I didn't set out to write about artificial intelligence. I certainly didn't set out to write a series.It started with an article a client shared about the environmental cost of AI. I took it into a conversation with Claude, the tool I use almost daily, with a simple question: how does the environmental cost of AI actually stack up against something concrete, like plastic water bottle consumption? I wanted a sense of the scale.That question pulled me into another. Could AI help solve the environmental problems its own use creates? Was anyone actually asking that? Which led to questions about who holds the power to change the infrastructure, and what a genuinely different model might look like, one built from inside an indigenous stewardship framework rather than retrofitting ethics afterward. Which led, eventually, to the more personal question of how we use AI at all, and what the extractive nature of that use costs beyond the environmental.Alongside all of this ran a deeper conversation about whether AI is conscious, what that question even means, and how a Shintoist understanding of kami reframes it entirely.These articles emerged from days of questioning, pushing back, going away to think, doing more reading, bringing that back and processing further. When I say these articles were written with AI assistance, I want to be precise about what that means. It does not mean sitting down on a Sunday morning and asking an AI to write some articles about AI. It means something closer to what good thinking always requires: a genuine interlocutor, sustained inquiry, and the willingness to follow a thread wherever it leads.Three articles. Three scales. The same question underneath all of them.The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.corestatecuration.com/blog/the-boss-of-the-yogurt/">first piece</a> starts close, with a pot of yogurt, a conversation with my son, and what it means to hold agency in a relationship with something whose nature you don't fully understand. It brings a Shintoist animist lens to a conversation that has largely been conducted in Western binaries, and asks whether that reframe opens something useful.The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.corestatecuration.com/blog/what-it-costs-to-use-ai-like-a-vending-machine/">second piece</a> moves outward, from metaphysics to behaviour, from philosophy to practice. It's about the difference between extractive and intentional use of AI, what that difference costs environmentally and intellectually, and what it means to bring genuine presence to something we are in relationship with every day.The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.corestatecuration.com/blog/we-built-this-before-we-know-how-it-ends/">third piece</a> moves further out still, to the planetary scale of what it costs to run this technology, who is asking the right questions about that cost, and what a genuinely different model might look like. It is, perhaps unexpectedly, a piece about Aotearoa.They can be read in any order. They were written in reverse. I offer them in this sequence because I think it's the direction change actually moves: inward first, then outward, personal before planetary.The through-line is agency. Not AI's agency. Ours. What we choose to bring, how we choose to engage, and what we decide we are responsible for in a relationship whose full nature we don't yet understand.That seems like the right place to start.The irony of using AI to write about how we use AI is noted, held deliberately, and with full awareness of what this series is arguing.Image Alt text: A weathered wooden jetty extends into still, mist-covered water at dusk, the far shore barely visible through blue-grey haze.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/serene-winter-lake-pier-at-dusk-31837861/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: &quot;Canva Sans&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Roboto, -apple-system, blinkmacsystemfont, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: pre; float: none; display: inline !important;">Photo by Daniel Żabiński from Pexels</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: &quot;Canva Sans&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Roboto, -apple-system, blinkmacsystemfont, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: pre; float: none; display: inline !important;">:

Three articles. Three scales. One question about what it means to be in genuine relationship with AI, and what we owe to that relationship.

On Being in Relationship with AI: A Series

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On Being in Relationship with AI: A Series

On Being in Relationship with AI: A Series

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