Sean Boots has a name for his choice to avoid generative AI: "Generative AI vegetarianism." In a March 11 blog post, he explains that he turns off every optional AI feature he can find. He disables Copilot in his office suite and Gemini on his phone. Apple Intelligence stays off on his laptop. He doesn't use ChatGPT or Claude. He also avoids consuming or sharing AI-generated content from others. But he still uses spellcheck. He still listens to algorithmically recommended playlists. He's fine with spam detection and facial recognition in Google Photos. What matters to him is where the tools come from. Generative AI, built on massive scraped datasets to predict text and images, is where he draws the line.
His reasons are specific. Bernie Sanders says AI billionaires are building a surveillance state and coming for your job. The erosion of critical thinking and creative skills. The destruction of writing, illustration, and music as viable professions. Corporate power concentration. Exploitative labor in developing countries. Environmental costs. Boots also flags vendor lock-in risks and what he calls "accountability sinks," where harmful decisions get hidden behind AI outputs. "I want to write my own emails," he writes. "I want to learn and think and ponder with other humans, not with a text-prediction system built by consuming all the text on the internet."
The concept caught traction on Hacker News, where commenters debated the vegetarianism label and noted a Hacker News thread collecting forgotten AI scandals and noted a quiet trend of experienced professionals opting out or doing bare-minimum compliance with workplace AI mandates. Commercial infrastructure for this stance is growing too. The C2PA standard, backed by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative, embeds cryptographic metadata in digital files to verify human authorship. Spotify now lets artists flag AI usage in tracks, while platforms like Cara have built audiences by marketing themselves as AI-free zones with anti-scraping protections.
Boots isn't claiming moral superiority. He jokes that he's "not a generative AI vegan" and says he's not interested in judging people who find these tools useful. But his framing captures something real. More people are making deliberate, daily choices to sit out the generative AI wave, having decided the costs aren't worth it.