Poll Of The Month: Is it ethical for people to use LLMs (generative "A.I.") for writing articles and books, putting their name as the author and not disclosing they use AI to generate the text?

January, 2026's poll in the Mirrors For The Mind, Heart and Soul series

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This is something I have been pondering recently quite a bit as we currently have a tidal wave of generative A.I. dependent writers publishing material here on Substack (and all over the internet) prolifically.

To provide some context on how fast people’s attitudes towards this tech seems to have been shifting in the last two years:

In November of 2024 I asked the following question for the poll of the month

“If it was up to you, what would you do with “A.I.” development and services globally?”

Here is a screenshot showing the results of that poll (so far) outlined in red:

here is the original post

66% of the people that voted in the poll shown in the screenshot above (just over a year ago) would have scraped the whole A.I. tech infrastructure and spectrum of services. Judging by how many people in your own circles are now adopting and using this tech, do you think that number is still reflected in people’s attitude today?

I certainly do not.

“I am finding myself using AIs every day. A month ago, it wasn’t like this. A few months ago, it wasn’t like this at all. A year ago, the AI concept had just been kind of an incepted idea. I am having a massive internal struggle about this subject matter - integrating AIs into my daily life - because I feel very strongly that the lure of AI will lead to the destruction of the creative mind.

The ease with which one can simply “ask as AI” anything could easily replace doing internet searches and/or reading books and/or critically thinking, and it’s not that I don’t think it could be used in a utilitarian way as a cool tool, but the thought of the loss of the process of seeking by the human being - complete with imperfections - knowledge and answers, concerns me. I don’t want my mental processes, especially the creative ones, to become “irrelevant” all because I might have fallen for some trap related to “convenience in fact finding” or “ease and rate of image building”.

I can see changes in myself every single day - and perhaps more descriptively - I can feel a weird kind of apathy rolling in: like a storm that’s going to wash away my memory of ever being able to do research and write my thoughts down. Do you know what I mean?” - Jessica Rose (January 14th 2025)

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Next poll flashback:

For the poll of the month for May of last year I asked people “If you could train an “A.I.” assistant/agent and autonomous robot to do all your work for you, would you?”

Here is a screenshot showing the results of that poll (so far) outlined in red:

here is the original post

Now here we are, looking back at the results of a past poll from 8 months ago (shown in screenshot above).

77% of the people that participated in the poll above answered with a hard no.

Are those numbers still reflected today now that these LLMs and “AI Agents” etc make it easy for people to pump out substack articles rapid fire with prompts and rake in hundreds of paid subscribers with zero creativity required?

I am not so sure. I see the notes feed blowing up with AI generated content endlessly and when I run a number of people’s writing that subscribe to my newsletter (which have previously expressed their misgivings about this tech) through an AI writing detector, some are now coming back at 90% plus A.I. Generated content (with no mention of this on their page).

As I explained in this note, in the past few months Substack has become increasingly filled with LLM (large language model) generative a.i. chatbot coaching specialists publishing material intended for instructing in the closet A.I. Dependent Writers to more effectively convince people their writing is 100% written by humans (examples shown in screenshots below).

If they believe in the technology and the quality of writing it produces, why are they trying to put a human like linguistic veneer on their chatbot generated content to trick people?

If the people using AI to write for them (and then editing the AI produced words to appear more like they were original ideas thought up by a human) believe in the quality of AI writing so much, why are they striving to pretend their material is written 100% by a human ? Why do they not advertise that they are using AI for writing ?

If these people are honest and stand behind the tech, why are publications like “Agy - The Buffalo Herbalist” and “Unbekoming” using generative A.I. to write entire articles, not disclosing they use that tech for their writing, and then censoring anyone that asks questions about A.I. writing assistance under their posts?

“Deception is hardly in the analog or digital shadows anymore. Tens of millions of hours of artificial content slop are uploaded to “social” feeding troughs every single day. Nearly every artificial digital “creation” is rooted in the spark of human imagination and the sweat and toil of human creation, going back throughout all of recorded history, official or subverted.

When it comes to storytelling, these machines have virtually no capacity for either creativity or originality—only for regurgitation. Any idea that manifests by prompt will have been pilfered from the existing canon of human-produced works. The human doing the prompting doesn’t require a deeply rooted foundational knowledge of the subject, only a few PDF files as books or articles on the subject, and a machine-created outline. Anyone with a morsel of gossip and some rudimentary instructions for a machine can rebrand themselves as an “expert” and now “write” a “book.”..”

- 𝙂𝙊𝙊𝘿 𝘾𝙄𝙏𝙄𝙕𝙀𝙉 ( from their post titled Technomachos Ex Machina, computer generated image at the top of this post is also sourced from the post quoted and linked above)

So, I think you`ll be able to gather where I stand on this issue, but I want to know what all of you think on this.

If you think it is ethical for people to use generative A.I. to write but not disclose it (not spell check, I am talking generating whole paragraphs and articles and then they edit them a bit to look more human, and then make no mention of generative AI assistance in writing) please drop a comment below and help me to understand your point of view on this.

I will also just preemptively state that (while leaning on that tech for writing might not be a choice I would chose myself) I do not personally have an issue with those that use Generative A.I. for writing and are upfront about it.

With all of that being said, I would like to now pose this month’s poll question to you you all.

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I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on your reason for voting yes, no or not sure in the comments section to promote constructive discussion.

Thank you in advance to those who are taking the time to vote and comment to promote constructive discussion and hold up a candle to the mirror.

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Pertinent Quotes, Posts and Notes covering subject matter:

“While generative AI devices like ChatGPT have been on my periphery, as I have friends who are users, they haven’t really affected me. Until recently.

A childhood friend, whom I haven’t seen in a few years, started a lifestyle blog. She writes about recipes, home decor, pets, landscaping, and gardening. While browsing her blog, I noticed something felt off about it. It didn’t bring out the essence of the witty and talented woman I know her to be. There were too many exclamation points. The writing rule of three was overused to the extent that it felt not only cheesy but disingenuous. My friend came off as braggadocious and hollow. Two characteristics I would never have used to describe her. I clicked on one of the links. The link brought me to ChatGPT.

Oh. There it was.

She had inadvertently used the wrong link, revealing her extensive use of ChatGPT. That’s why her writing felt soulless. It was soulless. The robot-writing didn’t bring out the Josieness of Josie (not her real name) because it wasn’t authentically hers. Only her uniquely God-given creativity can bring out her divine essence, not a machine. Reading her blog gave me the same feeling as coming home to an empty house when I expect someone to be home. I enter, and something feels off, even if I can’t pin it down. I say “hello?” already knowing that nobody will answer. Emptiness has a feel to it.

Some AI users claim AI “helps” them be better writers by generating ideas. It helps them “save time” and be “more efficient." (Nothing of quality is ever mentioned). However, what they lose in their worship of efficiency is their divinely given creativity and critical thinking faculties. Developing these takes time and discipline, but… isn’t that the reason God created us? We weren’t put on this earth to be efficient, to maximize our financial portfolio, or to climb the ladder of success. We were put on this earth.. ..to make what God made—Creation—more beautiful, more healed, and more alive.

AI writing isn’t writing. It’s robot-“thinking” expressed in writing. A good writer is a good thinker. Those who export their writing to AI actually export their thinking and even their capacity to think. This is anecdotally and scientifically documented. As the American poet and activist, Robert Bly, once said, “A human body just dead looks very like one still alive, yet something invisible has left it. In writing, as in life, it is the invisible that makes all the difference.” Artificial creativity is dead because it isn’t breathed into by the invisible Holy Spirit. Our works, when created with AI, are not “our” works; they are the works of a machine spewing out the generalities of Internet banality. Soulless forgeries”

- Alissa Bonnell (author of Divine Nature from her post titled “Disrupting Divine Creative Flow”)

Technomachos Ex Machina

Unbekoming IS a Lie

An Unholy Invasion – Chatbots Are Colonizing Our Minds

World Wide Ouija Board

Automating Spiritual Possession: Anatomy of Mind Control Through AI

Chatbot psychosis is actually a really big deal

Are we already avatars?

A Fatal Seduction — Artificial Intelligence Lures Children into Suicide

The Chicoms are Coming! Quick, Close the "AI" Gap!

Suicide by Technology

Here is a pic of some Chatbot Generated books being sold on Amazon:

For more info on books above: https://archive.org/details/chatbotgeneratedscamamazonbooks

Art vs. AI

Why sharing weights from neural network training is dangerous

We Need To Talk About AI

“When people talk about AI, they often speak in abstractions: “models,” “agents,” “the cloud,” “digital transformation.” But the infrastructure behind AI is not abstract at all. It is concrete. Literal concrete, poured by the ton. It is steel, wire, copper, compressors, water pipelines, diesel tanks, and transmission lines humming with electricity pulled from distant rivers, mountains, and mines.

If we peel back the metaphor, what we find is staggering.

The United States alone now houses data centers that consume roughly as much electricity as many entire nations. And they are expanding at a pace that even utilities admit they can’t keep up with. One analysis suggests that nearly half of the world’s data-center electricity consumption occurs in the U.S. The new AI-optimized facilities are larger, hotter, thirstier, and far more power-hungry than their predecessors.

And outside the U.S.?
The explosion is even more dramatic.

Across Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, and Ireland, hyperscale data centers are rising like industrial cathedrals. These are not the modest server rooms of the early internet era. These are multi-million-square-foot complexes built with the assumption that the future will demand more computation, more inference, more generation, more energy. Always more.

A brief accounting of the water, energy, and materials flowing into the AI revolution.

Water

-By 2027, AI data centers could consume 6.4 trillion liters of freshwater annually. That’s enough to fill 2.8 million Olympic swimming pools.

-Microsoft already draws 42% of its water from regions officially classified as “water-stressed.”

-Google reports 15% of its data-center water use occurs in “high water scarcity” areas, and that number is rising.

-A single hyperscale AI complex can require millions of gallons per day just for cooling.

-Water withdrawals for AI compete directly with human drinking water, agriculture, and the ecological flows that keep rivers alive.

Energy

-Global data-center power consumption is projected to reach ~1,000 TWh/year by 2030, or roughly equivalent to the electricity use of Japan.

-AI will likely account for 40–60% of this surge, making it one of the fastest-growing energy loads on the planet.

-U.S. data centers alone already consume as much electricity as entire nations, and expansion pressures utilities to revive fossil fuel generation.

-Coal plants in the U.S. and Europe are being kept alive, or reactivated, specifically to feed AI server clusters.

-Nuclear power is being revived at an unprecedented scale to meet AI’s 24/7 baseload demand, triggering a new wave of uranium mining on Indigenous land.

-AI is not “efficient.” It is becoming one of the most energy-intensive technologies humanity has ever built.

Materials and Mining

-To meet AI’s copper needs alone, the world may need to mine as much copper in the next 25 years as in all of human history to date.

-AI chips require 10–15× more energy and water to manufacture than standard chips.

-Server lifespans are shrinking to 3–5 years, accelerating the world’s fastest-growing toxic waste stream: e-waste.

-Each AI accelerator chip contains layers of rare metals that are currently impossible to recycle economically.

-New mining and processing demands fall overwhelmingly on the Global South: the Atacama Desert (lithium), the Congo (cobalt), Indonesia (nickel), the Navajo Nation and Kazakhstan (uranium), Chile and Peru (copper).

The “intelligence” of AI rests on an explosion of extraction, massive new wounds on land, watersheds, and communities.”

- Justin McAffee (from his post titled “What We Burn to Speak to Machines : Inside the Global AI Buildout: Power, Water, and Sacrifice Zones”)

Information War: Shock Doctrine Meets AI Slop

Dead Internet Confirmed: It's agents, trolls and clankers all the way down

What We Burn to Speak to Machines

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