There is a moment in Spider-Man: Brand New Day where Peter Parker is alone in his apartment, sitting with something he made and everything it cost him. If you're even casually aware of comic books and superhero culture of the past 60+ years you already know the line that's coming… everyone always knows the line that's coming with Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Dating allll the way back to Spider-Man's debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962), now one of the most valuable comic books in human history, the phrase that has been attributed to Uncle Ben for so long [or to Marisa Tomei, perhaps, for you newcomers] is actually a retcon… it originally appeared as narrator text in the final panel and wasn't uttered by Uncle Ben for another 10-20 years.

…but that's enough about comic book trivia.

I bring that line up because, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day recently crossing the $2-Billion mark at the box office, it is at the forefront (once again) of the collective consciousness. And how that line applies to AI is at the forefront of my consciousness. Why? Because, since I took the plunge about 6 months ago, I use AI almost every single day. I have quietly been building a business and authoring materials for most of 2026 and I think it's time to stop being quiet about that.

So this article is where I lay it out. What AI means to my work, to this website, my personal philosophy, and study of astrology. Tonight I will be traveling to Lily Dale Assembly in Cassadaga, NY, the oldest Spiritualist community in the country, to attend an all-star panel on astrology and AI. The panel is going to feature Rick Levine, Anne Ortelee, Kenneth Miller, and Cassandra Butler [the event info also lists Re. Dr. Patricia Bell and Cameron Allen but I could not confirm that they are participating in this particular panel]. The four confirmed astrologers, however, have over 150-years of combined practice and they will be hashing out one of the biggest questions facing this field (and, as I'm sure you're aware many others) in a 19th-century auditorium in the woods of Western New York. If ever there were a moment for me to put my own cards on the table, this seems to be it.

Where It Started

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult in my late-20s. I quite certainly struggled with it longer than that but it was only after a good friend recommended You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy!? (affiliate link) that I realized some of the things I dealt with on a daily basis had a root cause [broad strokes; you get what I'm saying, let's move on]. Fast-forward another decade or so and you'll find where my relationship with AI began. Not astrology. Not some grand plan for how technology might reshape an ancient practice. Rather, it started because my brain makes certain things ridiculously, extremely, haphazardly, unnecessarily, frustratingly more difficult and complicated than they need to be. Organizing. Structuring. Following through on the thing I was excited about an hour ago but now can't seem to locate in the pile of 98,072,136,490,872,345 things I got excited about since [I did two loads of laundry and began research on a music-related project I had the idea for over 10-years ago since I wrote the opening line of this article].

It is one of the truest IYKYK-isms in my personal universe. 372 ideas in an hour. Finish zero. See the whole architecture of a project in your head, vivid and complete, and then sit down to build it and watch it scatter like pigeons. AI hasn't 'fixed' that………… but it has given me something I haven't had before: a way to get the ideas out of my head and into a structure before they evaporate. Not by doing the thinking. By helping me hold onto my own thinking long enough to do something with it.

That's where it started. Where it went is a different story.

The “Hands” Problem

I have a degree in geography. Bear with me for a moment if that sounds unrelated. Geography is really a degree in thinking about how space, place, and pattern interact. Maps, systems, and the way a landscape tells a story… the “terroir of humanity” if you will. I have always loved maps and I tend to think spatially/visually. I see the composition of things. I notice the way a poster is framed or a room is lit, the color choices on a record sleeve (and if any thought was given to the inner sleeve or not). I hear arrangements in music and think about why the producer placed that sound where they did. I've spent my entire life consuming art and design with an obsessive attention to how it all fits together.

…but, at the risk of sounding overly self-deprecating, I don't have the ability to execute visual art.

I can't draw. The artistic limit of my painting is dabbling with acrylic pouring. I've never been able to sit down in Photoshop or Illustrator and produce something that matches the thing I saw in my head [and I did try; I believe I withdrew from that college course on the deadline day before the “C- at best” was cemented on my academic transcript]. Some people have the hands for it. The technical facility to take what they're seeing internally and translate it into something real. I understand that as I have been a musician for nearly 30-years; the majority of my life. But I never developed the ability to create visual art the way I wanted to and, at a certain point, one stops pretending they're going to. The vision was always there. The execution wasn't. And for most of my life, that gap was just… the gap. The place where so many of my creative impulses went to dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

AI closed it. Not by making* art for me. By giving me a way to describe what I was seeing and construct my vision du moment in real time.

*Yes, AI makes the art for me but it doesn't conceive the idea or know why it matters.

This website… the colors, the typography, the layout, this voice you're reading in right now… I built all of it collaboratively with AI. I picked every aesthetic direction, every color hex code. I made every weird late-night decision about neon green and grain textures and pored over dozens of examples of “AstroRot” written out in different fonts, deciding which font resonated most with me. But, beyond knowing that typing something like “<b> </b>” makes the thing inside the brackets bold, I don't know shit about writing html. AI helped me execute and build those decisions at a level my hands couldn't reach on their own and my brain couldn't comprehend without hours of training and education.

A painter uses a brush (or palette knife) but the brush doesn't have the idea… but we'll come back to the 'generative' aspect later.

What I've Actually Built

“I use AI” doesn't mean much on its own. It could mean someone asked a chatbot what to make for dinner. I believe one could argue that using a calculator or typing an address into Google Maps constitutes AI usage in a certain sense. So, with that being said, let me be specific about what my usage has been in practice.

I am currently in the review process for a study guide I have titled The Celestial Curriculum. It is currently a ~400-page, four-volume self-study guide for the NCGR-PAA Level I astrology certification exam. Nineteen units follow the official PAA topic list. I implemented what I call a three-lens system [Exam, Traditional, Modern] so the reader always knows which interpretive framework is speaking at any given moment. Scope markers, calculation tolerances, mock exams, a question bank for each of the nineteen units. I've been working on it for months. Every interpretive call has been mine and there won't be a word or number printed that I haven't personally reviewed. From decisions about what the exam demands versus what the tradition actually teaches to the color shading of text boxes and, yes, font choices [glorious font choices]… all mine. AI handled the production side: structure, formatting, cross-referencing, outputting at a scale and consistency that would have taken me years working alone [this article alone took me 5-hours to draft]. The result is something tangible and useful that wouldn't exist without the implementation of AI.

I am also working on building a computational “city ranker” that combines astrocartography with “real-world” factors like commute times, crime, proximity to museums, and things like that. Thousands of locations, planetary bodies and celestial objects, multi-axis scoring. Weeks upon weeks of number-crunching compressed into iterative sessions. Validated against professional software to the arcminute. During that process, the AI flagged a timezone error in an example chart that had shifted the Ascendant and Midheaven by roughly 13° and silently warped the entire interpretation. That error had been sitting there, unnoticed. The AI caught it. I wouldn't call that “replacing astrology”… I'd call it doing the math correctly.

There's my research project on generational astrology: comparative mundane astrology across 23 countries and 10 regions. AI is pulling primary-source material in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, French, Portuguese, Greek… you get the idea. I couldn't have attempted that scope alone. The interpretive argument is entirely mine, but the research muscle is collaborative.

…and then there's this website. Astro motherfucking Rot. Every page, every post you've read here, I write them. AI checks my grammar, suggests if my usage of “motherfucking” is excessive or not, helps me structure the information, troubleshoots the code, and produce at a pace that one person couldn't otherwise sustain. It's a collaborator, not a ghostwriter. If you can't tell the difference, I would argue that says more about the collaboration than it does about the tool.

The Responsibility Part

Brand New Day made two billion dollars in three weeks and currently holds a 98% audience score. The whole movie still comes back to the question Stan Lee posed in 1962: when you have something powerful, what do you owe?

So let's talk about what AI costs. Not in subscription fees. In energy and water.

A single AI query consumes roughly ten times more energy than a regular search. U.S. data centers burned through nearly a trillion liters of water in 2025. A UN University study estimates that AI-related water consumption could match the basic annual needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of this decade. Those numbers should bother you. They certainly bother me.

I ran the estimate on my own work since I began utilizing AI in Spring of 2026. I instructed the estimates to be calculated on the high-end of the spectrum as I always prefer to err on the side of caution with data sets such as this. The Celestial Curriculum. All 400 pages, edits, re-edits, months of back-and-forth across two AI platforms… calculations returned an estimated consumption of 10 to 15 liters of water…

That's about two toilet flushes.

The cheeseburger I had for dinner last night? That took approximately 2,400 liters of water to produce. A cup of coffee: about 141 [I added the “1” for the actual cup of water that I was skeptical wasn't in the initial figure]. A pair of jeans? A staggering 7,500 liters of water to produce [hit up your second-hand stores people].

The cost most certainly is not 'zero', and I'm not going to pretend it is. But the question worth asking is whether the things that are being built justify what it takes to build them. I believe that a professional education resource is worth 15 liters of water. Ten million throwaway chatbot horoscope queries that evaporate the moment someone closes the tab, however… I should say not. Same tool. Different intention.

Ugh… I know how this sounds and I'm audibly groaning to myself as I type this. It's the same argument Americans make about firearms… “the tool isn't the problem, the person is”. I am abundantly aware of the baggage that framing carries, and I'm not interested in fighting that particular war [although, I understand that, with this article, I may have drafted myself into it]. The underlying logic, however, doesn't evaporate just because someone else has used it poorly. Fire cooks your dinner and burns houses down. The printing press gave people scripture and propaganda in the same century. Electricity runs both hospitals and electric chairs. Yes yes, we've all heard it. Every transformative tool in human history has been exactly this: powerful, dangerous, and not going away. The question, with all these things, was never whether to use them. The question was always how.

Tonight at Lily Dale

In a few hours I'll be in the Lily Dale Auditorium for a conversation I've been looking forward to for weeks. Rick Levine has been calling AI “alchemical intelligence” and reading its emergence through Pluto's ingress into Aquarius. Anne Ortelee spent years as a computer programmer and tech salesperson before becoming a full-time astrologer… she's lived on both sides of this. Kenneth Miller works across multiple astrological traditions and knows exactly what gets ground down to slop when an algorithm trained on modern Western pop astrology 'decides' it can “do” Jyotish. Cassandra Butler practices right here in WNY and integrates mediumship, social work, and chart reading in ways that depend entirely on direct interaction with another human being.

And the sky overhead is saying something, because it always is. Pluto entered Aquarius the same day ChatGPT went public… the planet of total transformation moving into the sign of technology, networks, and the collective future. That's not a metaphor. That's a transit. Uranus is now in Gemini, the sign of communication, information, and how we process language itself… the last time Uranus was in Gemini, television was invented and the first computers were being built. Saturn and Neptune just conjoined in Aries, merging structure with dissolution in the sign of raw initiative… the beginning of a cycle that won't complete for another 36 years.

I'm walking into the auditorium tonight with a unique perspective. I have done this work. Not speculated about it. Done it. Built a curriculum. Built [well, building] computational tools. Built a website. I've sat with the hard questions too… about water, about displacement, about intellectual property and what constitutes ownership, about what happens to lineage-transmitted knowledge when a machine can approximate it at scale instantly and for pennies.

I……………. do not have all the answers. I have a study guide, a website that didn't exist two months ago, and the conviction that this conversation is too important to leave undiscussed.

With Great Power… yeah yeah

Peter Parker didn't ask for the spider bite. But once he had it, “whether to use it” was never really the question. The question was what kind of person he was going to be with it.

That's the question. For all of us. Not just astrologers or small-business owners or fucking mega-corporations. For everyone who opens one of these tools and starts typing a prompt.

AI is an incredible tool that appears to me like something that is here to stay. Build something worth the water it takes. Be honest about the cost. When someone asks whether you used AI, say 'yes' and then show them what you made. Also, and I hope this goes without saying: vote on issues that matter to you. Plant a tree. Do your best to stay educated at this crazy world we live in while we bat away all the AI slop that is permeating daily existence [because, we can all agree, that shit is awful].

My research on what the water and energy cost of my AI usage these past few months taught me more about the water and energy cost of daily processes I haven't given much, if any thought to… that was my ignorance. It's funny, isn't it? Looking into how much water my AI prompts have used resulted in making decisions to move away from using almond milk to something that is less water-intensive to produce. And, generally speaking, trying to be more mindful of the impact of all my consumer decisions.

The balancing act is a tricky one. Deciding between supporting a local business or purchasing the exact same thing on Amazon? Easy in theory but I have been in situations where the aforementioned local business is selling that widget or doohickey for something like six times the price… that's a horse of a different color [and yes, its own conversation regarding economies of scale and other topics]. There are countless conversations to have on these topics. And we need to have them. We need to be mindful of our impact individually and collectively.

Tonight in Lily Dale, in an auditorium where people have been taking the unseen seriously since 1879, a group of astrologers are going to opine on what comes next. I will be in the audience. Notebook open. Ready to listen.

I'll tell you what happens.