My daughter thinks I’ve lost my mind.
She’s one of those people who will tell you, flatly, that she’s against AI. Doesn’t trust it. Thinks it’s a threat to creativity, to jobs, to the planet. And honestly? She’s not wrong about any of that. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But here’s the thing. While she’s making that argument, she’s probably doing it on Facebook. Or checking her Gmail. Or asking Siri to set a reminder. Or watching the third Netflix recommendation in a row that the algorithm picked specifically for her.
She’s not against AI. She’s against what she imagines AI is.
The Invisible Infrastructure
People think of AI as ChatGPT. They think of robots taking over, or some sci-fi scenario where the machines wake up and decide humans are the problem. That framing is convenient because it makes “being against AI” feel like a moral stance you can actually hold.
It isn’t. Not anymore.
AI has been running quietly underneath your daily life for years. Your bank’s fraud detection system flagged a weird charge on your card before you even noticed it. That’s machine learning. Your spam folder catches 99% of junk email without you lifting a finger. That’s been AI-driven for well over a decade. Google Maps knows there’s a wreck on I-85 and reroutes you before you’d ever see it. That’s AI.
The self-checkout at Walmart uses image recognition to identify what you put on the belt. Your iPhone organizes your photos by face and location without you asking it to. Your credit score is calculated by algorithms. Your insurance rate is influenced by them too.
This isn’t hypothetical future stuff. This is Tuesday.
Closer to Home Than You Think
A Gallup study asked Americans a simple question: have you used an AI-enabled product in the past week? Only 36% said yes. Then they asked about six specific products — navigation apps, streaming services, social media platforms, weather apps, virtual assistants, and online shopping. Ninety-nine percent said they’d used at least one of them. Eighty-three percent said they’d used at least four. Half the people who said they hadn’t used AI were actively using AI-powered products while saying so.
Let’s get local about it. You pull into the Chick-fil-A drive-through and the menu board has already shifted based on the time of day and what’s been selling. Some fast food chains have started piloting AI-assisted order-taking, so the voice you’re talking to may not be a teenager with a headset. It may never have been.
Call your insurance company or your cable provider. That automated menu that makes you want to throw your phone out the window? AI-powered voice recognition. It’s listening, categorizing your issue, and routing you before a human ever gets involved.
When you comment on a Facebook post and a business replies within 30 seconds, there’s a real chance that response was auto-generated. Social platforms now make it easy to set up AI responses that fire instantly. You’re having a conversation with a bot and nobody told you.
The point isn’t to make you paranoid. The point is that this technology is not some future thing you get to vote on. It’s already the water you’re swimming in.
The Concerns Are Real
Here’s where I’m going to say something that might surprise you coming from a guy who uses AI tools every day: the people raising alarms aren’t wrong.
Data centers are genuinely thirsty. A 2025 peer-reviewed study estimated that AI systems could be responsible for as much as 764 billion liters of water consumption this year alone. To put that in terms you can actually picture: researchers noted that figure is comparable to the entire global annual consumption of bottled water. Training large AI models consumes enormous amounts of water for cooling, and a lot of that infrastructure sits in places that can’t necessarily afford to give it up. That’s a real environmental cost, and it deserves real accountability from the companies building these systems.
Job displacement is happening. It’s not evenly distributed, and the people best positioned to adapt are not the ones most at risk. A copywriter or a paralegal or a customer service rep in Gastonia doesn’t have the same runway as a software engineer in Charlotte to pivot and retrain. That’s a serious societal problem that policy hasn’t caught up to yet.
The creative concerns matter too. There are legitimate questions about what it means for human creativity when machines can generate passable art, music, and writing on demand. Those questions don’t have easy answers.
I hold all of that. I’m not dismissing any of it.
But Here’s My Problem With the Defiance
The people who are most loudly anti-AI are often the ones living deepest inside AI systems without knowing it.
If you’re on Facebook, you’re feeding a machine learning system every time you like a post, pause on a photo, or skip past a video. Meta has been using AI to manipulate what you see and maximize how long you stay on the platform for years. If you’ve been on Facebook this decade, you’ve been a participant in one of the largest AI behavior experiments in human history. You just didn’t get a consent form.
Same with Google. Chrome, Gmail, Search, Maps. If you use any of those products, you are actively generating training data and benefiting from AI outputs simultaneously. There’s no asterisk on your account that says “AI-free user.”
X, formerly Twitter, runs on algorithmic curation. Spotify learns your taste and builds playlists around it. Amazon’s entire recommendation engine, the one that makes you buy things you didn’t know you needed, is AI through and through.
So the position of “I’m against AI” while doing all of that is a little like saying you’re against factory farming between bites of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. The stance might be sincere. The behavior tells a different story.
What I’ve Decided
I’m not here to tell you AI is good, actually, and everyone should relax. It’s more complicated than that.
What I’ve decided is that fighting the existence of this technology is not a productive use of my energy. The train left the station. It left a while ago, actually, and most of us were already on it without buying a ticket.
What seems worth fighting for is the stuff around it. Transparency about when you’re talking to a machine. Real regulation on environmental impact. Labor protections for the people whose jobs are being automated away. Corporate accountability when AI systems get it wrong, and they do get it wrong.
That’s a fight with actual stakes and actual outcomes.
“I’m against AI” as a lifestyle brand? That’s just yelling at the rain.
The better question is what we want the world to look like as this thing continues to develop, and whether we’re paying close enough attention to push it in the right direction. You can be skeptical and engaged at the same time. In fact, that’s probably the only approach that actually does any good.
My daughter might read this eventually. If she does: I still think you’re right about a lot of it. I just think the way you’re expressing it lets the actual bad actors off the hook.
David is a Gastonia-area resident who writes about local issues, civic life, and whatever else is on his mind at davidt2974.com.