Two years ago, Senior Editor Holly Devon reflected on AG internal discussions surrounding the encroachment of AI, but remained steadfast in her assurance that those who lend their hand to this magazine have far more talent and tenacity to ever be replaced by an entity as stupid and ugly as AI. And she was right: A computer can never accomplish what our brilliant contributors do because they are smarter, more dedicated, and more creative than can ever be artificially replicated. However, I must take a moment to make a plea to the general public to please, for the love of fucking God, stop using AI.
I promise, from the bottom of my heart, you don’t need AI to write an email for you. You don’t need AI to make a grocery list for you. You don’t need to see what an AI “portrait” of your own face looks like. And guess what? Ironically using AI to illustrate how ugly and stupid AI is is actually no different from using it in earnest.
It feels like every other ad is either trying to sell AI directly or using AI to sell whatever else, and each one makes me feel fucking insane. They’re filled with people asking their phone asinine questions like, “Does my plant hate me?” and “Show me this thing that’s right in front of me.” The NFL, with all its billions of dollars, has been airing an ad full of the typical smoothed out, uncanny valley slop of players on a fake float because why put time and effort into making something look good? In one ad marketed towards college students, the ad asked whether students are tired of hours of research, and what if those hours could be minutes instead? There have been parodies of it aplenty, but what’s sad is that these parodies are nearly indistinguishable from actual advertisements.
But beyond being horrendously tacky, it is actually harmful—environmentally, intellectually, and politically. The negative environmental impact of this technology is now firmly established. Research has shown that AI sucks up an exorbitant amount of energy and water. A report by APM Research Lab showed that one data center in Goodyear, Arizona uses “around 56 million gallons of potable water annually,” which is equivalent to about 670 households in the town, and according to WIRED, data centers made up “1.5 percent of global energy use in 2024,” with AI only increasing that number moving forward.
We are mining and wasting our precious resources so that people can develop fewer critical thinking skills.
I spent most of my day on the Katrina anniversary running errands around the city—picking up and delivering the September issue, visiting with friends, watching the evening’s exquisite sunset, and staying mostly off my phone. But during one of my morbidly curious ventures onto social media on that weighty occasion, I opened Instagram and was accosted with a foulness I couldn’t have predicted: a suggestion to let me chat with an AI bot named Avi the Zionist. And while I know that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are bad and always have been, the severity of this propaganda shocked me. The suggestion to chat with an AI bot is bad enough, but to create a fake Zionist in order to manufacture sympathy for Israel is sickening. I’ve been trying to cut my ties with social media as much as possible for a while but my mission has become far more urgent.
These tech companies have a vested interest in our stupidity. There’s a reason that education is being attacked by our extremist government, and there’s a reason that their tightly-knit private tech entities are trying to manufacture consent in the form of AI bots. There’s a reason they want you to spend fewer hours researching. When we generate fewer of our own thoughts, they’re right there to generate them for us. And Louisiana specifically, which will soon be the site of Meta’s largest data center, has a vested interest in telling these companies to go fuck themselves.
The notion that hours of research are something to be eschewed in the name of “saving time” is not only lazy, it ignores the fact that research is as much about the process as it is the result, and it is intrinsically rewarding. The joy of being an English major, as I was, was getting lost in the threads of research that each project led me down. To this day, every research rabbit hole I find myself in provides a new giddiness as I discover that wow, in fact, everything does connect, and the world is full of nuance and beauty and music and surprise! When everything is a checklist to meet an end goal, the magic is gone, and what joy does a world without magic offer?
And so I find myself needing to ask right here, right now, what do you want to have spent your life doing when the end comes? What will you see flashing before you? Will it be the thrill of untangling the intricacies of the world we live in, the experience of humbling yourself before the accumulated wisdom of the ancestors, the joy of stumbling into hard-won new creation after much trial and error—or will it be asking ChatGPT what you want for dinner?
And while our readers are the types to know all this already, I do find myself surprised, still, by how many among us have yet to shun its use entirely, and every time I see especially local music, art, or politics promoting itself with AI it ruins my day.
So I beg you: Please, for the sake of our environment, our intellect, and general taste, if you’re still using AI, cut that shit out. —Marisa Clogher
illustration by Laura Frizzell
October 2025 cover by L. Steve Williams
