Think for yourself

This week, the Campbell County Commissioners passed a resolution prohibiting the storage of high-level nuclear waste in Campbell County and declined to sign a letter of support for a $100 million BWXT grant application while stating their positive experience thus far in interacting with the company.

I read the ordinance when it was first brought to light in September. This new version is much more solid, and the commissioners deserve some credit for sitting down and working through it.

They also took dozens of public comments on the resolution. After reading the comments, I don’t think we need to put this up to a vote like the original iteration of the resolution stated. It’s clear that people don’t want nuclear waste stored here. Putting it on the ballot would be a waste of time.

But it was great to see the community involved. There were quite a few comments that were clearly written by human beings. Some were written by ranchers, others were written by small business owners, and even one was written by a criminal.

Some of them were well-written, while others displayed a clear lack of reading comprehension and understanding of what the resolution is about. But that’s OK. They all were coming from the heart.

“We are the energy capital, not the center for trash collection,” one person wrote. Passionate and straight to the point.

One of the longest comments in the bunch stood out to me. It contained hundreds of words and was completely devoid of emotion. It seemed as if this commenter, in doing their own research, actually did not do their own research. They had ChatGPT do their research for them, then they had ChatGPT write, or heavily help to write, their comment for them.

It’s sad that there are some people these days who are so lazy that they can’t even do their own research. If I were a judge, I would strike this comment from the record.

If you feel strongly about a subject, you don’t need to construct an award-winning essay. Just say how you feel. Don’t let a machine do your thinking for you, even if it comes up with a result that you would’ve agreed with anyway.

In any debate, it’s easy to get caught up in emotion instead of looking at the facts. But it’s this emotion that separates us from AI, for now.

Don’t let the computers win. Be yourself and think for yourself.