Why No AI

I understand that people are using AI, but my hope is that it’s done thoughtfully. Please learn more about this tech and how it works.

I choose to avoid using AI in my art, writing, videos, and website because:

  1. AI is a labor issue.

    2. This tech was trained on words, images, videos, and code that we all published to the Internet. Now AI is an industry that’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and none of us have been paid for the use of our words, images, videos, and code.

    What’s more, this tech requires a lot of help from humans in order to improve. Many of the people who work in AI development are severely underpaid. This is especially true if they’re reviewing violent or explicit material, a job that is deeply harmful to their minds and hearts.

  2. AI lies.

    3. The industry refers to AI’s errors as “hallucinations,” but, whatever the terminology, you cannot trust this tech to respond correctly to queries. Though there have been improvements, Google’s Gemini, for example, still gives answers that contain made-up or mistaken information hundreds of millions of times a day. [New York Times April 2026]

  3. AI is addictive—and it’s by design.

    4. Despite public outcry about the dangers of chatbots being so agreeable that they lead some users to dependency and psychosis, AI continues to affirm users to an extreme degree. When this tech makes people feel like they’re right, they come back more often, and, when users come back more often, AI companies make more money.

  4. AI takes away our right to privacy.

    5. When you ask AI to help you, your queries become part of the tech’s training. Worse, even if you don’t seek out interactions with this tech, it has probably been trained on your information. Given AI’s tendency to synthesize data in problematic ways as well as its habit of lying, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and all the rest aren’t just a privacy breach: they are a nightmare.

  5. AI is an environmental catastrophe.

    6. The amount of power used to train AI as well as the energy needed to generate individual answers to queries is difficult to pin down precisely, but we know it’s a whole lot. Data centers in North America alone, many of which are involved in the development and running of AI, consume as much electricity as an entire country in themselves. [MIT News January 2025]

  6. As it stands, AI is about power.

    7. And this time I mean it in a societal sense. The AI industry is consolidating wealth and influence with a small number of people, increasingly making life more expensive and difficult for the rest of us.

Gwenn Seemel with a “choose democracy” sticker
photo by Gwenn Seemel
(Statue of Liberty design available in my Redbubble shop!)

In theory, artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world in positive ways. The problem is that what we call “AI” today is actually a deeply flawed attempt at artificial general intelligence.

Instead of creating different AI models that are hyperfocused on solving specific problems, big tech companies today are each trying to build their own super-smart-about-absolutely-everything model. And they’re falling maddeningly short of their goal in ways that damage our health and our planet.

My experience with AI: