We Need to Talk About AI

 

You just know I’ve got a lot of opinions about this – I just hope it’s going to be as cathartic for you as it is for me!

Let’s start with a little pro’s and con’s list, for the sake of fairness…

PROS

CONS

It’s convenient It unlocks skills you wouldn’t otherwise have It makes services free that you’d otherwise have to pay for It’s fast Specialist AI use in scientific research advance healthcare, weather predictions etc

It’s rapidly depleting drinkable water resources globally, whilst the climate crisis gives us droughts and wildfires, we really need our water. We die without it. It’s extremely energy-hungry & providing that energy is contributing to the ever-quickening climate emergency. The huge energy usage is subsidised by governments by actually increasing your household bills (it's true, look it up!) It requires large data centres. The materials used for those data centres are being rapidly bought up, raising the cost of metals, SD/HDD and other computer parts for the average shopper The data centres are LOUD, run 24/7 and are coming to a neighbourhood near you (unless we fight planning permissions & boycott AI) AI is trained on large data sets. YOUR data sets. Every time you post online, watch on netflix, type into your phone, text your mum, use google maps, use that funny face filter – that data gets saved and fed to AI to train it. Oh I almost forgot to mention this part – the NHS is also giving your data to AI companies. Fun. Anyone, anywhere can make deepfakes of you using free AI software, including your voice. AI is trained on the intellectual property of writers, visual artists, graphic designers, musicians, photographers, models and everything you can think of. Millions of hard-working people are losing their jobs to AI. It’s not accurate. People are getting psychosis from using AI chatbots. AI will kill you and it will even offer to write your suicide note for you, very helpful. It rots your brain. Did I mention it’s not even accurate?

Okay, now that’s out of the way – you might have noticed that the case for the use of AI in daily life is overwhelmingly bad and if you guessed that I’m firmly against the use of AI in all aspects of life except for specially trained AI models used by scientists then you’d be correct.

There’s many directions I could take this blog in, like “why is it being pushed on us for free then if it’s so bad?” and then meander into the social & political implications of a society who has out-sourced its critical thinking to robots...but honestly who’s got the time. I’m a jeweller, so let’s talk running a small jewellery business without AI and the new and horrifying exciting challenges it brings.

Every piece of software is slowly replacing its features with AI. Canva used to remove backgrounds from images without using AI but now it does, Shopify keeps prompting me to write product descriptions using artificially generated slop, and my email provider kept trying to smart-organise my emails by reading them first.

It’s far-from impossible to avoid using AI in the modern day but it’s getting really annoying having it slapped in my face every time I try to do some work because the same handful of tech giants own every piece of software the world runs on.

I’ve almost completely (it’s an ongoing project) divested from big tech companies in my personal life because I’m sick of it, but also because I don’t want them to train their AI models on any more of my data. I’ve switched Windows for Linux, gmail for Proton, Microsoft Office for LibreOffice, Google for DuckDuckGo & Iron Fox and even my switched smartphone for a phone that operates on GrapheneOS – a hardened operating system that’s privacy based and Google-free. I do run a small business though which means using Instagram (& co) and Shopify, so I’ve had to make hard-considered compromises there but it’s been a really interesting journey for data sovereignty fuelled largely by dread and a healthy dose of spite.

I’m in the process of putting together a guide to demystify this journey for other small business owners who want to tell Big Tech™ to shove AI up their arses too so stay tuned for that.

But also..

Did you notice that part where I said Shopify keeps prompting me to write product descriptions using AI? I also keep getting Instagram ads for a company who will use photos of my jewellery and generate images of conventionally attractive women modelling it for me. Assuming the product descriptions make sense, are accurate, and the models have the correct amount of fingers & teeth, that’s quite an attractive proposition is it not? I spend countless hours – days even – taking & editing photos, writing listings, SEO & uploading them to my website. I spend money paying a photographer to shoot gorgeous photos – and AI could just do it for me for free and in a fraction of the time so why shouldn’t I?

Other jewellers and small business are certainly taking up the offer. Editing their photos using AI, generating them entirely, generating SEO & copy, even replying to their web queries using chatbots.

It puts me in a really difficult position actually, because now businesses can use all these “free” AI tools, software & assistants to do so much of their work for them, free up a huge portion of their time and save money so how can I compete with them if I refuse to join them? Won’t I be “left behind” like we’ve been threatened?

No; and let me tell you why.

It’s because AI isn’t free. We pay an enormous price for it – far bigger than we can even contemplate. We pay the price with our clean water, our collapsing glaciers, our wildfires. We pay for it with diminishing data privacy, cognitive decline and deepfake scams. That photographer you didn’t hire pays for it by not earning a living wage. Your translator mate pays for it by losing their job to AI slop that can’t understand context or nuance and your graphic designer just paid for it when they got laid off in favour of fucking Claude.

And do you know who can’t afford to buy your handmade goods any more? It’s all the people who can’t find a job because chatbots took over their customer service roles, LLMs took over software developer roles, or jobs in the arts.

I refuse to give in to AI “convenience. I don’t want to outsource my brain & creativity. I don’t want to be responsible for my mates losing their jobs. I don’t want to contribute to the climate emergency any more than living in the modern world already does.

I want to make things with my hands. I want to chose my own words, clumsily and with typos and grammatical errors. I want my mate to get hired for that illustration job they desperately want. I want us to keep our humanity.

(And I never want to see another AI generated event flyer again in my life.)

I may as well sign off by saying this with my full chest, fuck AI.

~ Riley x

 

An afterthought – I didn’t even mention the AI generated videos I’ve seen on Instagram of fake jewellers making fake jewellery to sell drop-shipped jewellery that (probably) contains dangerous levels of toxic metals.

[If you would like the AI Free badge I made (at the top of this page) or the circular one I have on the scrolling banner on my website footer, you can get them in the FREE DOWNLOADS SECTION. I made them for both light and dark backgrounds and they're free of charge.]

 

A petition I found during my research:

https://protectthewild.org.uk/no-to-data-centres-yes-to-wildlife/

 

Sources:

https://www.theanimalreader.com/2026/07/10/how-ai-data-centers-are-affecting-wildlife/

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-noise-pollution-concernsabout-data-centers

https://www.internetsafetystatistics.com/how-ai-impacts-online-privacy/

https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/surveillance/your-data-training-ai-without-consent/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-psychosis-mechanisms-clinical-risks-and-safety-considerations-in-generative-ai-chatbots/04B53C8C3E11C7B4B0DC7E665B6A317A

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

https://thedailyperspective.org/article/2026-03-01-ai-still-cant-add-up-new-tests-reveal-persistent-math-failures-in-top-models-c1aada97