Maybe trying to be objective is the wrong choice here? After all, it might sound preachy to those who are ignorant to the dangers of AI. Instead, it could be better to stay subjective in hopes to trigger self-reflection.

Here are some arguments I would use for my own personal 'defense':

• I like to do the work by myself because the challenge of doing it by my own is part of the fun, especially when I finally get that 'Eureka!' moment after especially tough ones. When I use AI, it just feels halfhearted because I just handed it to someone else, which doesn't sit right with me.
• when I work without AI, I tend to stumble over things that aren't really relevant to what I'm doing, but are still fun to learn about and might be helpful sometimes else. With AI, I'm way too focused on the end result to even notice that stuff, which makes the work feel even more annoying.
• when I decide to give up or realize I can't be arsed with it, I usually seek out communities or professionals, because that way it's either done professionally or I get a better sense of community, but overall feel like I'm supporting someone. With AI, I don't get that feeling, but rather I only feel either inferior for not coming up with a result as fast as the AI does or frustrated because it either spews out bullshit or doesn't get the point I'm aiming for.

If you want to explain your reasons 'in good faith' you should be honest, and not adopt other people's reasons to argue the position you've already assumed.

A discussion in good faith means treating the person you are speaking to with respect. It means not having ulterior motives. If you are having the discussion with the explicit purpose of changing their minds or, in your words, "alarming them to take action" then that is by default a bad faith discussion.

If you want to discuss with a pro-AI person in good faith, you HAVE to be open to changing your own mind. That is the whole point of a good faith discussion - but rather, you already believe you are correct, and are wanting to enter these discussions with objective ammunition to defeat somebody.

How do you actually discuss in good faith? You ask for their opinions and are open to them, then you share your own in a respectful manner. You aren't trying to 'win' you are just trying to understand and in turn, help others to understand your own POV.

“It’s a machine made to bullshit. It sounds confident and it’s right enough of the time that it tricks people into not questioning when it is completely wrong and has just wholly made something up to appease the querent.”

I'm just honest about it… "I don't find it useful enough and do find it too harmful for the environment and society to use it"

In a way aren't you asking "how can I be an AI vegan, without sounding like an AI vegan"?

It's OK to be an AI vegan if that's what you want. :)

Very simple.

It's imprecise, and for your work, you'd like to be sure the work product you're producing is top quality.

All current AIs are based on stolen content.

What are some good reasons why AI is bad?

There are legitimate reasons people worry about AI. Here are some of the strongest, clearly framed concerns:

1. Bias and unfair decisions

AI systems often learn from biased data and can unintentionally discriminate—against certain races, genders, ages, or socioeconomic groups—in hiring, lending, housing, policing, and more.

2. Lack of transparency

Many AI models act as “black boxes,” making decisions that are hard to explain. This creates problems when the stakes are high (medical diagnosis, legal decisions, etc.).

3. Privacy risks

AI can analyze huge amounts of personal data, track behavior, or identify people through facial recognition—often without explicit consent.

4. Job displacement

Automation threatens certain categories of work, particularly routine or repetitive jobs. Without proper planning, this can increase inequality and unemployment.

5. Misinformation and deepfakes

AI makes it easier to create convincing fake audio, video, or text. This can undermine trust in media, fuel propaganda, and destabilize democratic processes.

6. Weaponization

AI can be used in autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, targeted surveillance, or manipulation—raising serious security and ethical issues.

7. Overreliance and loss of human skills

As AI does more tasks, people may become too dependent, reducing critical thinking, creativity, or expertise in certain fields.

8. Concentration of power

Powerful AI tools tend to be controlled by a few big companies or governments, potentially leading to monopolies, inequality, and reduced individual autonomy.

9. Alignment and control risks

Advanced AI systems may behave in unexpected or harmful ways if their goals aren’t perfectly aligned with human values—even without malicious intent.

10. Environmental impact

Training large AI models consumes significant energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions.

If you want, I can also provide reasons why AI is good, help you construct an argument for a debate, or analyze specific risks more deeply.

Were you looking for this kind of reply? If you can't express why you have an opinion maybe your opinion is not well founded in the first place. (Not saying it's wrong, just that it might not be justified/objective.)

I want my creations to be precisely what I intend to create. Generative Ai makes it easier to make something at the expense of building skills and seeing their results

and also alarming enough for them to take action.

Is this really an intent to explain in good faith? Sounds like you're trying to manipulate their opinion and actions rather than simply explaining yourself.

If someone was to tell me that they simply don't want to use generative AI, that they prefer to do writing or drawing by hand and don't want suggestions about how to use various AI tools for it, then I just shrug and say "okay, suit yourself."

just say that you don't want to use it. why are you trying to figure out good reasons that somebody else came up with to not use something you have to elect to use in the first place? just say "I don't want to use genAI". you don't need to explain yourself any further than that.

"There are emerging studies about AI induced psychosis[1], and there is a possibility to go psychotic even if one doesn't have pre-conditions to become one. I would like to be cautious with the danger, like with cigaretes or Thalidomide. You never know how it might be dangerous."

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19218

I just mentioned to a friend of mine why I don't use AI. My hatred towards AI strives from people making it seem sentient, the companies business model, and of course, privacy.

First off, to clear any misconception, AI is not a sentient being, it does not know how to critical think, and it's incapable of creating thoughts outside from the data it's trained on. Technically speaking, a LLM is a lossy compression model, which means it takes what is effectively petabytes of information and compresses it down to a sheer 40Gb. When it gets uncompressed it doesnt uncompress the entire petabytes of information it uncompresses the response that it was trained from.

There are several issues I can think of that makes the LLM do poorly at it's job. remember LLM's are trained exclusively on the internet, as large as the internet is, it doesn't have everything, your codebase of a skiplist implementation is probably not going to be the same from on the internet. Assuming you have a logic error in your skiplist implementation, and you ask chatGPT "whats the issue with my codebase" it will notice the code you provided isn't what it was trained on and will actively try to fix it digging you into a deeper rabbit hole then when you began the implementation.

On the other hand, if you ask chatGPT to derive a truth table given the following sum of minterms, it will not ever be correct unless heavily documented (IE: truth table of an adder/subtractor). This is the simplest example I could give where these LLMs cannot critical think, cannot recognize pattrrns, and only regurgitate the information it has been trained on. It will try to produce a solution but it will always fail.

This leads me to my first point why I refuse to use LLMs, it unintentionally fabricates a lot of the information and treat it as if it's true. When I started using chatGPT to fix my codebases or to do this problem, it induced a lot of doubt in my knowledge and intelligence that I gathered these past years in college.

The second reason why I don't like LLMs are the business models of these companies. To reiterate, these tech billionaires make this bubble of delusions and fearmongering to get their userbase to stay. Titles like "chatGPT-5 is terrifying" or "openAI has fired 70,000 employees over AI improvements" they can do this because people see the title, reinvesting more money into the company and because employees heads are up these tech giants asses will of course work with openAI. It is a fucking money making loophole for these giants because of how many employees are fucking far up their employers asses. If I end up getting a job at openAI and accept it, I want my family to put me into a god damn psych ward, that's how much I frown on these unethical practices.

I often joke about this to people who don't believe this to be the case, but is becoming more and more a valid point to this fucked up mess: if AI companies say they've fired X amount of employees for "AI improvements" why has this not been adopted by defense companies/contractors or other professions in industry. Its a rhetorical question, but it makes them conclude on a better trajectory than "the reason X amount of employees were fired was because of AI improvement"

What do you normally say that you're worried sounds like an "Ai vegan"?

You'd rather make your own painting than fill in a coloring book?

What is an “extremist view” in this context? Kill sam Altman? Lmao

Welcome to the world of being an activist buddy. Vegans are doing it for a living being with consciousness. Your cause is just too, imo, but just like the vegan who feels motivated and justified in bringing up their views because, to them, it’s a matter of life and death you will be belittled and mocked by those who either genuinely disagree or who do recognize the issues you describe but do not have the courage or self control to change

Start with speaking when it’s relevant. Note that this will not always win you fans. I recently spoke to my physician on this issue, who asked for consent for LLM transcription of audio session notes and automatic summarization. I am not morally opposed to such a thing for health care providers but I had many questions: how are records transmitted, stored, destroyed, does the model use any data fed into it or resultant summaries for seeding/reinforcement learning/refinement/updating internal embeddings/continual learning (this point is key bc the language I’ve seen about this shifts a lot, but basically do they feed your data back into the model to refine it further or do they have separate training and production models that allow for one to be “sanitary”), does the AI model come from the EMR provider (often Epic) or a 3rd party and if so is there a BAA, etc

In my case my provider could answer exactly 0 (zero) of these so I refused consent and am actively monitoring to ensure they are continuing to not use it at subsequent appointments. They are a professional so they’ve remained professional but it’s created some tension. I get it; I work in healthcare myself and I’ve seen these tools demoed and have colleagues that use them. They save a fairly substantial amount of time and in some cases they even guarantee against insurance clawbacks, which is a tremendous security advantage for a healthcare provider. But you gotta know what you’re doing and even then you gotta accept that some people simply will be against it on principle, thems the breaks

Here’s a piece I wrote to explain my apprehensive stance on AI to friends and colleagues: https://blog.erlend.sh/non-consensual-technology

Depending on how hardcore you are about it, you can't.

Are you getting up in people's face to tell them not to use it, or are you answering why you choose not to use it?
Are you extremely strict in your adherence? Or are you more forgiving based on the application or user?

There are two general points I like to make:

1. Big companies are using it to steal the work of the powerless, en masse. It is making copyright strictly the tool of the powerful to use against the powerless.
2. If these companies aren't lying and will actually deliver what they say they're going to deliver in the timeline they stated, then it's going to cause mass unemployment, because even if (IF) this creates new jobs for every job it destroys, the market can't move fast enough to invent these new careers in the timeline described. So either they're lying or they're going to cause great suffering, and a massive increase in wealth inequality.

Energy usage honestly never seems to be a concern for people, so I don't even try to make that argument.

What is your viewpoint?
Mine, for example, is that not only I don't need it at all but it doesn't offer anything of value to me so I can't think of any use for it.

"it looks like shit from a butt and sounds like shit from a butt, and if I wanted to look at a shit from a butt, I would do that for free"