usage in different contexts. And Codex live voice mode opened up new options for me. One time, instead of waiting to clean my apartment at the end of the day or on the weekend, I actually did it during the workday while I was dictating to Codex and processing tasks that I had to do. Another time, I had to fill out this form for my Apple Business account. And Codex did it all for me - it even found my W-9 on my laptop to pull my EIN. It completed the whole form so that I could run errands. Instead of being strapped to my computer and having to dig up all these files and numbers on my own, I could do double duty and get personal things off my plate without losing time. I use AI on walks. And importantly, it's not that I'm adding AI to the walks that I'm already doing (for that, I still prefer Sam Cooke or Hello Puzzlers). It's that I'm able to TAKE MORE WALKS that I wasn't able to before because of AI. So now, I might go on a walk at 4pm and process all the Slack messages that I didn't respond to or review a client contract. As a team, sometimes we even take team-wide walk breaks to work 1:1 with our AIs. BUT. I just tried one new workflow that I hated with the fury of a thousand suns. And that was trying voice mode while I was in the shower. It was effective in the sense that the AI could hear me well and could process tasks (unlike the Apple AI assistant who shall remain nameless, who can't hear me if a single pin is dropped in the background). Sure, there was a little annoyance when the phone had a permission pop-up and I had to reach my hand out of the shower to press it. But my biggest gripe was that I just hated the overall experience. Hated it. There are some parts of my life that I really don't want to add AI into right now. And it's really in those times where I allow my brain to dance off into the edges of my imagination, or truly relax and take time away from execution. And I just want this to be a reminder that we need space to be away from tech and just think and exist. That could be on a nature hike, or in the shower, or my favorite meditative place in the whole wide world (the middle of a car wash). There is no perfect optimization formula that is telling us that every minute of every day has to be AI-enabled. So I will no longer be showering with my AI and will stick to my rubber duck. Thank you.