Learning (and Unlearning) from My Kids

Just a short update today, but it comes with a twist: I got schooled by my own kids.

When I started this blog, my goal was to teach them—my wonderfully stubborn family—about sustainability. But today, my daughter Giselly turned the tables and taught me something.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with ChatGPT. I use it for writing help, ideas, even creating fun images. I was showing off one of those images to Giselly when she hit me with, “You know that’s bad for the environment, right?”

Wait, what?

I Googled it... and yep. She wasn’t just making it up. Turns out, the more complex and wordier your prompts are, the more energy these tools use. Here’s the article she pointed me to: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/worst-chatgpt-prompts-for-the-environment

Ironically, just the other day, I posted on my personal Facebook asking friends if they say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT. I thought I was being polite. Turns out, I was just wasting electricity in the name of good manners. Whoops.

And then my son Aiden, the artist in the family, chimed in too. He told me using AI to generate images is harmful to real artists because it pulls from their work without permission. Basically, I got hit with a double-whammy of environmental guilt and creative ethics.

But you know what? I love that my kids aren't afraid to call me out—and that they’re paying attention. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Oh, and a quick trash bin update: the recycling labels I ordered? Totally ignored. This morning I was elbow-deep fishing apple cores and banana peels out of the trash again. So I moved the trash can to the other side of the recycling bin. Maybe making it inconvenient will force them to think twice. Fingers crossed!