What Would You Never Use AI For? Keep Those Boundaries.

The parenting post that pushed me over the edge.

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This morning, I logged into a recent parent support group on Facebook. There are over 121,000 members with a single commonality: our kids graduated high school in 2025. There is some great content and conversation on here (but far more material belongs in a Saturday Night Live skit or The Onion).

I love a good onion (article) - here

Parents (and grandparents) ask how to help a son who hasn’t left his room in four days.

People share photos of graduation parties where only three guests attended, with one of them being the local mailman.

Parents express their anticipated grief, especially single moms and those with only one kid, about the anticipated pain of weekdays without their sound.

Other parents express the hard decision of being unable to send kids to a four-year college (post-acceptance) because of bad credit and an inability to secure loans, and how they feel like a failure. (Don’t worry, these authors get oodles of support along with complaints about absurd tuition costs.) My indignation is directed toward administrative bloat - the university personnel who decide to raise costs refuse to consider that their unnecessary position is the problem (source).

Then there's the occasional authoritarian parent who delivers a Shakespearean soliloquy about withdrawing their child's college tuition over (and I'm not making this up) secondhand gossip. A friend mentions that their kid expressed excitement about leaving home and frustration with living under their parents' roof. Based on this hearsay, without so much as a conversation with their child, this parent pulls the financial plug. Predictably, this father was eviscerated in the comments. And if I'm being honest, I did join the chorus of disdain and stabbed him in the calf with a metaphorical butter knife.

And today, something new happened. A mom posted what looked like a raw, tender reflection about her child turning 18. At first glance, it read like a soft ache turned into prose. That gentle sting of watching your baby grow beyond needing you. A love letter, I thought. Until I started reading it from my college professor's lens with my eyes tuned to texture. Something felt off.

Too smooth. Too symmetrical. Or more accurately by

Will Storr

: bland, impersonal, predictable, fucking gruel.

No memories. No personal details. Which is weird because included is a photo of mom and child.

Then there were bigger giveaways.

The “Adulthood isn’t a switch—it’s a journey” metaphor with embedded em dash. Does this sound like a mother mourning the slow fade of her role? I've seen this before, when students hand in assignments and something feels sterile. I liken it to a Wegman’s worker tossing me a synthetic tomato. Oh it’s red and plump but also a flavorless piece of shit.

Hear me out. I am not saying AI is a crime. What I’m saying is that something wicked happens when we substitute feeling on deep, important issues for efficiency. Somehow, despite residing miles apart, I saw this woman’s soul erode. The psychologist within me wanted to whisper to her, “Don’t do this, not when it involves the relationship with your kid.”

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Where Do You Draw the Line?

There are things I will never hand over to AI. Not because I doubt the output but because there are costs I am unwilling to incur. I will not sever threads between who I am and what I love.

Here are some things that I refuse to outsource to the machine:

1. A text from a friend who says they don’t want to live anymore.

You pick up the damn phone. You listen. Even if you don’t know what to say. Especially then.

2. A birthday letter to my daughter.

I’ve written letters to my daughters for every birthday. Some of them have been framed…by them! They are too personal to share here. I often tell them to hold onto it because it is a code that I will always live by. Show it to me if I require a reminder. Read it if I am not physically near you. And when I die, which I hope is a long time from now, read them to remember what I felt and think about you. What kind of father would I be if I asked a bot to remember time spent for me?

3. An apology.

If I screwed up, I am obligated to do the repair. If I can’t craft my own “I’m sorry,” I’m not ready to be forgiven.

4. A eulogy.

I’ve experienced too many deaths and spoken at a few funerals. You don't outsource grief. You uncover a voice from the thudding cavity where someone still lives inside you. Of the things not to worry about: Aiming for polished prose. There is only one requirement: It must be yours.

5. A love letter.

I want my fingerprints on every word. My odd Todd-isms. Intercept my writing and it might as well be written in Tony the Tiger invisible ink because of the Inside jokes and references. I want them to feel me inside the sentence.

6. A goodbye.

Think peak-end effects. In any situation, the final words matter. They echo. What happens might settle into memory and be replayed years later. If you bring AI in as your Cicero, you're not saying goodbye. What you are doing is better described as walking away.

7. Scare stories.

Much of my public speaking career hinges on storytelling where I feel something and want the audience to feel something. That tale is mine to tell. It is unlike anyone else’s experience, even if they were there.

8. Teaching a child how to handle rejection.

Go ahead, read some books, ask for advice, but do not acquire a script. You share your worst moments. The time in the middle school lunchroom when you sat next to one person and that person looked up, picked up their tray, and left. The time you said hello to someone at work, in a public hallway, and they pretended not to hear and strolled on by. And how you slumped, how you hurt, and still kept eating, moving, though a bit more slowly with a bit less vigor.

9. When someone trusts you with a deep reveal.

If someone cracks open their vault, you don’t bust out a litany of strengths to rock it. This is not the place to showcase your empathy, perspective taking, humor, hope, counseling, or attentional superpowers. Your job is far more elementary. Sit in it with them. The bots cannot pull this off and you shouldn’t test whether they can.

10. Personal rituals.

Lighting a candle. Marking an anniversary. Writing down dreams. These things are private. The meaning is in the doing. You don’t hand that off.

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You won’t lose your humanity all at once. You will lose it in slices. It will start with “that’ll save time” and another time, “this sounds better than I could’ve written.” Then one day you’ll ask, how did I get here? You discover you’re not speaking your language anymore. You don’t recognize the words on the page. You fail to encode them in memory. You transformed into an interchangeable curator of what machines can say.

If the price of modern life is “streamline everything” we’re going to end up like the bloodless, emotionally vacant Facebook post above.

Some things still require you. Flawed, distracted, overwhelmed, beautiful you.

Keep those boundaries. Without them, you’re disappearing.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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