By Alistair Mackay. Originally published by Daily Maverick (13 November 2025)
We’re allowed to resist AI – even if we’re told there’s nothing we can do about it.
I have a cap with the words “Please don’t talk to me about AI – I’ll kill myself” embroidered onto it. I wear it to go running and, by now, my friends know not to mention AI to me, but obviously it hasn’t worked to calm my anxieties. The dread persists. And yet we’re not allowed to be afraid of AI, everyone tells us, because “it’s here to stay”.
If I had a rand for every time someone has said that to me, I’d have… well, what’s the use of physical currency in a future where we live in a simulation?
I would just like to point out that when someone gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, we don’t say to them: ‘What’s the point of being afraid of death? It’s coming for you anyway.”
I think we’re allowed to be afraid, even if there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m allowed to think AI is genuinely malevolent and will cause humanity to go mad or destroy itself, even if I recognise that most people have acquiesced to it as “inevitable”. It isn’t inevitable, for the record. We go along with things and then, because we’ve gone along with them, they seem inevitable. But we could resist. We don’t have to go along with this. But if we resisted, we’d have to really put our backs into it. Complaining certainly isn’t going to stop what’s coming.
Now when I say AI I mean the large language models. I have nothing against AI being used in medical screening for improved disease recognition and prevention, for example, or for help with complex engineering problems – such as greener energy. If it can help us with intractable problems – great.
But the AI that generates books, essays, poems, video footage, movies, music? The AI that has just birthed the first “synthetic actress”? That does things people actually want to do, that they feel inspired by and passionate about… but it does them faster? The AI that feasts on our (stolen) cultural production and then remixes and reproduces it in such convincing ways that it seems new, and it seems like the real thing? I think we can all agree it’s unethical and very dangerous