Here's why I am so sick of AI and why it is a bad thing

I don’t know about you but I am truly sick of AI. It’s actually beyond a joke at this point in time. I’m not talking about things that make life genuinely easier like digital maps or having a calculator on your phone. I’m talking about the things that literally make you go WTAF.

Those things are of course copy and pasting other people’s information and palming it off as your own. You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about students who use AI services to write essays or “journalists” and I use that term loosely because I read an article today that had basically been copied from Wikipedia, with the exception of a quote from the City of Sydney. The article was about Macdonaldtown, which is known for its train station and nearby suburb Erskineville, which swallowed up the former in an attempt to improve public opinion of the suburb after a number of babies were killed by a couple, John and Sarah Makin in the late 1800s.

That is just one area where the use of AI is getting excessive. In the last 24 hours Google has announced that they are now going to summarise emails. For those of you who don’t already know, Adobe Acrobat attempts to summarise PDFs. Now I don’t know who needs to hear this but I, and many others are perfectly capable of reading and writing. We don’t actually need or want a robot to think for us. I’m capable of thinking for myself as well and there is no way in hell I would trust Google to judge what I would and wouldn’t find important in an email.

Then there’s the matter of privacy. If Google is summarising emails then that means their servers are holding onto private data against people’s will and using that data to train AI.

I get it though. There’s a bunch of tech bros who can’t communicate and plenty more who don’t even know how to read and write but I really don’t see how stopping people performing basic tasks such as reading and writing is actually helping anyone. If anything it is actually going to dumb people down even more and lead to a greater decline in literacy rates. A report from the ABC on the 14th of July 2025 shows that generally speaking, young men are less likely to read and older women are more likely to read. This could explain why tech bros are so obsessed with removing the need to read and write. Getting back to the statistics, statistics show that only 10.1% of males aged 15 - 24 read on any given day. That figure is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.  Gen Z teenage girls and young women were not far behind. On the other hand, 23% of Generation X read, compared to 12% of Generation X males. Across ALL age groups however women are more likely to read than their male counterparts.

Anna Burkey, president of book industry initiative Australia Reads told the ABC that part of the reason why boys and men have lower reading rates is because they don’t see themselves reflected. Well, I don’t know about you, but I would’ve thought the way to be reflected in these art forms was actually to participate in them rather than trying to completely obliterate them which is what these tech bros appear to be trying to do.

More alarmingly, 44% of Australians have literacy problems. Rather than relying on AI to solve something as basic as reading and writing, which just dumbs down future generations, wouldn’t it be better to actually educate people? Removing people’s need to read and write only harms the country generally speaking. There are grown adults in Australia who don’t even know the difference between he’s and his, as in words spelt he apostrophe s and h I s. They literally think these words have the same meaning. That’s just one example of Australians not knowing an English concept that is taught in primary school. The United States is not better than Australia, with 21% of Americans being illiterate.

What’s even more alarming is that literacy rates are actually declining. If people are not required to read and write for work those statistics will only drop further they will struggle with basic things such as filling out forms, finishing high school, completing university, accessing job training and building a progressive career. Ultimately that will affect their socio-economic positioning.

I’m getting sidetracked though, aside from the negative education and economic consequences of AI, there is also the consequence of not being able to access different views and information. How many times recently have you been doing a Google Search and you’re instantly struck with “AI Overview”. I don’t know about you but I find it so annoying. There is a way to avoid this though. When you search for something you can type the minus key followed by A I and you won’t get the AI overview so you’ll have the ability to view different websites rather than a summarised version, which may not even be correct.

Reading and writing aren’t the only areas that will suffer with a growing reliance on AI, so too will the arts, entertainment and customer service sectors. I’ll address each of those things separately.

More and more social media content is being generated by AI, which is damaging to the arts. There is no creativity that actually goes into creating it and there’s no heart. Most art is generated through lived experiences. While AI can technically create content that is consumed, it doesn’t have the same soul that art that is generated by humans does because it’s not a lived experience. Then there is the fact that a lot of content that is created by AI doesn’t actually make sense. The stories tend to jump around and don’t have any cohesion. While some people say that AI allows those who can’t create art to participate I would argue that they would be better to spend the time living, consuming REAL art created by humans and practicing their craft. That is the only way they will actually get better.

Over the last few months there has also been commentary about an AI actress being in a movie, as a performer myself I can 100% say that pixels on a screen with an artificial voice do not constitute being an actress. Only someone with human emotions can be considered an actress or a musician. The same applies to writing. Only someone who writes themselves can be considered a writer. I really want to know why the arts are being specifically targeted by these tech bros and why people are trying to erase the arts.

The other thing that is suffering because of the increasing reliance on AI is customer service. How many times have you contacted a company to try and get an issue resolved only to be hit with an AI Chatbot? Here’s the thing. If the problem could be solved by a computer do these companies not think that we would have tried to do that first. Sending a message and forcing people to be in an endless loop with a chatbot is no substitute for human customer service.

People need to reject the increasing attempts by tech companies to kill the arts by refusing to use their services. I know I for one thing will never use the likes of Chat GPT, Gmail’s summarise feature or Google search’s AI overview. I would rather look at a range of sources to get the information I require and I would rather write myself than have a computer do it for me. These companies trying to force AI on us will soon go out of business if they don’t stop trying to force their AI garbage on us.