{"id":4681,"date":"2026-03-27T02:26:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T02:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/27\/why-i-still-boycott-ai-by-sam-kahn-persuasion-persuasion-community\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T02:26:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T02:26:53","slug":"why-i-still-boycott-ai-by-sam-kahn-persuasion-persuasion-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/27\/why-i-still-boycott-ai-by-sam-kahn-persuasion-persuasion-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I (Still) Boycott AI – by Sam Kahn – Persuasion – persuasion.community"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, when AI had come onto the market and was clearly reshaping the society, I decided that I would have nothing to do with it\u2014I would <\/span>boycott<\/a>. This decision was based partly on morals and partly on practicality\u2014I suspected that, underneath the really impressive technological breakthrough, AI was still, essentially, a one-trick pony. And now that AI has evidently <\/span>gone through<\/a> another revolution, vastly improving itself in recent models and opening up a whole world of coding to the public at large, it seems like I should have to re-examine my decision to boycott\u2014which, actually, is one of the easiest decisions I\u2019ve ever made. I am more adamant about it than ever.<\/span>
I might be a lot more interested in developments with AI if I hadn\u2019t already seen this movie. It played out across a great swath of my life in the form of social media. It featured all the same actors making all the same promises early on\u2014and all of them following the same playbook to extract our attention, as if it were a mineable resource, and then selling that for ads, as well as whatever personal data we were unwise enough to leave unguarded on our own devices. I remember showing up on a college campus looking forward to young people connecting with each other; instead\u2014Facebook had just come out\u2014everybody seemed to be sealed up in their rooms carrying out a facsimile of social exchange. All this time later, has anything really improved? Every time I go into my bank account I seem to find some recurring subscription that I signed up for in the flush of tech optimism and long ago stopped using\u2014but which still clings to my wallet like a barnacle to a ship\u2019s hull.
So what\u2019s different this time around? Well, if in the previous installment of this series, the tech companies targeted social relationships, and hacked at the envy and FOMO and anxiety that animates social relationships as much as the substance itself, now they\u2019ve made their way into a different kind of space\u2014the deep privacy of people\u2019s innermost lives. In the AI regime, people confess their darkest secrets to their LLM therapist, which spits back out what they want to hear\u2014although without the legal confidentiality of actual therapy sessions, with everything forming a digital record, and with the tech companies, on a whim, sometimes <\/span>posting<\/a> the raw text of chats onto the open internet. People earnestly ask AI about the existence of God or the meaning of life in the way they might once have sunk down to their knees and searched the silence of their own soul. And people freely turn their most creative projects, sometimes their life\u2019s work, over to AI under the bashful premise that they themselves are not that good at the thing they most love to do and it\u2019s better handled by the bot.<\/span>
Now that we\u2019re a couple of years into this whole set of developments, the essentials of it\u2014and the battle lines\u2014are a bit more clear. It\u2019s not really about what AI can do or what it can\u2019t do, whether it will take all the jobs or won\u2019t, whether it will destroy the world or not. The question is about agency\u2014do you choose to exert agency in your own life, in the way that humans always have and were doing just fine with until, like, three years ago? Or do you prefer to turn it over to a machine, which really means turning it over to the data miners and the advertising innovators in the world\u2019s largest tech corporations?
Maintaining an <\/strong>AI boycott, it has to be acknowledged, is getting progressively harder to do\u2014and I am not always the strictest Luddite about it. I was hooked into various forms of AI before they started being called AI\u2014Google Translate, Apple\u2019s text predict feature, and so on. If I think I have cancer for some ridiculous reason, I now no longer need to go to all the trouble of clicking on WebMD to be told I don\u2019t have cancer; the AI tools can do it with just a glance at the screen.<\/span>
But… it\u2019s really not so difficult either. Every so often\u2014in a moment of weakness\u2014I\u2019ll download an AI app onto my phone and the process will begin all over again where I rack my brains to come up with some way in which the technology might actually benefit my life. So far, I haven\u2019t been able to come up with anything. I like structuring and writing my own essays; I have no idea why I would outsource that to AI. The advice it gives always starts out kind of interesting\u2014and there\u2019s always a moment of being awed by the technology\u2014before it reveals itself to just be gleaned from a couple of random pieces of information on the web. The actual zone of my life just seems to be in a place that AI can\u2019t touch or help\u2014unless I proactively turn myself over to the bot.
And meanwhile, in that time, I can feel the whole world around me doing exactly that. It\u2019s very common to have a conversation where someone shares their great idea\u2014only to reveal that it came from AI. Teaching (I teach journalism and public relations at an international university) has largely become a matter of trying to suss out what is AI and what isn\u2019t\u2014and, since AI became prevalent (and all my students use it), they have become distinctly lazier. They clearly feel that the AI is just better than they are and there\u2019s no real point in trying.
The general impression is of the invasion of the bodysnatchers occurring all around me\u2014if I deal with anyone, it tends to feel like they\u2019re becoming a kind of frontman for AI-generated work but without the work itself becoming in any way obviously better.
The lecture I tend to give to my students isn\u2019t moral at all. It\u2019s just very practical. They may fool their teachers sometimes with AI work, but their teachers are starting to catch on\u2014all it takes is running their work through an AI detector, or insisting on giving them paper-and-pen exams, to starkly reveal how much they\u2019ve been relying on the technology. And they certainly won\u2019t be able to fool their employers. If they show up in the workforce using AI for everything, their employers will of course take them at their word and simply replace their jobs with AI. If they use AI for their products, then they will be competing with rivals using exactly the same sets of AI tools and generating the exact same kinds of work\u2014there will be no way to distinguish themselves or to get ahead.
For adults, the question is a little more existential. It isn\u2019t so much how to adapt to the world but what kind of world you really want to build and transmit onwards. The value that AI presupposes is about optimization\u2014about doing things really, really well. AI text is always very clean, there is never a hint of, say, a spelling mistake; it really (and it is obviously a work in progress, but AI is getting better at it all the time) can do just about any task to a high level.
But whoever said that life is about optimization? If you simply shift your focus and presuppose that life is about enriching human experience, and finding meaning, then the value of AI almost instantly dwindles away. I\u2019ve heard of people using AI to write their diaries\u2014but the whole point of a diary isn\u2019t to produce some sort of masterwork, it\u2019s to record a particular day in the highly subjective, idiosyncratic way that lends meaning to you. A friend who works for a travel writing company told me that the boss had a meeting in which it was announced that they should \u201cwelcome in AI\u201d\u2014with the result that, only a few months later, virtually everyone at the company lost their jobs and the ones who stayed were basically there to check over AI-generated posts for hallucinations. But travel isn\u2019t actually just a bundle of information\u2014the whole point of travel is the relationship between you, the traveler, and the place visited\u2014and the result of the travel industry\u2019s turn to AI is that it now wouldn\u2019t even occur to me to read one of their posts.
The assumption <\/strong>at the moment is that AI \u201cis the future\u201d\u2014a phrase like that is the underpinning of just about any conversation on AI. I\u2019m not sure actually. I could sort of imagine this spinning the other way, that the pace of LLM improvement slows down, that more and more of what they\u2019re generating is obviously \u201cslop,\u201d and that the enthusiastic early adopters are the ones who will be caught out\u2014who will be remembered in a few years for having downsized their workforce for the sake of a bot; or for having skipped out on their education, on a crucial period of investing in themselves, in order to generate work that turns out to be indistinguishable from the machine-generated work that everybody is producing.<\/span>
But the ship really seems to be sailing on that fantasy of mine. AI has already moved into a \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d category\u2014the economy isn\u2019t producing much, but it is producing AI and that\u2019s the horse that we\u2019re collectively hitching our wagons to; the tech companies haven\u2019t quite been able to figure out a clear use for AI, but they\u2019ve been very good at generating <\/span>stickiness<\/em>\u2014at persuading people to download the free samples of AI and to use it for one thing or another so that it already becomes unimaginable to write a student paper or to prepare a recipe without it.<\/span>
AI may well push through the slight bottleneck it\u2019s been in for the past couple of years and prevail. The dissenting voices are starting to get a little lonelier; when I make this point with people, the glazed look I get back tends to mean that my interlocutor has already turned AI into a habit. But even should AI win out in the culture wars, that actually doesn\u2019t prove the larger point. AI isn\u2019t actually some guaranteed future that we have to succumb to whether we like it or not. The adoption of AI rests on choices\u2014on the individual choices of billions, and there is agency, actually, in deciding whether to use it or not, an agency that may be all the greater since we were fooled once by the tech companies\u2019 marketing gimmicks in the high social media era of the 2010s, and should at least be wiser to the tricks they are pulling with AI in the 2020s.
At the moment, the conversation about AI is basically a lot of noise. Most of it turns on AI\u2019s capabilities. The tendency to hallucinate and to generate confident slop were embarrassing for quite a while. The fact that it <\/span>seems<\/a> to be pushing past the worst hallucinatory tendencies is supposed to quiet the doubters. But the conversation about capabilities is, I am convinced, basically a distraction. The technology is already impressive and will continue to improve; that\u2019s not in dispute. But <\/span>cloning<\/a> and nuclear technology are also impressive and have strict guardrails around them.<\/span>
What\u2019s at stake isn\u2019t really technology\u2014it\u2019s about taking a good hard look at what our fundamental values are and questioning whether AI aligns with them. The question isn\u2019t whether AI is a stochastic parrot or not; the question is whether <\/span>you<\/em> are.<\/span>
Sam Kahn is associate editor at <\/strong>Persuasion<\/strong><\/em>, writes the Substack <\/span>Castalia<\/a><\/strong>, <\/span>and edits <\/strong>The Republic of Letters<\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
Follow <\/span>Persuasion <\/em>on <\/span>X<\/a>, <\/span>Instagram<\/a>, <\/span>LinkedIn<\/a>, and <\/span>YouTube<\/a> to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.<\/span>
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Edit: the piece’s title changed from "Why I Still Boycott AI" with no notice a moment ago, similarly to the other piece recently that switched the name after it hit my inbox.<\/span>
I agree with Mr. Kahn that saying "Write me a good essay for Persuasion" would be a bad use of his time (and the readers’), but this comes off like people bragging they don’t use a search engine. It’s either extremely incurious & uncreative or perhaps just dishonest.<\/span>
What you spent 5 minutes researching a few years ago you can now spend 1 minute typing into a textbox and recieve specifically sources representing a wide gamut of views to spend the remaining 4:45 to read! Any question you though "Ah I’d like to know that but not enough to spend 30 minutes on a deep dive" now can be done in a minute!<\/span>
Want certain computer tasks done? Ask the robot to step you through using the command line and to teach you the meaning of every step! Want to know if a book in the store is a good for you? Ask it to check reviews to see if they’re similar. Curious about the author’s past intellectual accomplishments? Just ask. Find a dead link to a paper? Paste the link and context into Claude and it’ll find it 9\/10, even if the paper isn’t on Internet Archive.<\/span>
I’m confused why we should be proud to not be able to think of these things. Obviously the tech can’t do anything previously impossible, but neither could the dishwasher and I haven’t read 1% as many essays boasting the author can’t find a use for one.<\/span>
Thank you for writing this. I don’t care how many times people call me a luddite, I’m just not willing to permanently atrophy my hard-won cognitive abilities just because it’s easy and fashionable.<\/span>
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