I have a long professional history of being more of an early tester than early adopter, staying on top of new developments in relevant technology as much as possible, while being very intentional about if and when and why I start actively using a specific tool (or platform) myself.
As a Gen Xer who grew up with the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, and self-published a newsletter in high school using The Newsroom and a dot-matrix printer, I entered the workforce during one of the more disruptive digital shifts. Back then, professional email was still relatively new, and many of my senior colleagues were still struggling to adjust to Windows 3.0, Word, and Excel.
Many years later, I fought in the Social Media Guru Wars, and during my DBW era I was often considered a contrarian for pushing back on the hype that ebooks were going to destroy traditional publishing while the iPad (aka the Jesus Tablet) was simultaneously going to save it. I can smell hype from a mile away and have a low tolerance for snake oil salespeople.
That’s why “I am not ‘anti-AI’… I am pro-craft.” is such an important distinction for me.
Healthy Skepticism is Healthy
As a “seasoned” marketing professional who’s primarily worked in and around the magazine and book publishing industries, I’ve seen myriad wannabe disruptors making bold claims — often blindly platformed by credulous media organizations and journalists who should know better but traded their credibility for clicks. The vast majority were objectively misguided “solutions” to problems they didn’t actually understand because the people behind them usually didn’t have any industry expertise, and they either quickly disappeared or pivoted a few times before eventually disappearing, too.
Pundits vs. practitioners is how I initially differentiated DBW back in the day, and I’ve found it’s still a useful reference point when evaluating “disruptive” new products and services fifteen years later.
As 2025 draws to a close, the “inevitable” hype around AI hasn’t slowed so it remains important to maintain an informed, healthy skepticism because the shills are everywhere — writing articles for industry publications, appearing on industry podcasts, and speaking at industry conferences, often with opaque disclosures and bold claims typically going unchallenged.
It’s also increasingly difficult to avoid using some of these overhyped tools yourself because they’re literally being shoved into everything, everywhere, all at once — whether or not it adds any actual value to end users — and often by default without any warning or transparency about how to disable them.
Is Resistance Futile?
Despite turning most “AI” features off whenever I can find their purposefully hidden and scattered options in a program’s settings, I still received a surprise email earlier this week with a transcript attached from a meeting I attended, courtesy of Gemini, which I’ve attempted to deactivate everywhere Google has let me. I was livid!
I’ve recently noticed in search that Google and Bing’s default AI summaries often include a prominent link to a primary source like Wikipedia while excluding them from the first page of organic results, which is almost definitely a ploy to boost their “engagement” metrics with AI summaries to claim widespread adoption. (Turning the browser’s URL bar into a search window was surely an engagement-jacking trick, too.) I now visit sites like Wikipedia and Reddit directly for relevant searches instead, and have shifted most general search queries to DuckDuckGo, especially on my phone.
The job market continues to be a nightmare as layoffs haven’t slowed and almost every marketing-related job listing I’ve seen is either for some random AI-related startup or a legacy company claiming some vague AI-first angle, or better yet, it requires “expertise” with tools that are still relatively new and objectively mediocre to anyone with actual marketing experience.
Meanwhile, actual expertise continues to be devalued across the board. Intellectual curiosity that helps develop that expertise is steadily being devalued in favor of “productivity” hacks. And my absolute favorite, AI “solutions” to problems that were created by previous non-AI “solutions” that also didn’t understand the original problem they claimed to solve. (eg, practically every sales and marketing automation tool you’ve ever heard of, along with every “content generation” platform.)
The “inevitability” narrative is formidable and relentless, and it might feel pointless to continue resisting and challenging the vague and mundane use cases for these tools when it seems like everyone else has given in — but that’s not true at all. There are plenty of smart people who are thinking, writing, and speaking critically about “AI” and engaging with their work is what keeps me informed and confident in my own continued resistance.
Seek those voices out. Read (or listen to) their work. Compare it to what you’re seeing in mainstream media or industry coverage. Unpack company executives’ big claims about AI’s benefits and potential and line it up with their actions. Always challenge pundits for specific examples.
More importantly, notice what isn’t being said? Which concerns are downplayed, if they’re addressed at all, and why?
Resistance is never futile. More importantly, it can be contagious.
PS: My wife has noted that my being so outspoken about AI hype might hamper future employment prospects and she’s probably right. I know my outspokenness about ebook hype definitely hurt me at times (I actually almost got fired from DBW at one point because of it!), and I assume that any company I might be interested in but doesn’t accept some level of healthy skepticism from employees wouldn’t be a good fit for me anyway, but… what if that’s EVERY company?
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Hooooo boy, do I hear you about the future employment stuff. And the conflation of “AI” with “automation”. I’m convinced that there’s very little there there, and it’s all an economy of FOMO and vibes. None of these valuations have ANY basis in ANY reality.
Where I work, we’ve got FOUR different AI models being thrust upon us. One is part of our data catalog; another is Co-pilot; a third is an in-house model trained on our data, which is relatively reliable; and a fourth is a new employee coaching model that we’re supposed to use for our self-evaluations. (My manager has pleaded with us not to use it, and I certainly don’t need to be told twice.)
Remember the ubiquity of blockchain 10 years ago? There’s always a technological fad that fades into the woodwork and becomes just another tool. But wow, do people love the new shiny.
I’m sorry I missed your AI meetup last week. Work has been kicking my ass this month with no relief in sight for another couple of weeks.
I’m lucky so far that I haven’t been forced to use any particular tools, but it’s an ever-present threat that makes past hype cycles seem quaint in comparison. Real dotcom bubble vibes, an experience I really don’t want to deal with again!
We recently had a mandatory ‘town hall’ time waster (over Zoom, at least), where the top exec crowed repeatedly about how they use ‘AI’ for everything! how it’s ‘the best assistant I never had’, and how we all need to make sure to use it ourselves for everything. While two other people–one sales, one, gog help us all, IT–also chimed in to agree on the “AI is wonderful” wagon, the deafening silence when we all were asked if we have ‘any questions’ about how to ‘integrate AI’ into our workflows, was awkward as hell. Three times the ‘offer’ was made, to silence. Meeting ended thirty seconds later.
A few people I am friends with away from work and I agreed that the question we really wanted to ask was whether there are *any* contingency plans (other than fire even more people and force whatever remains of the work force to do even more work–a note that my unit has lost 28% of our numbers in three years), for when the “AI is wonderful, essential, the best!” bubble bursts. We also agreed we need our jobs far too much to ask it.
Meanwhile, none of us use any of the tools the corporation pushes at us and, like you, we all do our best to deactivate or avoid what the other corporations keep forcing on us.
I’m thankful that I’m not in a corporate environment that’s pushing AI like that, but glad you’re finding space and moral support to resist as much as possible. The companies that are tying AI adoption to performance goals are the wildest ones! Not even measuring productivity, just forcing usage of the tools themselves. Bananas!