rejecting AI
A little over a month ago I decided to stop using AI entirely, as it was in no uncertain terms ruining my life. I stopped using it for most things earlier in the year, but the final holdout was for my job, where the expectation was that it be used for programming. Throughout the year I’ve continued to learn about how LLMs work, the companies that build them, and their true cost. It’s a bad setup all around, and I’m out. I’m done.
For months I tried to use it more intentionally but that never worked for me, I’d be right back to leaning into it. It felt silly to do it myself when I am slower and have to actually use my brain. Then one day, one of the LLM coding tools was down due to an outage. And I wasn’t sure what to do, should I just stop working? That’s absurd! It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was hating what my work had become. I decided this has to stop in all forms.
I wrote a blog post about my decision to stop using AI, even for coding at work, and it went surprisingly viral:
I'm done using AI – Brett Codes
Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.
The rambling companion video has passed 900k views, as of this writing:
And when I stopped using AI at work (and therefore don’t use it for anything at all now), my enjoyment of coding and problem-solving at work instantly improved. The apathy that had been growing for months evaporated. I was still productive, and I was learning more than I had in the months prior.
Learning to use AI to code at first felt magical and exciting. But as I used it more and more, I was getting further and further from the craft that I’ve studied and practiced for the last twenty years. There’s no depth in skill to prompting a coding harness hooked up to an LLM. There’s very little enjoyment to be had reviewing thousands of lines of sloppy code. Building software with LLMs soon felt disposable and meaningless and dangerous.
I’m continually surprised at how much my writing and videos are resonating with people. I thought I was alone (and that was partially why I was in such a deep depression about all of this). It’s been the creative communities fighting against AI for years that helped break me out of the tech bubble I spend most of my time in. I’m here to join that fight against AI, against the data centers, against the irresponsible companies and their leaders, against the loss of humanity being at the center of creativity and craft.
I’ve continued to make videos sharing my experiences and thoughts. I’ve been writing and planning. I’ve been reflecting. I’ve got some big ideas, and I’ll soon have the opportunity to dedicate my focus toward those ideas.
I’ve set up the ability to become a member of my YouTube channel, where your financial support will go toward paying the bills so I can focus on fighting against the nightmare we find ourselves in. If you’re able to support me, thank you! There are already some exclusive videos and lots more on the way: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQXaIyeRqHjK9EK41b8J3yQ/join
My focus will be on making videos for a few months to see how that goes and what comes of it. The risk of LLMs that I see are not nearly as dramatic and sci-fi-coded as the news and tech CEOs make it seem. I’m most worried about the mental health impacts of the AI industry and LLM chat and coding tools, the negative impacts of data centers on our communities, deskilling & loss of cognitive abilities, the withering of the web, and the economic bubble that we find ourselves in (the numbers are wild and make zero sense).
When we’re talking about “AI” these days, it’s all about the chat bots, the token generators, the large language models that return token-by-token something similar to what it was trained on. The technology alone is not dangerous in and of itself. It’s not like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey where it’ll start making decisions on its own. It is the human-beings running the major AI and tech companies that are irresponsible and dangerous, utilizing sci-fi tropes and language to cause mass anxiety and fear to help increase their evaluation as they prepare to go public. It’s a lot easier to sell investors on “the fate of humanity is in our company’s hands” than “we made a tool that’s quite capable of outputting sloppy code quickly.”
The future does not have to be the direction this is seemingly all heading. I’ve got a lot to say about all of this and actions to take. What I’m worried about is severe and concerning enough that I am going to focus my energy to fighting against it. I spent much of 2024 learning about and putting into practice political organizing skills. I’m now ready to apply those skills against AI and the companies that make these tools.
What you can do!
You have autonomy, even if your job “mandates” the use of AI. Here are some ideas of what you can do:
Stop using AI in your personal life
Delete the chat apps if you have any
Use a search engine like Kagi or https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ that allows turning off AI search features; if you use Google, type
-aito remove the AI summary
Push back against people communicating with AI, like in workplace emails
Speak out against AI when people are boosting it; I can say from first-hand experience that this can influence how people think and approach the tech
Learn! I recently read Cory Doctorow’s book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is thought-provoking, accessible, and useful; understanding how LLMs work can help demystify what’s happening, it’s not magic!
What’s next
I am hoping to interview people with the same goal as myself, continue making videos about my experiences, and organize community around rejecting AI. Maybe there will be a book in there too? We’ll see how it goes! One thing at a time.
Game dev & Usagi Engine
Fighting against AI doesn’t mean that I’m not working on creative projects though! I’ve continued to improve and fix my little game engine Usagi. It’s been awesome seeing people making games using it.
I haven’t been as focused on making my own games lately, but I did write a book about how to code games with Lua and Usagi. So if you’re interested in starting to code and make games, the book is free online! https://book.usagiengine.com/
I’m sure I will inevitably end up working on my own games again, but focusing on the fight against AI seems like the right thing to do for now!
Thank you
I appreciate you so much, thank you for reading this rambling newsletter! I hope you’re well. I’ve been enjoying playing the Shenmue series lately. I’m a bit obsessed with it. What have you been enjoying? I’d love to hear!
