I’m Resisting Gen-AI to Reclaim my Creativity

I’ve never been much of an AI user. I’ve never felt particularly reliant on these tools, and for the most part, I haven’t found myself needing them in my everyday life.

But even though I’m not a big AI user myself, I encounter generative AI constantly online. Ads, videos, images, writing, music. It seems to be everywhere, and increasingly, I find myself feeling irritated by its presence.

Being online has started to feel like navigating a minefield of things I would rather not see. I can curate my feed, follow people whose work I enjoy, and try to be intentional about what I consume, only to have something AI-generated shoved in front of me anyway. It’s not just that I dislike the content. It’s the feeling that I have so little control over what I’m being asked to engage with, and that something I value is being crowded out in the process.

I think what bothers me most is the sense that we're being encouraged to treat human effort as an inconvenience. Why spend time writing when a machine can generate a paragraph? Why learn to draw when a tool can produce an image? Why struggle to articulate a thought when you can ask for a polished response?

But I don't think the struggle is always something to overcome. Sometimes it's where the learning happens. Sometimes the time and effort we put into making something are just as meaningful as the finished product.

I do believe the AI bubble will eventually pop, or at least that the current rush to put AI into everything will meet some resistance. People are already pushing back against the environmental costs of data centers, the effects on the communities around them, and the growing expectation that we should embrace automation simply because it exists. I’m also concerned about what happens when we become so accustomed to outsourcing our thinking and problem-solving that we lose confidence in our own resourcefulness.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the small ways I can resist. Not necessarily by making a grand statement or opting out of technology altogether, but by being more intentional about what I consume, how I think, how I create, and how I spend my time.

Here are some ways I’m resisting gen-AI on social media and in everyday life:

I’m blocking the posts when possible and scrolling past when I don’t have the option.

I don’t want to normalize AI-generated content by engaging with it, even if that engagement is just stopping to look. I’m curating my feeds to make more room for actual human creativity. I want to see what people are making, thinking, drawing, writing, and experiencing.

When it comes to the feed, if I’m going to be bombarded with content that I didn’t choose, I want to see evidence of the human behind the work.

I love this thread I saw discussing why being served AI content, particularly AI art, feels like it violates our space:

Word! I love this and it feels so true. source: @slbarrett_87 on Threads

The idea that art is a conversation about humanity really resonated with me. When I read a book, look at a painting, or listen to a song, I'm engaging with something another person has made. I'm encountering their choices, their perspective, their interpretation of the world. Even when I don't know anything about the person who made it, there's a human experience behind the work that I can respond to.

I think that's part of what makes the flood of AI-generated content feel so alienating. I'm being offered the appearance of a contribution without the human participation that made me interested in the first place. I don't just want something that looks like art or reads like writing. I want to encounter another person through what they've made.

I’m training my brain to use methods that aid brain function, even when it’s not convenient.

Handwritten notes in a notebook. Journaling. Voice notes. Lately, I like the practice of sitting with a thought long enough to figure out what I actually mean before looking for an answer.

When I was younger, putting things like writing and journaling into a steady practice would mean that my thoughts became sharper.

It’s how I became so good at writing (if I do say so myself, haha!) When I would write papers in high school and college, a lot of the practice was having something to say and diligently putting one letter down after the next, re-reading it, searching my brain and using my resources to find the perfect way to say what I meant. Training those muscles, rather than relying on shortcuts, truly is what made me better. And even when those thoughts didn’t come out perfectly, the next time I’d be able to refine and sharpen them with more precision.

I don’t want to outsource every moment of friction when I can’t think of what to say, or when I’m articulating a thought. Sometimes the struggle to describe something is part of the thinking process. Sometimes the inconvenience is the point.

“I don’t want to outsource every moment of friction. Sometimes the struggle to articulate a thought is part of the thinking process. Sometimes the inconvenience is the point.”

I’m spending more time with people and less time trying to get everything I need from a screen.

I’m trying to go back to the times where a group call was the norm, where you could get a group together and talk to each other for hours instead of just sending memes back and forth in the group chat. I want to ask people questions, have conversations, exchange ideas, and learn from experiences that don’t fit neatly into a prompt.

I want to preserve the messy, unpredictable process of getting to know another person.

Human connection requires patience. People misunderstand us. We have to clarify what we mean. We have to listen, respond, and sometimes change our minds. These aren’t bugs to be engineered away, they’re features of being human. I think that leaning away from optimizing our relationships can result in deeper connections and a lot more growth and learning along the way.

I’m allowing myself to be a beginner at things.

In all of this, there’s the idea that life is going to be messy, not perfectly optimized or tailored for the viewer to enjoy. I’m letting go of my perfectionism by embracing the fact that I’m living life for the first time. While AI will scrape the internet for the perfect response to a prompt, I’m a beginner at almost everything. It’s okay if I have a flub or an embarrassing moment. I think that these little parts of life typically are what build up to make you great at whatever it is you choose to do.

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I know that my individual choices aren't going to dismantle the AI industry.

Blocking a post, writing in a notebook, or calling a friend instead of sending a meme isn't going to change the world overnight. But I think there's value in deciding what I want to make room for in my own life.

I want to keep developing my ability to think critically, to express myself, and to make things that reflect my own experiences and imagination. I want to have conversations that wander, ideas that take time to develop, and creative pursuits that don't need to produce anything particularly impressive to be worthwhile. I want to be able to try something, fail at it, and try again without feeling like I've wasted time that could have been spent doing it better or faster.

More than anything, I don't want to become so preoccupied with efficiency that I forget to enjoy the process of being alive.

There is so much pressure to optimize ourselves. To be more productive, more articulate, more attractive, more knowledgeable, more successful. Now we have tools promising to help us do all of that with less effort. But I wonder what we're giving up when we start viewing every inconvenience as a problem to be solved and every limitation as something to outsource.

“More than anything, I don’t want to become so preoccupied with efficiency that I forget to enjoy the process of being alive.”

I don't want a machine to live my life for me, even in the smallest ways. I want to participate in it. I want to do the thinking, make the mistakes, learn the skills, and have the conversations. I want to experience the satisfaction of making something with my own two hands and the surprise of discovering a thought I didn't know I had until I sat down and tried to write it.

Maybe that's what resistance looks like for me right now. Not a perfect boycott, not a refusal to engage with every new technology, but a commitment to remain an active participant in my own life.

I want to keep being a beginner. I want to keep making things. I want to keep learning how to be a person.

And I don't want to be in such a hurry to get to the finished product that I miss everything I could have become along the way.