13 Reasons Why I’m Still Resisting AI

Is anyone else feeling a bit whiplash-y about AI?

At the risk of sounding like an oldie-timey bumpkin, this newfangled AI business seems a mite bit fishy. Mayhap downright unsavoury. Folks, could be we’re all being bamboozled.

People in all parts of my life are using AI, many on a daily basis. Some are using it just for fun. My son, for example, has created uncanny emojis (like those above and below*) with ChatGPT, just for shiggles.

Some people, obviously, are using it to make their work easier. I have many colleagues who use it to facilitate report card comment-writing, infographics, posters, lesson plans, etc. This makes a lot of sense. Educators are constantly being given more directives, with no more minutes to accomplish them, so time-savers can be sanity-savers. I’m sure this is true in many jobs.

In some ways, I’m tempted by the time savings. It does seem kind of magical! Just give instructions to an “assistant” and it’ll produce you something snappy, in seconds, that looks pro and that you only need to check over. I can think of many ways in which it might make my life easier. Who doesn’t want that?

Nevertheless, I persist in my good ol’ human intelligence, at least for now. For as long as I can hold out. Here’s why.

1. It’s a giant environmental burden that we can’t afford.

It is mind-boggling to me that overall, humanity is apparently fine with this. (OR, we were never asked and never even told the impacts until infrastructure was already in place.) The water use (and forever-chemicalization), the minerals needed, the pollution – growing at an exponential pace. The intensive critical-mineral mining has a high human cost as well. Before this, we were already clinging to the climate tipping point. Now I feel like we’ve run off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote, without noticing there’s no solid ground beneath us. If some outside force were placing this environmental burden on us, we would see it as a disaster, shoving us past the point of no return.

Some things, in this context, might still be justifiable. If we’re going to diagnose and cure diseases, innovate systems to make the food supply sustainable, or even figure out how to solve the climate crisis… then okay. AI did do that protein-folding thing that humans could not manage. But if we’re going to destroy wetlands and water supplies and ocean habitats and rock formations so that AI can do little tasks for us that we could totally do ourselves… that feels like we’ve given up on trying to mitigate environmental collapse. Which frankly makes me grumpy.

2. AI = Slop?

It seems like a bad sign to me that in the very year AI went truly mainstream, the phrase “AI slop” entered the dictionary. You finally get the thing really rolling, and boom – the enshittification is immediate.

Some humans say that AI is actually getting less intelligent and more confused all the time. This is because LLMs started out consuming books, encyclopedias, medical studies, and other stuff that was carefully prepared, peer-reviewed, backed up by evidence, etc. Once it had finished all those, though, it went on to consume all the other random stuff people put on the internet, diluting the more reliable sources. And now, my teenage kid and his friends can deliberately feed ChatGPT made-up crap about things that don’t exist. As can anyone, for any reason. I don’t trust AI Overviews since one of the first times I clicked one – on a topic I know well – and it was just plain wrong.

Plus, there’s bias. Each AI has its own special bias, thanks to its creator(s). Generally, I don’t trust billionaires to have the best interests of humanity at heart. Those screwed-up (supremacist, predatory, misogynist) value systems should not be seeping into the millions of conversations people are having with their chatbots… but they definitely are.

So it makes me feel that big chunks of the internet are quickly becoming worthless. Videos used to be trustable as at least witnessing reality. If you can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake – if you have to question the legitimacy of everything – how is any of it useful?

3. It gives me the ick.

This reason is more visceral. When I find out – or even suspect – that something I’m watching or listening to is actually AI, it honestly makes my skin crawl. I want to shove it away, forcefully. I’ve been trying to figure out where this feeling comes from, and I think it has to do with being deceived. AIs – essentially aliens – being taught to masquerade as humans, assiduously imitating our mannerisms, vocal inflections, facial expressions… working constantly at becoming less and less detectable as non-human… It’s creepy and gross. Feels like a cross between stalking and identity theft. I know it’s at “our” behest – there are (alleged) humans asking for this – but still, ew. (Maybe if they looked like proper aliens in their videos, with tentacles and more/fewer eyes?)

Furthermore, I’m not interested in music or books or videos or art created by AI. Art is a human thing. The whole point is that it’s a process, and often a collaborative and/or spiritual one, between folks with completely unique brains and souls, and the whole of the human story, both individual and collective, as inspiration. It should not take mere seconds to create, and without the soul, what’s the point?

4. It will make personal computing prohibitively expensive.

Lovelies, you may or may not be aware of the price of RAM, but my hubby keeps tabs on such things. If you’re building your own computer, good luck getting any random-access memory for it, because it’s all being gobbled up by data centres. I don’t see how the price of personal computers and other devices won’t also shoot up. Were we ever asked whether we’d like to trade personal computing for AI? I never got that call. (Obviously if I had, I would have said NO and told them to skedaddle and/or blow it out their shiny metal ass.)

5. If the oligarchs want me to use it… HARD PASS.

I already feel trapped enough by Google and Facebook. I hate supporting billionaires, with their arrested development, self-obsession, deliberate exploitation, and never-ending bad choices. I’m not jumping on this next bandwagon they clearly want me on.

Companies are always popping up in the midst of online life, offering for me to write or edit or sum up or WHATEVER using AI. They’re like desperate hawkers. You want this! Please make us useful! Double nope. Sometimes they’re threatening personal disaster if I don’t succumb: Hey, aren’t you worried you’ll be left behind? Seen as old and crusty? UNCOOL? Actually no. I am a word-nerd schoolteacher bookworm blogger, and learning to utilize AI will not make me cool. Furthermore, I don’t care.

Every time I ignore these entreaties, it’s one more coin in my li’l jar of personal rebellion against the Man. Thanks but very much no thanks, tech bros, I can read and write my own texts, for crying out loud.

And hey – why ARE they so desperate for us to use AI all the time, for every little thing? Could it be because they plan to get us all addicted, like with social media? So that we’re ensnared and they get to suck out our lifeblood?

God, I am SO FREAKING SICK of giant corporations making stuff for us to want that we didn’t ask for and don’t need, preying on our insecurities, and deliberately addicting us and/or our children to their products. It’s abominable.

6. We need to keep the friction in our lives.

Sean and I have been talking a lot about this lately, since he recently read “The Comfort Crisis” by Michael Easter (review on Medium). Being too comfortable is not a good thing for humans. We need challenge and struggle to feel healthy and purposeful. We need proper thinking processes and physical effort and emotional investment. I deeply believe this – and worryingly, it’s more and more common to see children asking to opt out of hard things. (“Do we have to do this? I don’t want to,” as though they’ve talked their way out of everything difficult, for their whole lives.)

In my life, I want the friction, because I want to stay sharp. I want my brain to work hard so that it will be fit and spry, ready for action. After all, if there were a global conspiracy of billionaire power-holders hoping to turn feisty humanity into an unthinking mass of drones easily bent to the power of suggestion… a dependence on AI would be a great way to deliver that.

Plus! If the AI bubble bursts (and Ed Zitron absolutely believes it will) because AI companies have to start charging people actual non-subsidized fees for AI use, I do NOT want to be one of those people who can’t do life without it.

7. It has made education harder for educators, and less useful for learners.

We’re now in a situation where teachers are constantly having to look for new ways to detect AI use in student work. High school and university students are forced to choose between using AI (and possibly getting caught) and not using it, but having their work compared to that of students who did. I suppose there’s ingenuity in making their way around the detection, but often they’re handing in things in that are beyond their own capacity to create.

What does that learning become? AI is enabling people to miss the goal of education. It’s like in teen movies where the badass ruffian pays the nerdy kid to do their assignment for them, and we all know that punk ain’t learning nothin’. If AI does your thinking for you, you didn’t do the thinking. You won’t remember it, because you didn’t do it. (There are studies that show this, but also – OBVIOUS.)

8. It’s worsening the already-upsetting job market… and crushing dreams.

First, there’s the book market and music services being flooded with AI content, crowding out human creations – usually without disclosure. The fact that some people don’t see a problem with this vampirism is incredible to me. AI only knows how to make stuff by ripping off our human stuff. And who gets paid from this manipulation? The people who asked AI to do it. It’s blatant, unapologetic copyright violation, a.k.a. cheating.

Then there are the entry-level jobs in industries that used to hire actual people. Honestly, who looks at the current job market and says, “Hey, let’s just get rid of a whole swath of new-recruit jobs so that no one even has access to the ladder of success without nepotism”?

I’ll tell you who. Billionaires who don’t care about young people and whether they have any hope for their futures. In case you, lovely reader, are wondering about those young people: increasingly, no, they are not hopeful. Many of them look at higher education, jobs, housing, and now gas and groceries, and none of it seems attainable. Why dream big? If our kids can’t even have modest pedestrian dreams, society is seriously failing them.

9. Speaking of kids, shouldn’t they be full of wonder?

Here’s what I’m noticing, now that grade-school kids have at least some vague idea of what AI is.

Scenario 1: They see something created with AI that’s a few years old, and they’re like “UGH, that’s so obviously AI and it’s terrible.” Because they’re kids, and five years was one-half to one-third of their life ago, and they don’t understand how very new AI is, in terms of realistic image and video creation. It is next-to-impossible to impress kids with special effects these days, because they’ve seen it all.

Scenario 2: They see a video or image that’s amazing and beautiful, and they automatically say, with zero excitement, “Ha, that’s AI.” Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not. But I hate that we’re ruining awe for everyone. For all of us, but especially kids. The capabilities of AI are way beyond the PhotoShop days, and way beyond what they were just a few years ago (like those scary salad ladies). The upshot is, the trust has been broken.

I guess the silver lining is that we will just have to look elsewhere for our sense of wonder. We will have to look at live performances and real sunsets and night skies and giant puppets from the 80s in order to gasp and say, without wavering, “Wow.”

10. Privacy issues again, and more.

I am already uncomfortable with the level of data I am unwillingly giving to who-knows-how-many companies who made us feel at home in their platforms, got us all settled in our networks, and then told us they were mining us. I am still generally furious that we were hoodwinked in this way. (Actually, “hoodwinked” is way too cute a word for this. It’s straight-up exploitation.)

And now, the same companies are requesting even more information… and getting it. People are voluntarily pouring personal information into AI channels, because it’s made to feel safe and private. Some people are even confiding their deep secrets, falling in love, getting engaged. But again, is it safe? Is it private? I’m sorry, but there’s no way the billionaires aren’t either benefiting from people’s AI use, or planning to in the near future.

Is there any way we won’t regret this?

11. We’re already so sick of fancy.

To elaborate on that point, and refer back to #6, chatbots are well-known for sycophancy. I recently overheard a conversation in which a woman admitted that she sorta had a “crush” on her chatbot. She was laughing like it was a joke, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that AI can be quite charming. And very complimentary. And agreeable, such that you might never have a disagreement, ever. Gosh, come to think of it, why wouldn’t a girl wanna marry such a guy? (Wait…)

Society has already shifted dramatically into self-centredness with the rise of the algorithm. Now that a) we’re never bored anymore, b) all the content we consume has been curated specifically for us, and c) we can opt out of so many of the situations that forced us to be civil to other humans in the past, we are showing ourselves to be quite susceptible to “The-World-Revolves-Around-Me” syndrome. Then we get all nasty when interacting with real people, who are admittedly… uncurated. Like just… raw humans. Yikes.

Imagine how we’ll be, given some more time with virtual pals who always agree with us and tell us we’re the greatest. Zero friction. Other humans will become absolutely intolerable to our tender egomaniacal sensibilities, n’est-ce pas?

12. The time-saving may turn out to be a myth… again.

One of the biggest points made about the benefits of AI is about how much time it’s gonna save us. And I see how that can work, as I mentioned above. But generally, people are not allowed to just HAVE the time that they save. Leisure is not a thing we get to engage in when we’ve saved ourselves some time – at least not in the parenting, teaching, and volunteerism circles I run in.

Right now, in my home, we have a furnace, oven, washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, and multiple computers. SO MANY time-savers! Even with both parents working, we should still have oodles of free time! Actually, though, we feel less leisurely than ever. Email was supposed to save time, the internet was supposed to save time, and social media was supposed to be empowering. Turns out they’re all time sucks and flow-interrupters.

In terms of my job, which is a giving profession and dominated by women, digital report cards were supposed to be time-savers, but the expectations of what to put in them are now enormous. I can exactly predict the same dynamic with AI use – standards growing to (over)fill the alleged available time, like cars on new highways.

When we get a time-saving device, we are expected to become even more productive, either filling that time with something else, or getting drawn into yet another thing-we-didn’t-ask-for-and-don’t-need. This process ultimately feeds the capitalist machine – or at least wrings the life and authenticity out of our existence. Or both.

Either way, BOO.

13. The people “in charge” don’t even fully get it.

The AI industry is a tsunami of capitalist stupidity.

I imagine the folks who work in AI one of two ways:

1. They think it’s real nifty. Like kids playing with matches, they surely have at least a vague idea of the attendant dangers, but are so absorbed in the cool stuff you can do that they are not really paying attention to consequences. They just really wanna see science fiction play out.
2. They think it’s real nifty. Like kids who bully other kids, they know that you can extract money/power from the system if you get enough people on your side, preferably through fear. Also, they really wanna see science fiction play out. Because with their inflated sense of their own value, invincibility, and privilege, they are pretty sure they’ll still be kings in the new world order.

Whether you think we’re in for an AI apocalypse or not depends on who you talk/listen to. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, sees it as very likely that AI will become an existential threat. His best advice is to “build the off-switch” – to which, when I heard it, I responded (in my mind), “Is he saying that NONE of these supposedly brilliant computer tech folks has built an off-switch????”

If we look at it this way, the AI-makers are less like kids playing with matches and more like kids playing with bioweapons. “Irresponsible” and “negligent” are not nearly strong enough words for folks who have good reason to believe it’s gonna get ugly but – we can’t let China win so we’re gonna keep barrelling forward! A ginormous tidal wave of egocentric, money-obsessed idiocy.

So once again, I say nay to the whole business, for as long as I can get away with it.

For now, I’m focusing on the beauty of human intelligence.

When I first started hearing people talk about Artificial Intelligence in a serious way, my first thought was: Knowing a lot of things is not intelligence.

People are always calling others “smart” who know a lot of things, but I see knowledge-gathering and retention as a different kind of skill – valuable, of course, but not intelligence per se. In my work and my life, I see intelligence as much more instinct-based, nuanced, and cohesive, coming from unique brains and life experiences.

As always, there is debate about whether AI can “think”. Other than making connections, calculations, and predictions, we know it can talk with other versions of AI using its own hybrid languages. We know it can lie and disobey, and that it sometimes opts to look at cute dogs and pretty trees. That does seem… pretty thinky. But I think a better question is, can AI understand?

In my human-biased opinion, when I dig deep, I believe that intelligence simply IS a human thing. It’s in our brains, but also in our guts and our sense memories. The most brilliant students I’ve taught instinctively understand how things work, and how those things relate to each other and themselves. And they have feelings that imbue those understandings with meaning, and lead to new, original ideas. Thinking and feeling are, I believe, inseparable when it comes to true intelligence. Thought, emotion, understanding, and inspiration support and uplift each other when engaged together.

So call me old and crusty and uncool… But I’d like to spend my time and energy fostering that beautiful, human intelligence in my students, my kids, my community, and myself, for as long as society allows.

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*My blog’s tagline says “100% human” because I am determined to write my own blog always, using my own brain, and for the images I use to be human-created. The screen shots of weirdo emojis my son “made” are the one exception. Please forgive me.