This story first appeared in CityView Magazine’s “The Spring Issue” April 2026 edition.

Love it or hate it, we are living in a day in age when artificial intelligence can do an astounding (and rapidly increasing) number of things for us. Whether it’s using OpenAI to develop a wedding toast that rivals Shakespeare, asking Alexa to curate the perfect playlist for a swanky dinner party in a matter of seconds, or turning to ChatGPT for help checking your sixth grader’s math homework (not that I would never need that), these are just a few of the seemingly endless uses of AI assistance in everyday life. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Artificial intelligence is also being used in more complex applications—everything from healthcare diagnostics and cybersecurity threat detection to supply chain optimization, data analytics, precision agriculture, advanced marketing strategies, and even vehicle navigation and object detection. (This last phenomenon I recently experienced on a dinner double-date when our friend summoned his self-driving Tesla to pick us up curbside from the parking lot of a restaurant, which both blew my mind and scared me to death all at once.) 

In many ways, AI makes life easier. It helps us optimize our time and efficiency, and offers a helping hand when our human capabilities fall short. 

For instance, as long as I have an aptly placed speaker, I can ask Alexa to “put trash bags on my shopping list” the very second that I pull the last Hefty trash bag from the box, or even “order my usual conditioner on Amazon” from the shower, as I bang the remnants from the bottom of the bottle.  

When my daughter’s math homework exceeds the extent of my math tutoring ability, with a few clicks on the keyboard, I can even ask ChatGPT to explain a pre-algebra problem step-by-step in terms an 11-year-old can understand. It can just as easily come up with a simple dinner recipe using the ingredients I have on hand on a day that did not allow time for a grocery store run.  

And although yet another advantage of AI is that it eliminates human error in theory, it’s not always perfect. For starters, there’s the virtual voice assistants’ inability to understand a good ol’ southern accent. 

After years of frustrating iPhone back-and-forth misunderstandings between Siri and me, it was enlightening to learn that she was developed in California. And if you ask me, the voice recognition software creators really dropped the ball on “Siri-Lynne,” the Carolinas-specific voice recognizer who knows better than to convert “tell” to “tail,” “well” to “whale,” or “I would have guessed” to “I would have gas” on voice-to-text. Or “Alexa-Jean,” who would never respond to a twangy “add syrup to my grocery list” with a robotic, “OK, Claire. I have added cigarettes to your grocery list.”  

And then there’s the problem of needing to be extra-specific with your AI requests, such as which speaker you’d like to connect to play your request of Ricky Martin. 

If you’re not careful, Alexa will send the song not to the playroom for your kids’ dance party, but straight to the portable Bluetooth speaker your husband is using on the golf course with his buddies. Apparently, golfers do not appreciate an unexpected blasting of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” from the golf cart in the middle of a game-changing putt. 

You also must double-check exactly which group thread you’re voice texting, or else you might end up sending, via Siri, an invitation to your husband’s birthday barbecue meant for a small group of close friends to the parents of your daughter’s entire little league soccer team instead, as a friend of mine recently did. 

Another burgeoning use of AI that I’m sure we’ve all seen across our social media feeds is the extreme editing and enhancement of photographs that has replaced old-school Photoshop and left many folks’ profile pictures looking like Barbie and Ken caricature versions of their real selves. 

I had to chuckle at a post I read just the other day that said, “I knew we were cooked when people started accepting compliments on AI photos of themselves.” This is a real phenomenon I’ve personally witnessed. 

I’ve seen plenty of friends reply to naive compliments like, “Tell me your secrets! You do not age,” with “Aw, it’s just a good skincare routine” on photos that have been digitally morphed. They’re edited in a way that makes one wonder if they uploaded their photo into ChatGPT with the request, “Make me look just enough like a supermodel that my old high school buddies might actually think it’s still me.” 

And that’s all fun and games until you zoom in on the new and improved photo and realize that, while ChatGPT magically erased your fine lines and wrinkles, plumped your lips, and trimmed your waistline, it also inexplicably gave you 12 fingers.  

For creatives like me, the idea that an invisible bot could have “written” this column in a matter of seconds is more than a little frightening. While the AI version might have fewer grammatical errors, be a bit more concise, and even still reflect my writing style, it would not be a true and honest reflection of personal insight and feeling. 

I hope that the next generation will continue to use their wonderful, creative minds to write stories, songs, and essays. That they’ll invent their own recipes, make unique playlists, and not forget that while sometimes backroads take a little longer than the highway trip Siri will suggest, the scenery is worth the extra 10 minutes. And that they will have the discernment to see the beauty in real human faces over artificially edited digital versions of them.  

As for me, I plan to stick to using AI for things like creating grocery lists and finding the best route around standstill traffic. When it comes to my writing, I’ll continue to use the ol’ brain God gave me. I just can’t promise the same for all the math homework. The good bots at ChatGPT can have at those pre-algebra equations.