A statement on AI

When I was around 12 years old, I went on the holiday of a lifetime: a trip to New York City. As an unsophisticated Brit, who grew up in a village, it was incredibly exciting: full of lights, late-night meals, and buildings taller than seemed possible.

During that trip, our generous host offered to buy me a book of my choice, and I opted for a collection of essays on artificial intelligence. That’s the kind of kid I was. This fascination with AI was very much a product of the time, when robots were ever-present in our ‘culture’ (Short Circuit, The Terminator, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) and the most rudimentary forms of chatbot (ELIZA) were basically another form of video game.

After that, my interest waned. I avoided the optional AI-related project at university. I shared the common disappointment with ‘AI-lite’ tools like Microsoft’s much-loathed Clippy. Ideas that had once seemed intriguing had become annoying, maybe as a result of their adoption by global megacorps.

Keep fast-fowarding until the cusp of 2026. AI is everywhere, but never has it felt more depressing. Any positive uses are overshadowed by the bad: slop-generators replacing jobs and hallucinations sidelining the expression of actual human thoughts and feelings.

I refuse to be a part of this. Fortunately, it’s still possible to be a conscientious objector—at least, in some contexts, such as my own personal writing.

So, on this site, I will never use AI to write an article, I will never prompt an LLM to vomit out a bunch of nonsense and redirect that nonsense onto a page here.

(I never have, BTW, I just want to emphasise that I never will, either!)

Bobby Jack, 2025-12-29