I want to say something about artificial intelligence’s intrusion into life. Because the emerging technology is rapidly changing since public awareness of it increased a few years ago, whatever I might say seems unlikely to persist in relevance for long. For now, people I know reject it as something of value. Evidence is everywhere.

May commencements brought a share of public derision. Speakers were being booed after bringing up AI and touting its benefits, notably former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive. Graduates face a difficult labor market, and a technology that could make it more difficult to find a job was neither welcome nor news.

There is a lot to hate about Schmidt, but who is Gloria Caulfield? She comes from the Lake Nona development world, a 17-square-mile, master-planned smart city and innovation hub in Orlando, Florida. To her, AI and related innovation represent modernization, economic growth, and future competitiveness. She thought her speech was relevant, yet graduates in media, arts, and communications heard another warning that the professions they trained for may become more unstable. No wonder they booed.

Among problems encountered by recent college graduates are that their work internships are not turning into jobs as employers don’t accept that as experience. The use of resume scanners instead of a human is off-putting. The struggle to talk to a human at a prospective employer creates uncertainty. In addition, there are fewer jobs out there. Entry level positions are viewed as most likely targets of AI-driven automation. These things put together create stress in graduating seniors. AI is simply one more thing.

When I’m working at my desk I have a Twitch stream on in the background. The community is more than five years old with a good group of regulars I’ve gotten to know, some of them in real life. To a person, they are not fans of artificial intelligence. When the chat turns to AI, rejection is immediate. There are reasons for that, although the discussion never gets to them.

In part, this cohort spent years adapting to unstable working conditions. They are well-versed in the digital world, and a bit weary of yet another technology purporting to make their lives better when so many new technologies did not fulfill their hype and promise. They lived through outsourcing, remote work transitions, automation, software churn, layoffs, and constant demands to retrain or rebrand themselves professionally. AI is yet another source of volatility in the job market, yet another skills race with no certain outcome, and one more way to jimmy-jack the job market to the advantage of business interests.

My Twitch cohort is mostly of digital natives likely to have played Oregon Trail in school computer labs, and first experienced the internet by loading a disk into their home computer to access by dial-up on a phone line. They have seen it all and the commercial nature of AI represents nothing special. They are tired of the next new thing.

Why don’t I like it? The theft, mainly.

In October 2025, my blog got a dramatic increase in number of views from a single source. By dramatic, I mean in September the view count was 2,800, and October was 51,335. Most of these views took place from Oct. 7-9, or roughly 12 views per minute on average. The views were of individual posts going back to the first still existing online. Obviously a machine was doing this “viewing.” To what end, I don’t know, but I suspect AI training.

A local used bookseller reported a surprising number of recent online purchases of obscure books, to the tune of 500 orders per week. They feared the worst, that the purchasing was algorithm driven to acquire the books, tear off the covers, scan the pages for AI, and then discard them. In aggregate, taking millions of used books out of the marketplace. The Washington Post recently ran a story about this operation. This is a clear intrusion into what many of us believe are social norms—people buy books to read and cherish them. It represents AI theft.

I use artificial intelligence almost daily, mostly through Google’s Gemini which is now embedded into the search function. I also use ChatGPT for more complex questions. Both provide responses quickly but I find half of them problematic, or more simply said, they are garbage. Crappy work product makes AI just one more suspect opinion in a society where there is a lot of that going around.

Likely a machine designed the rollout of artificial intelligence to more public use. As is typical, the machines missed the human factor, which is another reason to boo.