Generative AI Vegetarianism

Generative AI vegetarianismMarch 11, 2026 Version historyExtra-prominent disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own, and don’t represent the opinions of my current or previous employers.For some spicier takes! Anthony Moser’s “I Am An AI Hater”, Jenny Zhang’s “choosing friction”, Rusty Foster’s “A.I. Isn’t People”, or Ed Zitron’s “The Case Against Generative AI” if you have most of an afternoon to read it. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s podcast interview with Paris Marx is also excellent.Hello, it’s me: I’m a generative AI vegetarian.The tech industry is convinced this is the future; every app on my phone and most of the apps on my computer want me to use their new AI features.I don’t want any of them. I want to write my own emails. I want to write my own (mediocre) software code. I want to learn and think and ponder with other humans, not with a text-prediction system built by consuming all the text on the internet.If you’re stoked about generative AI tools, that’s cool. A friend of mine runs workshops across Canada teaching people how to use AI systems. Friends in the government tech space have built really interesting and thought-provoking things with AI. People find these tools useful and fascinating. In my day job, I’m keen on helping people use AI tools to make government data more accessible. I’m not here to cut you down; I’m not a generative AI vegan, after all. (Sorry, vegans!)If you’re a government department or public institution looking at adopting AI tools at scale, well, I’ve got some real strong opinions for you. (As it says on the tin: criticize systems, not people.) But I’ll save those for another blog post.What is generative AI vegetarianism?When I planned on writing this post (in April 2024!) I figured a background explainer on “what is generative AI” would be a good place to start. It’s 2026, and if you somehow haven’t already collided with your phone’s messenger apps or phone camera or your office suite at work telling you to summarize or generate or edit something with AI, well, I’d love to hear how you did it.Generative AI tools are software products that produce text, or images, or other media by generating it from a user request and a very large quantity of underlying data. LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT are the most well-known.I often describe software as made up of three things: interfaces, data, and math. In the case of generative AI tools:The interface is pretty minimal (a chatbot or similar text interface, or a voice-recognition based interface like Siri or Alexa).The data, for most of these generative AI products, is the astounding part: comprehensively-scraped copies of all of the publicly available text on the internet, millions of scanned books, transcriptions of Youtube movies and other videos, and so on.And the math, in most cases, is based on “transformers”, mathematical operations that predict, for example, what words might come next after a series of previous words. It’s just, a lot more math and an a lot a lot more data than most software products.That’s generative AI in a nutshell.Generative AI vegetarianism, simply put, is avoiding generative AI tools as much as you can in your day-to-day life. For me, that means:Turning off all of the optional AI settings I can find: turning off Microsoft Copilot in my office suite (over and over again). Turning off Google Gemini on my phone. Turning off Apple Intelligence on my laptop.Not using any of the built-in AI features that I can’t turn off.…

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