Man using Laptop With AI, Artificial Photo / 123rf
Some of Ellen Rugaber’s high school teachers allow students to use artificial intelligence for schoolwork, but she prefers not to.
“It’s part of growing up to learn how to do your own work,” said the 16-year-old, who attends school in Arlington, Virginia.
She doesn’t want to off-load her thinking to a machine and worries about the bias and inaccuracies AI tools can produce, she said.
Abstaining from using AI makes Rugaber one of the few students at her school with strong viewpoints on the technology, she said.
Beyond campus, she has company.
As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back.
Some tech workers told the Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp.
Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.
For some creatives and small businesses, shunning AI has become a business strategy.
Graphic designers are placing “not by AI” badges on their works to show they’re human-made while some small businesses have pledged not to use AI chatbots or image generators.
Across industries and use cases, AI abstainers said it’s getting harder - or is impossible - to opt out.
Tech companies are constantly adding new AI features to smartphones, office software and other products.
Some companies require or strongly encourage staff to use AI tools to get work done. Several tech workers spoke on the condition of anonymity in part because being critical of AI could hurt their standing at work.
Many people find AI tools helpful or interesting. ChatGPT has more than 800 million users each week, according to OpenAI.
Those trying to avoid AI share a suspicion of the technology with a wide swathe of Americans.
According to a June survey by the Pew Research Centre, 50% of US adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in everyday life, an increase from 37% in 2021. The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.
Michael, a 36-year-old software engineer in Chicago who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name out of fear of professional repercussions, uses DuckDuckGo as his primary search engine, in part because he can turn off its AI features more easily than he can with Google.
He routinely disables them for every app he uses - a task becoming more complex as tech companies embrace AI.
“It feels like a con to me,” Michael said of the explosion of AI features in a phone interview.
He’s concerned about the toll on the environment from data centres behind AI products and thinks the technology is primarily a boon to “venture capitalists’ valuation portfolios and not a tool that most people benefit from”.
He also worries about how companies will use information he types into a chatbot.
Many AI abstainers cited the technology’s potential for errors.
A 40-something government worker in California, who analyses statistical data for a federal agency and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing his job, said top managers have been pushing staff to use ChatGPT.
He feels the stakes are too high to experiment with a tool that might make mistakes.
If a federal dataset contained made-up information from an AI chatbot, the worker said, “immediately our credibility would be shot, and it’s very hard to earn back that trust from the public”.
Another federal worker, who handles sensitive intelligence and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he’s not authorised to speak publicly, said he gets concerned when junior colleagues turn to ChatGPT to understand government regulations.
“They should be actually reading the regulations in full to understand the nuance,” the worker said.
This worker said he avoids using his agency’s internal AI chatbot because he worries about the legal consequences if he shared incorrect material with foreign partners.
It takes him longer to do his work without the automated tool, he said, but the peace of mind is worth it.
Some people just don’t see a need to use AI.
Jacob Sears, a 31-year-old who works for a mental health non-profit in Fairbanks, Alaska, feels inundated by AI wherever he goes.
AI-generated images and videos populate his social media feed, productivity tools from Google and Microsoft try to predict the next word he’ll type and the graphic design platform Canva nudges him to create an AI-generated image.
“It does really feel like it’s being shoved down my throat,” Sears said.
“I’m not seeing any convincing reason to use it. I can type my own email quicker than I can tell a chatbot what to say.”
Sears has tried to turn off AI features wherever he can.
Despite their personal views, Sears and other workers said they can’t fully avoid AI, because their offices rely on productivity tools powered by the technology.
A 2025 Gallup survey found that 27% of white-collar workers reported frequently using AI at work, up from 15% since 2024.
People in finance, technology and professional services were more likely to be frequent users of AI.
Some people find AI can harm productivity at work.
Michael, the Chicago software engineer, said that GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot system reviews all changes to his employer’s code but recently produced a review that was completely wrong. He had to had correct and document its errors, Michael said.
“That actually created work for me and my co-workers,” he said. “I’m no longer convinced it’s saving us any time or making our code any better.”
He also has to correct errors made by junior engineers who are encouraged to use AI to generate code, Michael said.
It’s difficult to speak up about such problems. “It’s become more stigmatised to say you don’t use AI whatsoever in the workplace. You’re outing yourself as potentially a Luddite,” Michael said.
Workers in several industries told the Post they were concerned that junior employees who leaned heavily on AI wouldn’t master the skills required to do their jobs and become a more senior employee capable of training others.
Some young people are making a conscious effort to avoid becoming dependent on AI.
Elias Gondwana, a 20-year-old studying plant and animal biology at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, said he finds it puzzling when fellow students rely on AI.
“It seems counterintuitive to be going to university to learn as much as you can, and skipping over the most interesting parts of learning something - or at least the parts that lead to developing interesting skills,” Gondwana said.
Gondwana said he thinks it’s important to cultivate the patience, communication skills and creativity that are by-products of learning new things.
If he were to ask a chatbot rather than reading a text, asking a question of his professor or doing research himself, his brain wouldn’t “get everything that it could out of still being malleable”, Gondwana said.
While many corporations are heavily invested in AI, some small businesses are purposefully eschewing it.
Last month a music venue in Oakland announced it would no longer accept artists’ flyers for shows if they had been made with AI tools.
“As an independent alt venue we feel the poster art for a show has always been an essential part of the creative process of live shows. It’s like the album cover of the night,” Thee Stork Club said in a September 9 Instagram post. Creating poster art with AI is “not very punk”, it said.
The response to the policy has been “overwhelmingly positive”, Billy Joe Agan, one of Thee Stork Club’s co-owners, said in a recent phone interview.
Graphic artists from all over the country have since asked to join the club’s roster of poster creators, he said.
Some artists and designers have adopted a logo to signal that their content is primarily human-made.
Maciej Harabasz and his partner recently published an adult colouring book of mandala designs and included on the back cover two badges that said: “not by AI”.
Harabasz, who is 43 and lives in Britain, hopes the badges get people thinking more critically about the books, images, and videos they consume.
AI-generated content is “pretty on the outside but empty on the inside”, Harabasz said. “The humanity isn’t there.”
Allen Hsu, a 38-year-old user experience designer in Philadelphia, came up with the “not by AI” badges two years ago as a way to “celebrate human authenticity”.
Anyone can use them as long as they pledge that at least 90% of their work was human-made, Hsu said.
Hsu is not completely against AI. One of his project’s goals is to encourage humans to keep creating so that AI systems will have fresh material to train on.
Unless some people opt to make art without AI help, he reasons, the quality of content made by future AI tools “will be poor”.
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