I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human
As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move
Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.
It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.
This all sounds so quaint now, in an era when anyone can spin up a slick-looking app using OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, and high-school dropouts are raising millions for their AI startups.
To be clear, my educational journey was not particularly efficient; I toiled away solo, following my own shoddy, made-up syllabus, motivated by curiosity and a desire to understand. Still, in the process, I discovered a love for a certain way of thinking, one that would carry me through a four-year computer science degree plus various software development jobs.
I could tell a similar story about becoming a writer. My initial desire to write about the tech industry came out of a sense of frustration with what I was reading. I felt like there was something missing in the discourse, some gap between my own increasingly critical understanding of Silicon Valley and the optimistic and credulous way it was discussed by other people.
Since then, I’ve published many thousands of words, with countless more left on the cutting-room floor. But even the discarded words never felt wasted, because they were the byproduct of thinking. Any writer can attest to the transformational nature of the writing process: you can start out with one idea, only to end up somewhere quite different. Writing is more than a matter of merely outputting words. It’s a matter of discovering what your values are and convincing yourself that they’re worth fighting for.
In these two domains – coding and writing – I sometimes feel as if I’ve taken the last helicopter out of Saigon. Both fields have been revolutionised by recent developments in large language model (LLM) technology. Software development has been deskilled by “vibe-coding”, when AI tools are prompted to make code using natural, conversational language, and tech companies previously known for being great employers are now using AI as an excuse for large-scale redundancies. Writing has been overwhelmed by AI slop to the point where people have become afraid to use em dashes, that unfortunate hallmark of AI writing.
In the past, I would have embraced any seemingly revolutionary new technology. And yet, today, I avoid using AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience.
That’s why I worry about the young people who are coming of age in the midst of this AI boom. I fear that the mystique around AI is teaching them to see technology as a black box, something foisted upon them, managed by opaque corporations over which they have no control. What does that do to their relationship with technology, if they see it as something that simply happens to them, whose inner workings cannot be fathomed, much less changed? What does that do to their relationship with the world at large?
In a world where huge AI companies are hoping to make intelligence a “utility” – in other words, privatising thought – limiting our use of this technology may be a way to protect our cognitive sovereignty. On an individual level, it’s about preserving our ability to think, keeping our brains active rather than outsourcing every decision to some essentially probabilistic software.
Research suggests that even just a few minutes of AI chatbot usage may have a negative impact on cognition. On a collective level, it’s a political matter: a way to combat our dependence on AI companies raising unprecedented amounts of money with the goal of inserting their tendrils into every facet of society, in the process transforming the world into a cold, inhospitable and even more unequal place.
As I write this, we are in the midst of the AI bubble. Trillions of dollars are projected to be spent on datacentres. Corporations posting record revenues are initiating mass redundancies in order to invest more in AI, while the employees who remain feel pressure to maximise their own use of AI to stay competitive. People are using AI to write their wedding vows and even falling in love with the AI itself. In a short span of time, it’s become terrifyingly normalised.
In this atmosphere, my refusal to engage with AI might feel heretical, even absurd. Even as more information comes out that should make us all sceptical – the shadiness of the industry’s executives, the financial concerns, the horrific environmental consequences, the negative impact on working conditions – the world remains caught up in the AI frenzy. There’s so much money and power behind it that to challenge it feels as hopeless as challenging a divine authority. I may believe in my heart that I am right, but I have to live every day surrounded by apparent evidence of my wrongness, the AI billboards looming over me like monuments.
I know that I’m a less efficient coder, on the infrequent occasions when I write code, because I haven’t learned the latest tooling. And I’m a less efficient writer, too; in the time it took me to write and rewrite this essay you’re now reading, I could have prompt-engineered hundreds of books.
But in a world where efficiency and convenience have become vehicles for the advancement of corporate greed, inconvenience and inefficiency may simply be the cost of preserving my humanity, of building character. I’m taking a path that I think will help me become the kind of person I want to be: someone deeply rooted in the world, who moves with intention and integrity.
Of course, that path comes with certain trade-offs – a more mercenary version of me could be raking it in at an AI startup right now. But I know what values I want to fight for. I think the trade-offs are worth it.
- Wendy Liu is a writer based in San Francisco and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley
