Readers Explain Why They Are Turning Away From AI, from Environmental Concerns to Fears About Thinking for Themselves

Lia is 18, a university student in Sydney, and she has built a small set of defenses around her screen. She runs browser extensions that block Google's AI summaries. She switches off AI features in every program she uses. She stays away from ChatGPT and Claude, and she blocks social media content that uses AI. Generative AI, she says, is all around her at university, used by students and staff alike, and she refuses all of it, including the optional kind.

Her reasons are less about any one tool than about direction. She describes a society obsessed with accelerating without saying what it is accelerating toward. She fears AI is not the answer to our problems and may make the real solutions harder to reach.

Lia is one of several readers who wrote to the ABC after it published a story asking whether people will really be left behind if they avoid AI. Their ages run from 18 to 64, they are spread across the country, and each describes avoidance as a deliberate personal choice.

In Northam, Western Australia, on Ballardong Noongar country, Samantha, 55, put her objection in terms of trust. Knowing what was real and what was true was already difficult before AI, she says, and she asks what hope there is now. AI, in her word, terrifies her.

Tayla, 43, in Victoria, describes whiplash at work. Her company went from telling staff not to use AI under any circumstances to telling them to use it for everything, in what she calls the blink of an eye. She has decided to be a conscientious objector on environmental grounds alone, citing her concern about AI's environmental impacts. She has told colleagues openly that she will not go out of her way to use it, while acknowledging it cannot be avoided completely. Local IT told her she will be left behind. She has a second worry: that people will lose the ability to think for themselves on a broad scale. She asks how many of us still remember multiple phone numbers, and finds the thought of that happening broadly frightening. She adds that there would be no satisfaction in saying "I told you so."

Rainer, 64, of Sydney, has been a professional driver for 42 years. He learned to read a street map long before Google or AI, imprinting the route in his mind and driving it using his experience. He admits that when he tried Google Maps for fun, it sometimes showed him a better way. But he once used it to reach an unfamiliar place, then repeated the drive without it and promptly took the wrong exit. To him that captures the biggest flaw in learning through AI: you do not learn, you simply follow instructions.

Adrian, 23, of Melbourne, who asked that their real name not be used, draws a line within the technology itself. They probably use a lot of tech labelled AI, Adrian says, but when it comes to large language model chatbots, agents and the hype around them, they want it to stop.

The accounts are individual testimony, not a survey, and they share no single argument. They cover environmental cost, eroded independent thinking, doubts about what is real, and the gap between following directions and understanding. Tayla's account points to what may come next: as employers push staff toward AI, whether opting out carries a professional price is a question these readers are already facing.