How I Use AI

Introduction

I have a younger sister. Watching out for her was my first job. It’s a reflex — you see someone who needs help, you step in. That instinct never left. It shaped everything I’ve done since: military, teaching, caregiving, running a business. In every one of those roles, the job was the same — have someone’s back so they can move forward without looking over their shoulder.

There’s another kind of Big Brother. The one that watches us. The one that knows where we drive, what we buy, what we search for at 2 a.m. when we can’t sleep. That Big Brother doesn’t have our back. It’s at our back — extracting, not protecting.

This page is about AI — how I use it, what I think about it, and why I think we should all have our own. But it’s also about who holds the controls. Because the technology isn’t the problem. The question is whether it works for us or on us.

Let’s Get This Out of the Way

I use AI. A lot. I use it for research, for writing, for policy analysis, for building this website. The tool I use most is Claude, made by a company called Anthropic. I also run open-source AI models locally on my own computer.

Without AI, I could never have gotten to the point where I was ready to run for office. The running part is still people — knocking on doors, talking to voters, making decisions. But AI prepared me. I don’t have a staff of twenty. I don’t have a PAC writing my policy papers. I’m a first-time candidate in a district that stretches from the Georgia border to Ocala, from just beyond the outer parts of Jacksonville to the Gulf Coast, and everything in between. AI lets me do the work of a much larger operation — research federal programs, draft policy, analyze budgets, build a website — with the resources I actually have.

Some candidates use AI and don’t tell you. I’m telling you. Every idea on this site is mine. Every position is mine. Every decision is mine. The AI is a tool, the same way a calculator is a tool. It doesn’t decide what to calculate. I do.

AI Isn’t the Threat. The Business Model Is.

We’ve seen this playbook before. Offshoring didn’t just happen — it was a decision. Corporations moved production overseas because labor was cheaper and regulations were looser. The towns that built those products got hollowed out. The profits went somewhere else.

AI is the same extraction logic wearing different clothes. The tool changes. The pattern doesn’t. Concentrate the technology at the top, harvest the value from the bottom, and tell everyone it’s progress.

I call this the caterpillar economy — a massive organism that pulls everything into itself. It centralizes. Local jobs, local knowledge, local wealth. Consumed. Digested. Concentrated somewhere else. Win-Lose.

The butterfly economy is the opposite: it decentralizes. It distributes. Wealth circulates locally, stays where it’s produced, and feeds the community that created it. Win-Win.

When AI is owned by a few companies and rented back to everyone else, that’s the caterpillar. When AI runs on our hardware, trained on our data, answering to us — that’s the butterfly. Same technology. Different ownership. Different outcome.

Running a Model T on the Information Highway

I run AI models on my own computer. Locally. Offline. Using open-source software called Ollama and models that anyone can download for free. The machine sits in my house. The data stays in my house. Nobody else sees it.

Is it as powerful as the cloud-based tools? No. It’s slower. It’s less capable. It’s a Model T on the information highway — everyone else is flying past in something with leather seats and a subscription fee.

But the Model T is mine. I own it. I maintain it. It doesn’t report back to Big Brother on what I’m up to. It doesn’t stop working because someone changed the terms of service. And every month, the open-source community makes it a little faster, a little smarter, a little more capable.

I Don’t Invent Things. I Connect Them.

I’m not a technologist. I’m not a programmer. I’m a generalist — someone who’s been a teacher, an Air Force veteran, a wireless retail operator, and a lifelong learner who reads about everything from monetary policy to meat processing. My brain works by making connections across all of it.

That’s what this entire campaign is. I didn’t invent mobile health clinics — they already exist. I didn’t invent USDA cooperative processing grants — they’re already funded. I didn’t invent community land trusts or rural broadband programs or veterans’ telehealth. All of it exists. Somebody just needs to connect the county that has the need with the program that has the money.

AI is another tool in that toolkit. It helps me find the connections faster. It helps me read a 200-page federal register notice and pull out the three paragraphs that matter to Suwannee County. It helps me compare what ten different districts have done with the same HRSA grant. That’s not replacement — it’s amplification.

A catalyst congressman. That’s what I want to be. The person who makes the introduction, connects the dots, and gets out of the way while the community does the work and gets stronger.

My Data Is Already Mined

I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’ve lived off the grid. I have a smartphone. I use Google. I’ve had a Facebook account. I ran Cricket Wireless stores for years — I sold the devices that collect the data. I know exactly how that ecosystem works because I was part of it.

That’s not resignation. It’s reconnaissance. I know the cost because I’ve already paid it. I know what a carrier can see in usage data. I know what the activation system collects. I know how a commission-based retail operation gets squeezed between the corporation above and the customer in front of it. I’ve been on every side of that transaction.

That experience is why I take privacy and civil liberties seriously as a policy issue — not as an abstraction, but as something I’ve watched happen from the inside.

What I Actually Found

I used AI to research every candidate in this race. I fed their websites, their public statements, their voting records into Claude and asked it to compare positions side by side. No spin. No TV filter. Just: what do they actually say they’ll do?

The difference between what the coverage tells us and what the candidates’ own words say is striking. Strip away the party branding and the attack ads, and what’s left is often thinner than we’d expect — or completely different from what we’ve been told.

I also tested the free tools — ran my own website and an opponent’s through ChatGPT and Gemini. Gemini invented quotes I never said, called me a “correctional officer” (that was the Libertarian candidate), and fabricated an entire bill with a sponsor and detailed provisions. None of it was real. ChatGPT was better but limited. The tools aren’t perfect. But they cut through the noise in a way that cable news never will. And that’s why it’s crucial that we use our critical thinking skills — that we push back to keep AI honest. Unlike TV, AI actually responds when we do.

A Declaration of Independence

Running for Congress is my declaration of independence. I’m not waiting for permission. I’m not waiting for a party to choose me. I’m not waiting for the perfect conditions. I’m building the campaign with the tools I have, on the terms I choose, and telling you exactly how I’m doing it.

I want to help us all find our own. Personal AI on our own devices. Data that stays in our homes. Technology we own, not rent. An economy where wealth circulates in our communities instead of being extracted from them. A government that works for us instead of watching us.

That’s what securing our independence means. Not just from foreign powers. From any power — corporate, governmental, technological — that treats us like resources to be mined instead of citizens to be served.