Are You Practicing Conscientious AI Usage? [Friday Wrap-Up]

Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur, a short

episode where I cover four things, what's on my mind this week? Recommended reading

something fun and something to help your systems. This is the show that helps overwhelmed

coaches, consultants, and service providers build systems so their business doesn't

depend on them. Hopefully this week's curation gets you thinking about your own systems

Before you close the laptop for the weekend, I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's

what's on my mind for August 21st, 2026,

what is conscientious AI use?

As is usually the case, I wrote about AI on LinkedIn and it took off becoming my

second most popular post in the last 90 days

behind only a post to Doist paid to boost.

It's a contrarian view that I don't feel should be contrarian.

If you didn't write it, it's not yours.

I'll touch more on this in the recommended reading segment, but ultimately it boils

down to this.

If you have an idea and outsource it to an LLM to write about that idea, it's not

yours. Ideas are not executions. If they were, I'd get credit for thinking of Facebook

or as I put it, MySpace, but only for college students back in 2003.

But as I said, you'll get more of that in the next segment.

This LinkedIn post was the catalyst for what's actually on my mind this week, conscientious

AI use. This was a term proposed to me by my mastermind group. Shout out to,

Jen, Liz, Rahul, Tanya, and Mike. And I've been thinking about it ever since.

I've written a lot about AI over the last couple of years, but I've always been hesitant

to brand myself as an AI person, even a contrarian one because I didn't want to be

viewed as taking advantage of some ai. Gold rush tools come and go, methods come

and go, but it's really the core principles that matter when you're doing something

that said more people are asking me about it and it's becoming a legitimate part

of systems.

I can't really ignore it or avoid it anymore.

The other event that is pushing me towards this thinking about conscientious AI usage

is that Claude has broken spectacularly for me this week.

Basically from when I started my weekly planning on Sunday up until right before

I hit record every day. Claude has given me a different problem. Whatever changes

they made in last week's updates has screwed up a bunch of my skills and projects.

and for some this would put a halt to their work as they rely so heavily on AI to

do the work for them. I know this because when Claude is down, there are people who

legitimately cannot work a lot, say This must be a sign to go outside. I say a sign

to go outside is you want to go outside,

not the thing you've outsourced your thinking to is down.

One tenant of conscientious AI usage is that you're using it for specific tasks

and not craft

meaning that when the large language model breaks your whole business

or your whole work day isn't

upended

that you don't have to spend a bunch of time fixing the thing so the work can get

done

that you should be able to continue working

or make small tweaks like I did with my copy editor skill

or like I did with another project I use for podcasting.

I will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I have

set up a new hub for all of my AI content. You can find it over at Love-hate dot

ai. That's love-hate dot ai. I am actually shocked that domain was available.

that is going to be where all of my AI writing podcast episodes and YouTube videos

will be. By the way, when I say AI writing, I mean things I wrote about ai, not things

I had AI write.

And of course, if you have something on your mind, what do you think about conscientious

AI usage? You can let me know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. You can write in or leave

a voice note. I might even play the voice note on the show.

Okay, let's get to the recommended reading. This is from Dan Morin over at Six Colors.

It's called LLMs RT Writing.

And this is another thing that was pushing me towards conscientious AI usage.

Several people have asked me what I think about the lexical watermark that Anthropic

is adding to writing in its new models.

my most glib answer has been, I'm not worried about it because I'm not using LLMs

to write for me. I don't think anyone should. So this is actually, Annette, good

for me,

but I was also very confused to read John Gruber's very angry take about it.

He is so mad that this watermarking is happening. He is so mad that AI has stolen

writing, which I am too. But the screed reads differently from what I would expect

because my understanding is that he doesn't use AI to write either. So like

shouldn't just just push more people

to not use it.

And truth be told, I've never been a huge fan of John Gruber's work, though I do

respect what he's done. I mean, he's like an

OG

actually get paid to blog Blogger.

My take is actually much closer to Dan Morin's at Six Colors and it is today's recommended

reading. So I'm gonna quote this directly here.

If this does truly make AI generated text worse, well good.

A lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM turns out as good enough.

And if I'm being realistic, I don't think this will change anything.

But if it does lead to more people being dissatisfied with the plum they're being

fed and turning instead to writing and editing their own text,

then that would actually be a positive outcome.

I agree wholeheartedly with this quote, and I feel a lot of the backlash is revolving

around two aspects of AI writing. The first is that AI is changing the words to make

its output worse, which

seems to not really be the case, and maybe that's going to get worse. But again,

if you are so concerned about the word choices, which you should be,

we need to think about the words we use. I tell my children, if they don't know the

meaning of a word, they cannot say it. This is what communication is. It's why I'm

so passionate

that we shouldn't let AI write for us.

'cause when we are letting a machine

communicate what we feel are important thoughts,

We are robbing people of our actual thoughts.

And so we should be concerned about the words that are being used on our behalf.

And so if this watermarking thing gets worse and more, more audacious, great, we

should all use AI writing less.

But the other side of it

is that people are being outed for using AI in their writing. Like, why are we mad

about this? This is a good thing.

If you are unashamedly using AI to do your writing, then you should disclose that

you used it.

If you think it's so great that I just give Claude an idea and my team of agents

makes it sound just like me, which it doesn't sound like

you,

you are diluting yourself if you believe that.

But if you really feel that way,

give the large language model a byline on the work.

Give credit where credit is due,

because otherwise, in my view, it is

so close to the line of plagiarism

I suspect I'll think about this a a a bit more, a lot more.

Writing is one of the most important things that anyone can do. It's not just a mechanism.

It's not just a means to an end.

It's a universally important skill.

Not everyone needs to be an incredible writer.

Not everyone needs to be Shakespeare or whoever,

but we should all be able to state our own thoughts.

We should all be able to think through an opinion,

not just give AI a vague idea and have it write it for us.

Okay,

well, with all that, let's move on to something fun.

That's something fun as Halo three.

Last weekend, it was a rainy, sleepy weekend.

As we in the household in southeastern pa as we prepare to go back to school,

we're tired from the summer,

so we decided to have a family screen day.

The kids enjoyed movies and games and I dusted off the old Xbox, paid $24 for a month

of Game Pass and I booted up Halo three.

I don't play video games much these days. I mean, I do like the

mobile games from New York Times. I play Immaculate Grid

But

true blue video games, right? These would consume large portions of my days in high

school and college.

Sometimes

me and my dorm mates would play from early in the morning until past midnight,

But as games evolved, they got more complicated

and they require much more of a time commitment that I'm willing to give,

especially 'cause there's a bunch of other stuff I want to do and I have to do.

That's why I love old school games like Halo or Gears of War, these run and gun games,

you know you're going the right way as long as you see more bad guys

and there are no side quests or massive customizations. I knew Call of Duty left

me behind when I had to like pick all the gear I had and the type of soldier I wanted

to be. I just wanna pick up a gun that I run over and and use it. I don't wanna have

to think about every single attribute of my character.

And so I had a lot of fun playing Halo three last weekend.

I don't know how much more I'll revisit it before school and travel startups. September

and October are going to be very busy for me,

but I do know that it's supposed to be another rainy weekend this weekend here in

southeastern pa.

Okay, let's move on to something to help your systems.

And I wanna talk about something I did this week with

AI

and it's creating

a quiz with Claude.

I honestly don't know how much longer quizzes as lead magnets will be useful.

I know

like upsettingly little

about what makes a good lead magnet, but I worry that they'll saturate the market

soon. And here's why.

Generally, quizzes have been something aspirational for me

due to the time constraints and the fact that I didn't want to pay for all of the

industry leading services, right? I think like SCORE app is, is

50 or a hundred bucks a month or something like that,

but large language models have changed that

Earlier this week in conjunction with my thinking around conscientious AI usage,

I decided to make an Are you suffering from AI Brain Rot quiz.

I have the aforementioned hub of content over@lovehate.ai, which I fed into Claude

to help me make a short eight question quiz evaluating my four dimensions of AI brain

rot, which is using it reflexively. That is to say, not thinking of a problem for

more than a few minutes before asking a large language model,

talking to AI instead of people. So asking like, what does my audience want? Instead

of asking your audience, what do you want?

Having no skin in the game, which is

because you didn't come up with something, you're actually not really committed to

it. You're just burning tokens and not really thinking about the the things that

you're doing.

And using AI as a coach, and we know that AI cannot advise because it cannot have

opinions because it's not thinking,

it is doing word association.

So it looks at the quiz, looks at my four dimensions of AI brain rock, and then gives

the user a score

and then the user will get a resource and recommendations for conscientious AI usage.

That resource

is A PDF and it was generated from a markdown file that I wrote using my design system

and brand guidelines that I gave to Claude Design.

The most kind of,

I'll say craft work that Claude did here

was come up with the scoring and questions based on my writing,

and then I had it mark all of the places where it created placeholder copy so I can

go in and change it.

Claude Code then wrote the application and ran its automated tests, and then I tested

it independently and wired it up to kit.com, which is my email service provider,

and it's hosted on Netlify.

All of this would've been in incredibly time intensive

and it would not have looked nearly as good.

Instead, it took me a couple of hours between meetings because Claude already had

all of my content,

knows my AP well, knows, quote unquote

has. My approach in context,

is connected to my kit account

and is connected to Netlify.

My last task in this project, which,

should be done before you are hearing this,

is to review all of the copy with fresh eyes,

then I'll feel comfortable promoting it widely. But for now, you can find it

at Brain Rot streamlined,

FM

But that's it for this episode of the Friday wrap up from Streamline Solopreneur.

These episodes are about taking more time off, especially

on the weekends, and this has been an AI intensive episode. So if you wanna be more

conscientious about how you are using AI to save you time without replacing you

in the process of your work,

take the quiz over at Brain Rot streamlined FM to see where you land and how you

can be using it more conscientiously.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and until next time, I hope you find

some space in your weekend.