I’ve heard great arguments for rejecting AI for environmental reasons (water, climate, energy) and for ethical reasons (like the theft of all digitizable intellectual property). I’ve even made those arguments myself (see previously linked blog post).

But I also want to suggest another angle that can be used in conjunction with these: rejecting genAI for selfish reasons.

For context, it is nearly the 1-year anniversary from when I authored my blog post on “Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used”. It is easily the most successful blog post I’ve written and certainly gets more impressions than my research papers 😂. But I love it especially because it helped me form my own thoughts at a time when I felt like I was losing control of things (research budgets getting cut, anti-immigration on the rise, the impending deadline of my thesis work, future job insecurity, AI companies consolidating power across the world, facing irreversible climate disasters in my lifetime and so on).

Here is my small, humble manifesto for rejecting generative AI on selfish terms.

1. Defending your own friction, your own struggle

Hayao Miyazaki said it best, “if life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.”

But this is a meta-point, which the former blog itself makes: that struggling through writing is a miraculous task. And by doing it myself and not offloading my thoughts to a machine, I gained a new piece of myself that I appreciate. At a time when so much is out of my control, the ability to congeal a messy space of thinking into a structured set of thoughts brought a little order into the chaos of my life.

And writing isn’t just a “mirror” into your own thoughts. It is a vehicle for developing the skill of thinking and reasoning. It’s both a reflective and generative practice. You create thoughts through writing, not just invoke what is already in your brain. If more people who prompt their way through life realized this, we’d be taking back the frontiers of labor in our inner minds from AI companies.

2. Holding precious your own thought-making

“What are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?” - Joseph Fasano

I don’t care if a machine can think better than me. My thoughts are precious and being able to form them through writing and socializing with others currently has no equal practice. Prompting appears to give the benefits of both the writing and socializing at once, but it actually steals the benefits of doing both of these acts from us. This is because the part of these activities that matter, the friction that exists in writing and socializing, become the selling point of AI: it’s frictionless.

Anyway, best of luck to all of us as we navigate the new world we live in. We all now need to figure out which portion of our minds are worth delegating to machines on our behalf. What bits of difficulty do we want to keep in our lives, and what does it do for our sense of self?

One question I hold myself to is: if I wasn’t being paid to use my brain, would I still want to? And which things do I still enjoy thinking about?

Hullman writes that the enthusiastic pro-AI discourse strikes her as “nihilism masquerading as optimism.” And so it is worth asking ourselves: what part of our work should remain fundamentally human?

3. Focusing on your own need for joy and responsibility

Focusing less on tasks I can complete and the time it takes me, and more on what gives me joy to think about (even if it is hard) has been central to me. Secondary to this has been my sense of moral responsibility. Turns out, I value writing immensely. This means that generating code, a blog post, a poem, a work of fiction, a text to my wife, or even emails to coworkers are all things I’d rather do myself and have a sense of sole responsibility over.

I enjoy deterministic systems, for example. These give me a sense of self-interpretation. I can question my own thoughts when a deterministic machine fails: did I fail to construct language in the right way? Do I have assumptions about the problem or solution? But when interacting with a non-deterministic machine, like generative AI, instead I tend to focus on the machine’s own failure and randomness. I don’t gain a sense of absolute clarity in my own mind, just a fuzzy closeness that exists somewhere between my thoughts and an agent’s performance. I cannot imagine someone else holding me responsible for this fuzzy space, this broken and un-inspectable space. I enjoy sleeping at night knowing that I can be held accountable for the things I’ve chosen to do. But the things I’ve chosen to delegate or manage? Perhaps those things failed because of my agent, “co-worker,” or minion-machine.

Perhaps we should start asking ourselves: what difficulty brings us joy, and what work do we want to remain responsible for?