“Please Use AI” turns the case for AI adoption into satire

An essay published on the Substack newsletter The Courage to Live It has become one of the most widely discussed contributions to the debate about how far artificial intelligence should reach into ordinary life. Written by Shawn Smucker and published on 4 May 2026, “Please Use AI” makes its argument entirely through irony: it instructs the reader, again and again, to hand everyday tasks — and intimate ones — to a language model.

An instruction manual that reads as a warning

The piece is built as a list of commands. Be sure to use AI when planning your next meal plan, it says, and definitely do not call the friend who loves to cook: that conversation will run longer than you hoped, and you might hear about her father’s cancer diagnosis, how lonely she has been, or the garden she planted and then lost to an early frost. Use AI when planning the next camping trip — the last one you will take with that particular child — rather than texting the friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail.

Weddings, books and a funeral song

The targets widen as the essay continues. Use AI, it says, when your next child gets married, so you can produce the perfect toast, poem or song, because nobody wants the poorly written words of a parent who changed hundreds of diapers or fed that child at night. The same instruction covers the next book, essay, artwork or photograph: admire how good and how easy the result is, and ask why anyone would spend years being mediocre when competency is only a good prompt away. The satire ends at a funeral, imagining a song assembled from an obituary, Facebook posts and algorithmic quotes fed into a chatbot.

The counter-argument in the final turn

The essay then drops the irony. Smucker writes from his fiftieth year, his youngest daughter asleep on his chest, thinking about older children moving out, a body that fails him in ways that will never be restored, and stories he could not get onto the page the way they felt in his mind. His answer is that the longing for something better, the clumsiness and pain of anything worth doing, and the sound of another human voice are where the beauty of life actually sits. The post drew more than 15,000 likes and over 400 comments on Substack, where readers traded their own stories — among them one who transcribed a peanut butter pie recipe by telephone from a nearly blind grandmother and a nearly deaf grandfather instead of searching for it online.