Why I don't use AI in 2025

I don’t use any AI on this site. I also use very little AI in any other part of my life, despite being someone who is interested in tech in 2025. Why?

Energy use

This is a big one for me. Not only do I care about the environment, I also have a slight obsession with doing things in an optimal or efficient way. AI isn’t either of these things in many situations.

Reports vary but AI search engines might use 10 times or even as much as 33 times as much energy as just searching something. I don’t think that I’m necessarily better than AI users in this regard - I do run a home server after all¹ - but I think it best if I don’t further add to my energy use.

At least anecdotally, Andreas over at 82MHz.net tried running a AI model locally on his laptop and it took over 10 minutes for just one prompt.

Reliability

AI has critical reliably and bias problems. It has made up court cases, told people to eat poisonous mushrooms, and said that the the first images of an exoplanet were taken by James Webb Space Telescope (the first picture of a planet outside our solar system was actually taken by Chauvin et al. back in 2004).

It may have got moderately better since these errors were reported but the fact remains that AI has no sense of truth, only things that seem like true statements. This means that the mistakes (or ‘hallucinations’) that it makes are often close to the truth or seem plausible. This makes them very hard to catch.

If I am putting words out publicly I want to make sure that they are factually correct. I could painstakingly check everything that the AI outputs, however I am very likely to miss things.

I am not perfect without AI but it would undoubtedly make my accuracy worse.

Ethical problems

Much of the criticism towards AI aims at the possible violation of copyright laws by large AI companies. The main discussion around this is whether creating a AI model from copyrighted is without getting permission from the copyright holders is allowed. This seems to be a complicated question and I’m not a lawyer so I can’t really comment on this.

Whilst I agree that it is a problem that large companies feel that they can ignore the law, I am aware that copyright law often doesn’t benefit consumers and artists who make “derivative works” - fanfiction, art of copyrighted characters and the like.

On the other hand, copyright law is meant to make sure that artists (and other creatives) can get paid when people use their work. Being paid is, of course, very important and it seems unfair that AI companies are making money off art and text that they didn’t put any effort into themselves.

Enjoyment

I write and code for myself as a hobby. Getting a machine to do it would take the fun out of it.

I also prefer writing code to debugging it, and using AI to code would likely lead to more debugging and less writing.

I don’t like it

I will be honest - part of the reason that I don’t use AI is because of its association with people like Musk, who I have a strong dislike of, as well as venture capital and people and companies previously involved in cryptocurrency scams.

AI output is often annoying when I come across it, such as in search engine optimised articles that don’t tell me the answer that I was looking for or terrible art.

This reason isn’t entirely logical given that I could probably find a model that wasn’t created by someone I disliked but it does nevertheless influence me. I think quite deeply about the tools that I use and AI has always seemed a bit too ‘sketchy’ to me.

Should you use AI?

Maybe. I might even use it myself in the future². AI definitely has use in data analytics including amazing things like AlphaFold, a neural network that has been used to predicted the structure of over 200 million proteins including most of those found in humans.

Regarding the use of AI in writing software, although I worry about the implications of developers not understanding a codebase, I am not a professional developer and there are people who seem more intelligent than me using it. I just don’t want to use it myself in this way.

I’m not going to say that using AI is always wrong, just that it should be thought carefully about and is not the best tool for every task.

Footnotes