I'm done with AI

In a cafe in Krakow, I sat with a banana-flavored coffee only to realize that the Christmas music being played over the speakers was entirely AI-generated and demented. Sung in a nondescript crooner voice, typical lyrics about “Christmas in a Cadillac” gave way to off-putting lines like, “boot sleeve circle on the table”, or, “lift the breath and light the spine, holy sign”.

I have thought deeply about AI, believing that it’s a process not a tool, and that the degree to which you use it to generate artifacts is the degree to which you export your own (or somebody else’s) cognitive ability to do so. In other words, Midjourney’s statement that they are “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species” is disingenuous— AI can only create from the direct results of human skill and imagination and no further.

This means that I’ve considered accepting LLM’s to help complete tasks for me (Chat GPT, make me a list of books written by women), but have not accepted browser AI as a respectable means of making content (Prompting them to make songs, photos, and videos is just unskilled).

Out of curiosity, I used these browser programs myself and of course, I arrived at no special conclusion, no further advancement of imagination or thought. The phrase AI slop is well earned. But like lots of others I used ChatGPT successfully for a myriad of tasks: to create lists, to help me refine an argument, to fix my grammar, to process devastating interpersonal drama, etc.

Still, the reality is that even if I ignored mounting public concern over data centers, climate impact, and our cognitive and economic well-being, at the end of my experiments I was only left with a handy set of calendars, some better syntax, and the hint that I should probably get some therapy.

It is plainly, embarrassingly, obvious that I cannot justify its cost by its benefits.

I was in this state of mind already when Christmas 2025 sent me over the edge. For the first time ever in my life, I was inundated with Christmas cards, GIFs, and videos that were not made by a person. I was sent crass Christmas carols with naughty lyrics, had to look at a garbage dump of cheap, absurd images of cats and puppies in Christmas cups, candy cane women in a conga line, etc etc. And finally, on the eve of the new year, in a real-life cafe, I was having to sit and listen to literally meaningless nonsense.

Banana Coffee complete with ribbon

As I was halfway through my coffee, a second AI voice joined in a duet, and the two sang lyrics like “my heart’s wrapped up in hush, our hand in mitten (singular) touch.” Jesus H Christ.

The digital voidscape had found me (and some confused others) in the real world. As these things go, the matrix of variables I’d mulled over finally alchemized into one fat conclusion: that I want to resist as much as possible a reality in which our cultural artifacts are made by exporting our potential to cheap, unethical, and sometimes illegal means of talent exploitation and extraction.

I thought briefly then about AI’s use for social justice. Like in the case of AI processes used to generate images depicting hidden violence faced by refugees, or to reconstruct moments for people with fading memories.

But my answer to this was fairly immediate. I want to resist social justice hinging on exporting imagination, even the imagination for cruelty, on processes that abstract typically embodied acts of generation. As with ChatGPT girlfriends or Nano Banana celebrity mashup clips, I cannot see the benefit outweighing the ethical and cognitive cost of these products, and the large-scale existential threats they pose to our planet and human cultural development.

There is much more to consider.

What about AI’s use to detect tumors? Or make medicine? The arguments here are complex and manifold. There will be a lot more to explore. The sheer scale of the matter has been the chief reason I’ve avoided anti-AI moralizing, or doomsday scenarios. But after a year of AI and an uncanny Christmas, I can stop my useless search for how I want it in my life (I do not), or the exact right ethical line in the sand (there isn’t one). I wound up leaving the last of my banana coffee and dashed back out in the cold.

No AI on this particular street