AI is powerful and strange, but the technology itself is also deeply fraught. I’m generally optimistic about what AI will unlock, but let’s not be naive: AI threatens steep environmental, social, and creative costs. It raises urgent questions about copyright, labor, and what it means to make things. The cynical deployment of AI wrings out efficiencies at human expense. The creators of the leading AI models have engaged in the purest form of extractive capitalism to date, slurping up all the world’s content without compensating its creators. So yeah, that’s a lot.
Mainstream surveys from Pew, Quinnipiac, Gallup, and others show a general unease about trust and consequences with AI, even as usage increases. (A 2025 Gallup study found that 64% of Americans plan to “resist using AI as long as possible.” And indeed, a more recent Pew study finds that 65% don’t use AI much at work.)
But what if your feeling is stronger than unease? What if you find the whole enterprise so immoral that you can find no ethical use for AI?
“Mike in Massachusetts” asked that very question in the Work Friend advice column of the New York Times. The columnist’s pragmatic answer echoes how you might think about living within any system whose foundations or effects you can’t abide (late-stage capitalism, climate crisis, political system, etc.):
What’s your goal in refusing to use A.I.? Saving your immortal soul? Throwing a small wrench in the enormous cogs of capital? Will refusing its use do anything to stop its relentless advancement, or just make you feel righteous?
A.I. boosters and critics alike often talk about the technology in revolutionary — if not apocalyptic — terms, which can make the risks of using A.I. (or not) feel overwhelming. To use A.I. feels like participating in morally bankrupt process of technological exploitation, on the one hand; to refuse it feels like consigning yourself to obsolescence and unemployment.
But the stakes are just not that high. If you decline to use A.I., you may end up working a bit harder than your peers, but the process of adopting A.I. will occur over a long timeline, in stops and starts, and the risk of being left fatally and irreversibly behind is low. At the same time, your individual decision to use it won’t make a huge difference to the tech companies you’re wary of on their march to economic domination.
Which is why my recommendation is to refuse the choice you’re offering yourself. Why not use A.I. in circumscribed and deliberate ways to make your work life better? You won’t be refused entry to heaven because you prompted Claude to organize a data set and saved yourself some time and eye strain.
Meanwhile, you could channel your outrage into organized political action rather than an individual ethical choice by joining and supporting climate or labor advocacy groups that are thoughtfully working on the issue. If you’re morally against A.I., you owe yourself and the people in your community more than just a private protest.
