Less A, More I: a zine on the importance of thinking critically about AI

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a stick of zines with the title "A zine on the importance of thinking critically about AI"

This zine collects some of the perspectives that have been helpful to me as I, like everyone else, navigate this historical moment and the rise of chatGPT, claude, gemini, and all the other ones. Personally, I am critical and deeply suspicious of these “tools,” and the pullquotes/links below point in the direction of why.

That does not mean, however, that “I think if you use chatGPT you’re a bad person” or whatever absolutist hot take someone might read into it. These tools have become normal to a lot of us, and part of my argument here is that it’s worth thinking critically about that, and that normal doesn’t have to mean inevitable.

And while it’s important for everyone, in every field, to have these kinds of conversations, I also want to be clear about whom this zine is for. I think of a spectrum:

  • On one end of the spectrum: If you’re like, a radiologist or an astrophysicist or whatever, and you use some kind of AI tools to comb through data, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. The term “AI” has come to mean a range of things; this zine is more about the consumer-facing LLMS and gen AI tools.
  • On the other end of the spectrum: As a writer, as an artist, I do not ever use any AI tools, for any reason, at any part of the process. Not for idea generation, or outlining, or making promo flyers for events, or answering emails, or even writing alt-text for images. I do all that myself, because I believe we grow by doing. Even the boring stuff (especially the boring stuff) makes me a better writer.
  • In the middle: Should a busy single parent use a chatbot to help meal plan for the week? Should a teacher use an AI assistant to to organize their thoughts into a potential lesson plan? Should you use a gen AI tool to write a difficult email to a co-worker, or an essay for a class you don’t care about? I am not here to tell anyone what to do, or shame anyone for their choices. The title here refers to “thinking critically” about how we use these tools, and that’s the key point: even when there are pros, there are cons too. Even in “innocent” use cases, these tools are not neutral. Even when they’re free, we are paying for them.

As writer John Scalzi put it: I don’t know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about “AI” to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying “Well actually fire is used to make bread” when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their [expletive] houses.

Where can I get a copy!? I’ll have (free!) copies of this zine with me at my next gig: the launch for Witness: Poems to Address the Past, Present, and Future of Policing. That’ll be Tuesday, September 1, 2026 at the New City Center in Minneapolis (3104 16th Ave S) at 7pm. More info.

Want to print, fold, and share your own copies?

Here is the full text; actually the “fuller” text since this includes even more quotes, links, and resources that didn’t fit in the physical zine.

Less A, More I: Quotes and Perspectives

When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse. 
– Tressie McMillan Cottom, from a live conversation at Urban Consulate in Detroit (referenced in Marisa Kabas’ Refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism)

I don’t write because it’s fun (though sometimes it is.) I write because it feeds my spirit. It helps me unspool my thoughts and feelings in the hopes of helping others do the same. The process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose.
– Marisa Kabas, Refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism

I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. … I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
– Hayao Miyazaki, from NHK Special: Hayao Miyazaki — The One Who Never Ends

Young people are getting the message that ‘before long, AI will be able to do anything that they can do’ and that can lead them to think that there’s no point. Or to wonder: ‘What is the point of studying or making an effort?’ That’s why it’s especially important for them to know that AI cannot do the things that Silicon Valley is claiming.
– Ted Chiang, AI and art in college settings: Q&A with author Ted Chiang

AI systems that are called generative are truly regurgitative systems. And they’re regurgitating the hard work and the IP of artists from all around the world.
– Dr. Joy Buolamwini, interviewed on Dare to Lead

They’ve put a trillion dollars into A.I. right now. But I haven’t heard a single A.I. song that I like—and millions of people have made an A.I. song. If you could name an A.I. song you like, maybe. But think about all the artists they could have given a lifetime of money to.
– Boots Riley, interviewed in Director Boots Riley and George Clinton Disagree About the Future of A.I.

What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines. 
– Anthony Moser, I Am An AI Hater

The massive companies pushing ‘A.i.’ cannot be trusted on a moral and ethical level. They are run by billionaires who can manipulate the products to push disinfo or outright bigotry. Put their ‘A.i.’ in everything, and everything can become their megaphone for garbage.
– Greg Pak, I’m an “A.i.” abolitionist

People are coming together from all walks of life and realizing they have more in common around this issue… they’re saying, ‘This is not the future that we want. We want a future where we can breathe the air, we can drink the water, where we have jobs, where our kids have jobs, where we have a livable future.’
– Astra Taylor, interviewed in AI Data Center Resistance & Fighting ‘Billionaire Big Tech Agenda’

Indian Country is always a target for extractive industry. And what history has taught us is that anytime outside industry comes into Indian Country and has all these big promises of jobs, economic development, language revitalization, and all of these things—it tends to not work out for us. We are never the ones that truly benefit from that; we’re always the one that ends up having to sacrifice our relationship to land, air, water, our communities and our nonhuman relatives.
– Krystal Two Bulls, interviewed in ‘Data Colonialism’: Native Communities Fight AI Data Centers on Indigenous Land

Asking the question ‘who benefits from this?’ is what has created my criticism of AI and the companies pushing these models. As far as I can tell the proliferation of the technology mainly benefits the people making money off of it, whereas, say, a robust and fast train network would provide a lot more obvious benefits to working people in the country where I live.
– Gita Jackson, The Left Doesn’t Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited

The largest A.I. environment-ruining supercomputer is located next to a Black community outside Memphis, TN. You don’t have to ask A.I. why something so bad for the environment was built next to Black people. I can tell you why: racism. You also don’t have to ask A.I. who would want to own a racist supercomputer. I’ll tell you again: Elon Musk.
– W. Kamau Bell, A.I.? Not I.

A learner who would once have asked a friend or a teacher a complicated question is now asking AI. A writer who would once have gotten a friend’s feedback is now asking AI. People who would once have relied on a tutor, or study buddy, or a trained counselor for academic support are now asking AI. And it goes way beyond academics. People are using AI in place of therapists, in place of romantic partners, in place of friends… Isolation, while harmful to everyone, disproportionately harms groups with less power who need to stay in coalition and community to keep from losing their rights.
– Christiana Salah, PhD, Generative AI Is a Feminist Issue

This is the endgame of our isolation. Rather than throwing up barriers that make it harder to seek companionship and support in each other, we are being offered an artificial replacement for other people’s humanity, and for our own thoughts. We are being bundled away from one another and deskilled, as critical thinking atrophies or goes undeveloped in people who outsource their thought work to an autocomplete mechanism. Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. They want techno feudal subjects who will believe and do what they’re told. We, as people, are being strategically simplified. This is a fascist process.
– Kelly Hayes, Some Thoughts on Techno-Fascism

AI has demonstrated that it can do semi-compelling screensavers. That’s essentially that. The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it requires; it is how much you would risk to be in its presence.
– Guillermo del Toro, interviewed by the British Film Institute

Gen AI is Garbage. It is terrible for humanity and it is terrible for the environment. It kills jobs and it kills plants and animals. Also, it makes cursed, soulless garbage.
– Daniel Jose Older, NaNoHellNo

Good friends care about you because they love you. AI profits off your data. Good friends have healthy boundaries. AI surveils your every move. Good friends have good values. AI works with ICE to kidnap your neighbors. Good friends make the world a little brighter. AI wrecks the planet and causes droughts in poor communities. Good friends want you to be safe. AI encourages teenagers to kill themselves. You deserve good friends. AI is a bad friend.
– from a collection of autonomous anti-ai art at boycottai.noblogs.org

This shit is cooking the planet!!!! And our brains!!!!
– Ayo Edebiri

Even More Quotes/Readings that Didn’t Fit in the Zine

Art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies… Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
– Ted Chiang, Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

Through our resistance, we get to assert an alternative vision of humanity, one rooted in solidarity, collectivism and reciprocity — those wonderful features of humanity anathema to Silicon Valley, which they dismiss as “bugs.” Communing with others, bouncing ideas off of actual human beings, making connections across our beliefs and lived experiences, identifying points of tension and agreement, being wrong, very wrong, feeling upset, then elated, and finding enlightening moments of connection through a ballad of conversation – that is irreplaceable. If we are to succeed, this vision must be so irresistible as to form its own narrative of inevitability.
– Joseph Mogul, 10 reasons to resist AI

Generative AI is built on theft, having stolen the work of countless creatives… Numerous studies have documented AI’s harms to children, including reduced cognition, diminished mental health, and stunted social-emotional skills, while no independent study has demonstrated a durable benefit from AI in K–12 classrooms. On a societal level, AI is an inequity machine that subjects communities of color to surveillance, amplifies racial and gender biases, raises the utility bills of struggling families, and endangers everyone by exacerbating pollution, drought, and planet-warming carbon emissions.
– NYC Artists, Writers, and Creatives Call for a Moratorium on AI in Public Schools

This weekend I gave a presentation to a group of mostly college-aged folks and had a little line at the beginning of my slides that described it as an “AI-free presentation made by a human, for humans” and I had to pause for clapping at that part. It’s such a low-key resistance move but talking about not using AI, especially in a professional context, is so important in working against “inevitability” narratives and so powerful in identifying who your people are — and in ensuring there are more of us all the time.
– Andrea Grimes, from a BlueSky thread

They’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. And even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard.
– Hannah Einbinder, from a press conference promoting Hacks (direct link to video)

I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theater is: AI can’t do it. I couldn’t be less interested in computers and fake things. I like people. I like the way they smell, I like the way they talk, and I like the way they think. I think of AI as a plagiarizing mechanism. That’s all it is. I’m in open rebellion.
– Ethan Hawke, from an interview with CBS Sunday Morning

THERE IS A PRICE FOR CONVENIENCE AND BLACK AND BROWN [PEOPLE] WILL PAY THE BRUNT OF IT EVERY-TIME.
– SZA

Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life. And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn’t be a writer. Because you’re not writing. Go do something else… The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing.
– Seth Rogen, interviewed in Seth Rogen talks to Brut. about AI in Hollywood

I don’t use AI/LLMs/etc. for any purpose, as any part of my process. I write every poem, song, program outline, event blurb, email, slide deck, alt-text and photo caption myself (or in collaboration with other human beings).
– the brief anti-AI statement at guante.info, shared here in case anyone wants to adapt or re-use it on their own sites

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