I already knew AI was deeply uncool. Two grown men just proved it

A moment last week solidified for me that, when it comes to our relationship to AI, the toothpaste has exploded out of the tube.

I already had a sense that there was no going back when a friend held up his phone to show that he’d organised his lock screen to give the ChatGPT shortcut pride of place. No more digging around or waiting three seconds to open the devoted, people-pleasing tool that will not only give a quick response but also invent something that feels true-ish enough to not have him question it. It did the formulas he needed for work, he boasted, and could solve the mystery of what his favourite chef put in their mac and cheese that made it so delicious.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I tried arguing – it invents “facts”! Most mac and cheese recipes include gruyere! I once asked it for a list of famous black women in their 60s (to win an argument about a movie’s casting choices, and because I am very fun at parties) and it offered up octogenarian Diana Ross first! It relies on you not second-guessing its answers and that dissolution of basic, everyday critical thinking has been proven by Microsoft studies to leave people “atrophied and unprepared” to quite literally think for themselves! My arguments – like the warning signs about what the global uptake of AI tools is doing for the climate – fell on deaf ears.

But it wasn’t that interaction that did me in. Nor was it watching Adrien Brody accept a best actor Oscar last month for a performance bolstered by computer-generated voice cloning. Shockingly, I could also stomach witnessing the weekly, AI-generated visual assault doled out by my beloved football team on their social media accounts. (Turns out making cringe content that runs through data centres consuming more than 3 per cent of the world’s energy is even more embarrassing than finishing bottom of the ladder.)

No, it wasn’t any of that. The final nail struck last week, while I was smashing out an article at a cafe in the city, using my own fingers and brain like an absolute cavewoman, and sitting at the table next to me were two men who, I deduced through the art of eavesdropping, were former colleagues. One had just had headshots taken for his new gig, and tried to use an AI tool to get rid of a cold sore on his face. He showed his friend the result. “It gave me a whole new head!”

Both took out their phones and fired up the app, coming up with increasingly ridiculous scenarios to plug in. Here’s me in a dress! Look, it’s me in a police uniform! Two grown men draining natural resources to play virtual dress-ups with a tool they freely admit is bad at the thing they’re using it to do. Someone needs to do us all a favour and teach them to gossip about their colleagues instead so we can even hope to have a climate in 2050.

I’m no Luddite, but if my options are embracing or resisting this scenario, where deeply uncool tech swallows culture in one big gulp, I’d rather opt out. My monthly Microsoft Office subscription – the thing I use to be a human doing my human job to make money to live my human life – recently increased by 10 per cent so I could enjoy all the benefits of having its trained model do my work for me. On X, Elon Musk has continued his reign of Giving Products The Dorkiest Names Ever by calling the platform’s AI model, Grok. If the toothpaste is well and truly out of the tube on AI, I’d rather get halitosis.

We were promised a future of video calls and that wardrobe app which Cher uses in Clueless to pick her outfits in the morning. For the most part, those have been realised thanks to products like FaceTime and apps like Whering. But the tools that were supposed to save time are increasingly more prevalent and less valuable, as anyone who’s seen Gmail suggest that you reply, “Thanks for the update!” to a funeral invitation can attest.

Sure, I can press a few keys and see what I’d look like as an olde-timey shopkeeper if I wanted to – but I could also just go to Sovereign Hill or hire a graphic designer who knows how to do that (and will sign an NDA and promise to never tell). I could also ask why on earth I was spending my one and only life doing this, and perhaps instead check into a hospital. If we can’t reverse-course for the sake of the planet or an entire class of creative professionals, maybe the inherent uncoolness could be a motivating factor.

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