Slow AI

Everyone will tell you how to use AI. Almost no one will tell you when not to.

Slow AI is the missing half of that conversation: a short, sharp, evidence-led book about the most useful skill of the AI age, knowing when to reach for these tools and when to leave them alone.

Written by Professor Sam Illingworth, it cuts through the hype and the panic in equal measure. Across seven chapters it takes apart the promises and the fears with real evidence and a close reader's eye: why AI companionship is not the same as being cared for; where AI is genuinely, brilliantly useful; how it saves you time and quietly costs you more; why AI detection punishes the students with the least power to fight back; what the endless feed does to your attention, and what the machines cost the planet; and why the humanities, the disciplines we keep defunding, are the skill that outlasts all of it.

No prompting tips that expire next month. No utopia, and no doom. Just the critical thinking to make your own call, in your own life and work.

Read it slowly. Then decide for yourself.

Sam Illingworth is a Professor of Critical AI Literacy at Edinburgh Napier University, where his work looks at how we use artificial intelligence with judgement: when it helps, and when to leave it alone.

He is the founder of Slow AI, a newsletter read by more than 18,000 people, and he has written and presented for the BBC, with work appearing in Nature, Scientific American, and The Conversation.

His path runs from atmospheric physics to poetry, and he still uses poems and games to open up conversations across communities. He lives in Edinburgh, and he is still learning to take his own advice.