AI is now reaching into every corner of our lives — we can, and must, carefully choose how to engage with it

Editor's note: Country Life does not publish AI generated copy — and will never knowingly do so. For more than 125 years, the magazine has championed human endeavour and craftsmanship. The latter is important, especially when it comes to the written word. In a world that soon might be overrun with 'slop', true luxury will be a human-to-human connection — and that is something that we will continue to facilitate and celebrate for many years to come.

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,’ proclaims Cassandra, heroine of Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, as she begins her story. If the book were transposed to the present day, its famous first line might instead read ‘I log in to ChatGPT sitting in the kitchen sink, before asking it to come up with a catchy opening for a novel’. AI — Artificial Intelligence, a constellation of technologies that have learned to act and ‘think’ in human-like ways — has been inescapable over the past 12 months. For every environmentally beneficial crop-spraying system using AI to target individual weeds, as spotlighted in the 2025 Savills report on farming technology, there was a flop such as the Kingston-upon-Thames Christmas mural in south-west London, an AI-generated Lovecraftian nightmare featuring snowmen with teeth and a penguin that appeared to have caught fire.

The defenders of AI point to the good it is already doing, from assisting NHS clinicians with their paperwork so that they have more time with patients to helping art experts assess the provenance of paintings, as it did recently with Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute. Criticism, they say, is merely Pooterish resistance to innovation. People huffed and puffed about electric lighting, the telephone and the radio and none of those things led to the downfall of civilisation. Surely this is no different? I believe it is. However, I want to clarify that what I’m sounding an alarm bell about is so-called generative AI: the kind that creates images, sounds or, like ChatGPT, text, when it is given a prompt, at no financial cost to the user.

I recognise how helpful it can be. One friend, recently bereaved, has been using it to deal with the avalanche of painful ‘grief admin’. For another, severely dyslexic, it has levelled the playing field miraculously. The technology can now do a decent job of everything from emails to composing music — surely it would make our lives easier simply to let it? Where’s the harm in getting ChatGPT to help you write a best man’s speech or a bedtime story for your children? My answers are inevitably coloured by the fact that, as well as working for Country Life, I write novels.

In March last year, I discovered that my work was among the millions of books that had been ‘scraped’ from a vast pirated online cache by Meta — parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — and used to train Llama 3, the technology behind its new ‘virtual assistant’, which it claims can ‘help you plan dinner… study for your test... create album artwork for your band [and] decor inspiration for your apartment’. Legal proceedings were launched in the US to force Meta to compensate authors. This failed because the ‘theft’ was ruled to constitute ‘fair use’ (this would not have been the case in the UK, although our Government has been flirting with changing the law). However, to my mind, the court documents are far more damning than any judgement.

Meta, the plaintiff’s submission states, ‘decided it needed a large corpus of high-quality text, particularly books’, so that Llama 3 could ape human language. However, the organisation baulked at paying to license anything, so the decision was allegedly taken to ‘steal’ the material systematically instead. For all Meta’s chummy framing, the message seems crystal clear to me: Llama 3 is a project designed to enrich further a corporation currently valued at somewhere around $1.234 trillion at the expense of the rest of us. All generative AI technology learns to do human-like things by ‘feeding’ on words, images and sounds, many of which are copyrighted. Those that aren’t arguably represent an even more precious resource: our thoughts, feelings and experiences, which we merrily hand over every time we enter a prompt.

Most of us try to buy direct from producers and seek out independent businesses wherever possible, but we are, in effect, ‘spending’ in a way that runs entirely counter to this philosophy whenever we use ChatGPT and its ilk. The environmental cost should also be of concern. The water use required to build and maintain the vast data centres that power generative AI is on course to outstrip that of the whole of Denmark— and it takes 10 times as much electricity to power a single ChatGPT query as a Google search. Putting aside the questionable quality of much AI-generated output, is a technology designed to allow us to skip straight to the end product something we want to buy into?

Country Life has always celebrated craft in the broadest sense, whether that be architecture, a painstakingly laid hedge or a day on the hill. We know how important serendipity and the scenic route can be. Think of the Paxton Rock Garden at Chatsworth, laboriously created to conjure memories of the 6th Duke’s visit to the Alps, or King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, the awe-inspiring form of which was cumulatively shaped over many years by changes of plan, political crises and shortages of funds. By tech-giant metrics, both of these extraordinary endeavours were staggeringly inefficient and ripe for ‘optimisation’. If we accept the premise that we should be outsourcing much of our cognition to generative AI, how, ultimately, will we spend our days? What will give us the sense of satisfaction we gain from completing a task the analogue way? As anyone who has rigged a boat, thatched a roof or hand reared an animal knows, it is not the skill per se that matters —it is the messy, protracted, organic development of it that burnishes our humanity.

On July 11, 1996, when the internet was still teething, Country Life ran a leader titled ‘Gardeners in Cyberspace’, addressing concern that it was ‘a medium for pornographers, terrorists and other deviants’. The magazine was heartened by the evidence that it could ‘promote clubbishness, by allowing scattered individuals with special interests to share information easily’. How prelapsarian that feels now. For all its apparent utility, generative AI offers only a facsimile of connection, an empty echo. We should be using it in the same way we use anything else that comes at a social and environmental cost: sparingly and only when there is no reasonable alternative. Otherwise, I fear we will be sleepwalking into fundamentally impoverished relationships and the silent theft of our species’ most precious gift: our ability to think.

This feature originally appeared in the January 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.