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Maria Demy · Aug 29, 2025

Girl vs AI

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Maria Demy · Maria Demy

I was drinking coffee one morning, scrolling TikTok, when a cheerful man poured a bottle of water down the sink. “That’s how much gets wasted with every AI request,” he announced, looking far too pleased with himself.

And suddenly that old knot in my stomach tightened:

  • Am I a bad woman?

The thing is, I vibe code. A lot.

In my corner of the internet (pretty pink-pilled, I admit), the warnings are constant: environmental harm, cognitive decline, misuse. The message is clear: AI makes you dumber, it’s burning the planet, and if you’re a decent, world-conscious woman, it’s not for you.

And yet my job has been AI-centered for years.

AI is computationally expensive and only getting hungrier. Most progress so far has come from throwing more resources at it (read more - The Bitter Lesson).

The climate angle unsettles me most. Some AI influencers dismiss it with a breezy “AGI’s got you, babe,” but that doesn’t inspire much confidence. Still, AI could help with the smaller, practical steps toward net zero: making communities greener, cutting waste in everyday systems, optimizing energy use.

Then there’s the “cognitive flattening” critique. Everyone and their mum has cited that study about students using ChatGPT showing less cognitive engagement than those writing unaided (again read more ChatGPT and the Death of Effort: Is AI Turning Students into Lazy Thinkers?). But do we really have enough data? AI hasn’t been around long enough to know its long-term effects. We said the same thing about smartphones for decades.

Meanwhile, some schools are already experimenting with AI to do the opposite: creating personalized curriculums, curating material for each student, and claiming it’s the future of education. So which is it?

Don’t we always panic when new tech arrives?

And not too long ago, this was literally a conversation in the U.S. Congress:

Congressman: “Do you track people’s eyes when they scroll TikTok? Do you hypnotize them to vote Bernie?”
CEO: “I am Singaporean, Congressman. Singapore is not in China.”

The point being: new tech always breeds panic. The concerns are valid, but the certainty isn’t.

If you’re dating your AI, go touch grass while it’s still around.

But it’s not just dumb uses. There are real risks too: biased outputs from messy training data, models spitting out misinformation with confidence, privacy leaks, and, my favorite, GPT psychosis.

Do you think our corporate overlords will slow down? Fat chance. No one is putting this genie back in the bottle.

After all, we didn’t ban calculators just because kids spelled BOOBS on them.

And here’s the thing: dumb uses and real risks haven’t stopped me - and they probably won’t stop you either. Or your boss.

My reason isn’t just that I like it (though I do). Elon’s out here spinning up chatbots nobody asked for, and he’s not about to stop.

Billions have already been sunk into this. Every big company has slapped a shiny AI button on their site because, well, that’s what you do now. The longer you wait to get on board, the steeper the climb to catch up.

If you actually care about the world, AI literacy has to be on the list. You don’t have to love it, but you should at least understand it. Because if you opt out, the scaffolding goes up without you. And then, as a gut punch, your nine-to-five will shove watered-down models at you to handle calls and shuffle paperwork anyway.

Yes, it’s uncertain. And it’s room to shape what comes next. And if you ask me, that makes now the best possible time to use it.

For twenty bucks a month you can have near-infinite knowledge in your pocket. You can use it to build a community, start a project, protect your career, protect your people. Hell, you can even teach yourself to code - the floodgates are wide open. Ask dumb questions, ask smart ones, solve real tangible problems in your life.

And as a woman, I think it’s especially important that I do.

So I absolve myself of the guilt. Maybe that doesn’t make me a “bad woman” after all - maybe it just makes me a woman who codes.

Women already do the kind of work AI thrives on: communicating, empathizing, prioritizing. Prompt engineering is just structured communication with a machine.

Think about it. We already manage households, coordinate doctor’s appointments, juggle daycare pickups, negotiate with bosses, edit friends’ Insta posts. We’re optics managers, decision makers, community builders. Shouldn’t the person carrying all that mental load finally get some of it lifted?

For now, we all get a personal assistant. Haven’t you always wanted one?

Prompting AI is just blending lived experience with facts, connecting dots across domains, and shaping the output with discernment (which is still a hard word to spell).

The point is: if you’ve got a passion, AI can help you get started.

For me, it started small. Bills.

AI compared my internet providers. I saved thirty bucks a month. That’s ten bottles of water I can pour down the sink on TikTok if I ever need to repent.

It helps with little roadblocks too, especially for neurodivergent brains. Things that used to derail me, AI smooths out.

Years ago, I abandoned a side project because I couldn’t figure out how to add a favicon (where do you get one? which ones are free to use? how hard is it to make one?). Don’t judge - some things you just don’t know.

Three days ago, a favicon tweak took me five minutes. AI unblocked me, kept me in flow, and the project got finished. Momentum is everything for spicy brains.

I’ve also used it to research scholarships, book flights, organize local girl open mats. And sometimes just to vibe code silly apps.

Even now, I feel like I’m still scratching the surface. Computers are intimidating and tech bros love to push the grindset. What I have now is a digital manual I can query however I like. I can zoom out and see big problems, or dive into one small domain and learn everything about it. Over time, that just makes me a better engineer, because AI helps me build more.

AI makes it joyful. It makes it accessible. You can give it a go.

A friend just launched a photography business. She bought a domain from GoDaddy and got upsold into a $400 package for a sluggish Wix-style site (that I’m pretty sure AI wrote, sorry Daddy). My own site costs ten dollars a year. That’s a $390 difference before she made a single dollar.

Here’s the kicker: she already has ChatGPT Pro. It could have built the whole thing. She just uses it for emails. That is how software often feels to women: impossible. Sometimes we just miss the possibility because we are limited in what we know.

I am not blaming her. I am saying we all could use more AI literacy. Otherwise Daddy shows up again, smiling, and sells you SSL as if it were a luxury add-on.

There are a million ways to build with AI, because in development there are always a million ways to build. I’ll probably write a follow-up showing step-by-step routes for launching a free, simple website (just for the girls, grown-up engineers look away please). But the bigger point is this: the tools are here, and the opportunities are real.

None of us really know which way is up yet. That’s exactly why smart, educated women should be shaping this era of AI - not sitting on the sidelines policing one another while someone else does.

If you’ve been hesitant as a woman, but you have a vision and a passion, I think you should give it a go. And if you feel guilty for it, if you worry a “good woman” wouldn’t, I personally forgive you. Because maybe being a “bad woman” just means being a woman who codes.

Read the original on bashdemy.substack.com ↗

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