The Turn Against AI, and the People It Leaves Behind

There has always been a group of people who don’t like AI. That part isn’t new. What’s new is how fast that group is growing, and how loud it’s gotten.

Graduation season has just come to a close, and there were several occasions where graduates booed commencement speakers for bringing up AI on stage. Seth Rogen said that if you use AI to write your scripts, “you shouldn’t be a writer,” and should “go do something else.” Scroll LinkedIn for a few minutes, or really any social media, and you’ll likely find someone saying that if you’re still defending AI, you’re embarrassing yourself. Whole creative industries have lined up against it. This isn’t a fringe position anymore. It’s becoming a default posture, and it’s still spreading.

There’s no nuance in any of it. It doesn’t matter what kind of use, and it doesn’t matter how much. It’s just AI is bad.

This outrage also feels bigger than it might actually be. The media and our social media feeds reward rage. They feed off drama. So the angriest voices about AI aren’t necessarily the most common ones. They’re just the ones the feeds carry the furthest. If you don’t already have a strong opinion either way, you’ll see a lot of this and start to think that’s just the way it is, and the way it should be, whether or not that matches how most people actually feel.

Take the Pope this week. He released his first encyclical, and his actual point was about AI being used to dominate people. The encyclical doesn’t tell anyone to stop using AI. It calls for regulation. He even presented it alongside one of the founders of Anthropic.

But the headline every outlet ran was “Pope calls for AI to be disarmed.”

You have every right to be worried

A lot of this anger has real things underneath it.

Copyright is a real problem. Models got trained on people’s work without consent and without paying for it. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not going to pretend I know the exact shape the law should take. But the direction seems clear enough. If your copyrighted work is going to train a model, you should have a say in it. You should be able to opt in, get paid, or keep your work out of it completely. And we need clear lines on what actually counts as abuse here, because right now nobody really agrees on that. That’s a real fight, and it’s worth having. But refusing or shaming people who use AI just doesn’t happen to be how you win it. That fight is with the AI model providers, not with the users.

Job displacement is real too. Some work is going to get displaced, the way it does in every big shift. But the honest thing about every one of those shifts is that we adapt. That’s what we’ve always done. The danger was never the change itself, it was ignoring the change until it had already happened to you. We’ve left people behind in every previous shift like this, and we don’t have to keep doing that.

And then there’s a quieter complaint, the one people don’t always say out loud. AI lets people do things they couldn’t do before. And that scares some people. Someone with a real eye for design who never learned to code can build a working website now. To some that feels like a line got crossed, a kind of cheating. I don’t see it that way. I used to build websites by hand, writing the HTML and the CSS myself. I can’t really do that anymore, not without relearning a lot of it. But HTML and CSS are languages, and what AI does for me is translate. I describe what I want, how I want the colors to feel, how the copy should read, how the navigation should work, and it turns that into the language a browser can read. Using a translator has never been cheating. The translator doesn’t supply the idea. I do. It carries what I already meant into a language I’m no longer fluent in.

So when someone with real taste who never learned to code finally builds the thing they could always picture, nothing got cheated. They had the vision the whole time. They just couldn’t speak the language, and now something can speak it for them. We tend to think the way we learned to do something is the only right way to do it. It’s a natural thing to feel. But it has never been true. There’s always more than one way to a good outcome.

AI slop is real too. Hiring tools that screen good people out because nobody gave the AI the context it needed to judge well. Writing that’s just bad. Design that’s just bad. People see all of that and decide AI is the problem.

But slop has always been slop. What’s new is the speed and volume. AI lets everyone create faster, so the people who know how to make good things make good things faster, and the people who were only ever going to make slop make slop faster, and a lot more of it. That’s a real problem, and we should reject slop wherever we find it. But rejecting slop and rejecting AI are not the same thing.

Boycotting AI only hurts you

The concerns are real. But we get to choose how we respond to them, and the response we’ve been seeing lately is more and more some version of refusal. Don’t use it. Look down on the people who do. Band together and reject it.

That instinct comes from a good place. For a long time, refusing as a group was how ordinary people pushed back on something powerful. You boycott, you strike, you withhold, and the thing on the other side feels it, because it needed you. It needed your money or your labor or your attention.

But AI is the first tool of this size built specifically so that the powerful don’t need your participation. The corporations pouring billions into it have already seen what it can do. They are not going to give it up because a group of people online decided they don’t like it. They’ll keep building it and keep deploying it, and they’ll do it in a way where most people won’t even realize they’re dealing with AI anymore. A boycott only works when the other side needs you in the room. This is the first one where they just don’t.

So refusal doesn’t stop AI. And it doesn’t fix copyright, and it doesn’t bring back a single displaced job. Regulation might do the first. Adapting might do the second. Refusing does neither. The change is already underway, and the part still in our hands is how each of us decides to meet it. Refusing to engage at all is the one response that helps nobody, and it hurts you most of all.

Bad people are going to do bad things with AI no matter what any of us decide. That part isn’t really in question. So the real question is whether good people get the training and the access to do good things with it too. If we shame the conscientious people off it, we don’t stop the bad uses. We just lose the good ones. And done right, the good can outweigh the bad.

AI use goes underground

So if refusal doesn’t kill AI, what does it actually do?

It changes who talks about AI more than it changes who uses it. Some people will quit, sure. But most of the people using AI won’t stop. They’ll just stop doing it in the open. They’ll keep using it quietly, in the background, and keep getting the benefit of it. What goes away is the open conversation, the questions asked where other people can see them. And that’s the part that actually matters, because that’s how people learn.

The people who have genuinely gotten good at this, the ones using it carefully and getting real results from it, mostly are not going to stop. It’s working for them. What they will stop doing is saying so out loud. Because there’s a social cost to it now. Talking openly about how you use AI gets you lumped in with the worst examples of it. It gets you a fight in your comments. It gets you called embarrassing. And most people, pretty reasonably, decide that fight isn’t worth it. So they don’t just stop mentioning it. They stop sharing what they’re learning. And the people who want to learn stop asking questions, because nobody wants to be called out for asking.

I’ll be honest, I feel that pull myself. I like sharing what I’m working on and what I’m learning. But I also hate drama. And if sharing what I’ve learned mostly buys me drama, then at some point people like me just stop sharing. Some will keep doing it anyway. But a lot fewer will.

Learning to use AI well gets harder

When the people who know how to use AI well go quiet, the knowledge goes quiet with them.

The good explanations get rarer. The helpful threads, the walkthroughs, the people who used to answer questions out in the open, there’s just less of all of it. It doesn’t go away in one go. It gets harder to find. A lot of it moves behind closed communities. Some people keep sharing, but more and more of them are the ones selling something, and fewer are doing it just to help. And asking a question, going looking for a straight answer, quietly becomes a harder thing to do.

And it goes further than explanations and walkthroughs. The most useful part of AI right now is the tools and the methods people build on top of it, not the model itself. Someone figures out a better way to work and posts it, and everyone else gets to use it. That only happens because people are talking. There have always been people who keep their best methods private, and there always will be. But the people who share freely, who give away what they’ve figured out, are the first ones a hostile climate drives off. When they go quiet, things stop improving in the open. The best of AI stops being something you can find and learn, and becomes something you buy, if you can afford it.

Picture it like a picket line. Somebody who wants to learn AI now has to cross one to do it. And nobody wants to be seen crossing a picket line. Nobody wants to be the scab. So they don’t ask the question. They don’t post the thing. They hit a wall, get stuck, and instead of reaching out to someone, they just stop.

Shame only works on good people

Most of this shame is aimed at the wrong people.

It doesn’t hurt the corporations. They have AI, they’re using it, and a wave of online disapproval doesn’t slow them down. They’ll just work around it. If the mood turns, they stop advertising that AI did the work, and they keep right on using it. The wealthy and the well-connected do the same. They’ll use whatever they want, and they have ways to power through whatever criticism shows up.

That’s because shame only works on people who feel it. The person who feels the sting of “you should be ashamed for using that” is, by definition, someone who cares about doing the right thing. The person who doesn’t care, who’s happy to cut every corner, feels nothing. So the shame doesn’t slow down the people you’d actually want it to slow down. It slows down the careful ones, the people who would use this stuff thoughtfully.

And the everyday person who does listen, who hears “AI is bad, stay away from it” and obeys, is left in a bad spot. The culture is telling them to keep their distance from AI. The job market, at the very same time, is increasingly telling them they need it. They’re being shamed for the exact skill they’re about to be expected to have. The person who ignores the stigma comes out mostly fine. The person who does the “right” thing and avoids AI is the one who gets hurt.

This gap grows every day you wait

With most technology, a gap like this sorts itself out on its own. People who fell behind catch up later, once things settle down. You can be a few years late to something and still get where everyone else got.

AI is different. Earlier shifts were mostly additive. A new tool made you somewhat faster or somewhat better, maybe twice as fast at the very best, and a head start like that was something a latecomer could close. AI doesn’t work that way. Used well, it’s closer to a multiplier. It can make you something like 10 times more effective, and if you build good tools and systems on top of it, that compounds further still. When a person ahead of you is compounding like that and you haven’t even started, the distance between you only grows.

There is a hopeful side to this. The same multiplier that lets an early adopter pull away from a beginner also lets a small operator keep pace with a giant. One sharp person with AI can do the work of 10, sometimes a lot more. And a small company can move at a speed a big one structurally can’t. A big company carries more risk with every move it makes. It has a board to answer to, stakeholders and shareholders to keep happy. It can try big things, but there’s a lot of red tape around them, and AI doesn’t clear that red tape away. A small company doesn’t have nearly as much of it. For a long time, scale was the one thing the little guy could never beat. AI is the rare tool that hands the small and the fast a real way to keep up.

This is the one moment the everyday person gets a real shot at keeping up with the big players. And the loudest message we’re sending is don’t pick it up, it’s shameful, leave it alone. The shame lands hardest on exactly the people who’d use that shot responsibly. We’re talking the right people out of the best chance they’ve had in a long time.

This is how people get left behind

I’m not telling anyone they have to like AI.

But, if we keep shaming people into silence about AI, here’s what we get. The people who are good at it don’t stop. They get good enough that you can’t tell anymore, they go quiet, and they pull further ahead. The people who wanted to learn it well never get the chance, because there’s nobody left in the open to learn it from. And slowly, we sort into two groups. The people who got to learn this, and the people who didn’t.

So what should we do instead? We refuse to make AI a shameful thing to talk about. We teach people to use it well, and to use it responsibly. We challenge the AI companies to be ethical, and we push back hard when they’re not. And we ask our political leaders to fight for better laws and regulation around all of it. Every part of that needs the conversation to stay out in the open, where a beginner can find it and a careful user isn’t punished.

What I’m really hoping is that we don’t shut a tool down just because we don’t understand it yet, or haven’t learned to use it well ourselves, or because we’re blaming it for something that was always here. Slop isn’t new. AI just makes more of it. That was never a good reason to walk away from everything else AI can do.

We get to decide how this goes. We can keep talking, keep teaching, and keep the door open, and a lot more people get to learn this and use it well. Or we can shame each other into silence and watch it quietly become the property of whoever was already ahead. I’d rather keep the door open. And keeping it open is something any of us can do.