My Opening Farewell to AI Loathers

The future belongs to the curious, not the certain.

Half the room hated me already. I had just asked a simple question at a conference packed with data visualization experts—the kind of people who design charts for the biggest media companies, agencies, and teach at prestigious universities. This wasn't just any audience. These were people who shape how millions see data.

"How many of you LOVE AI?" I asked.

Ten percent raised their hands. Tentatively.

"How many loathe AI?"

Over half the hands shot up. Vigorously.

I knew my defense of AI was doomed.

The Talk That Started a War

My talk (here’s its essence) raised hackles and hell. Despite my attempt to share a positive message, the loathers were unconvinced. During a post-talk roundtable, the moderator asked how many of the AI loathers were swayed by my talk. Not a single hand.

Online, attacks turned personal. My talk was called “The Worst I’ve Ever Seen.” People I have never met blocked me. I felt like a Trump supporter hoodwinked into presenting at a Bernie Sanders rally. The controversy grew so fierce that four industry leaders asked me to join their show, Chart Chat, to address the blowback. Scarred yet hopeful, I agreed.

Here’s what the war taught me.

The Shock: Smart People Hate Smart Machines

When I first saw the Pew Research numbers, I didn't believe that 52% of the population loathes AI. When I presented at Outlier, I expected openness, debate, and support.

My instinct was wrong.

Massively, embarrassingly wrong.

I thought education bred acceptance, but it also breeds contempt. The loudest critics were luminaries. Authors. Academics. Community leaders with a lot to lose.

Maybe success breeds fear and loathing. Maybe fear explains why only six percent of organizations are successfully using AI. Maybe 94% of leadership silently hates AI because it threatens their position of power.

That's tragic.

This insight carries weight beyond my hurt feelings. Investors may be well served to reflect on whether their CEOs genuinely embrace AI or harbor reservations about it. CEOs might need new blood to lead AI initiatives. Everyone should wonder if their objections to AI are real or based on fear. AI loathing can be economically devastating, competitively suicidal, and career-limiting.

Lot of Spite, No Action

My mom used to have a sign on our refrigerator that read, “Complain about anything as long as you have two solutions, too.” Her wisdom echoed in my mind as I responded to comments after my talk.

I fielded many complaints about AI. Its unethical consumption of power. Disgust with Mid Journey-generated images. Annoyance with AI-generated slop on LinkedIn. All fair criticisms. But the complaints weren’t coupled with solutions. Their hatred, hollow. The strongest objectors had the weakest ideas about AI and its impact on human work.

Each time, I offered constructive solutions. One asked accusingly, "Aren't you concerned about AI bias?"

"Yes! I coauthored a patent for identifying and mitigating AI bias, involving human adjudicators to address it." Nobody asked a follow up. Nobody was interested in solutions.

Crickets.

Talk of solutions seemed to reveal that the loathers weren’t looking for answers; they were just out to play the problem-pointing game.

The AI Creativity Wars

Is prompt-writing creative? I asked. This question was the center of my talk, about how AI can amplify human creativity.

More crickets. But I noticed several nodding heads too. I felt the quiet support.

Upon reflection, this question struck the heart of the identity of the most offended folks in the room. Maybe my question questioned their worth. Ironically, this is the opposite of what I was saying.

The most frustrating debates centered on abstract ideas: AI intelligence (it's not); AI enhances creativity (it does); using AI is a craft (it is).

I presented a 599-word prompt I crafted for in-depth patent research. The prompt took weeks to write, leans on thirty years of experience in product invention, company leadership, and go-to-market strategy. The idea that creative prompting is an art and science isn’t original. Everyone that uses AI aggressively knows that the more you put into your questions, the better the output. This post, “The $20,000 Growth Consultant Prompt,” went semi-viral on LinkedIn. Its author claimed the wisdom in this prompt was worth $20,000. I didn’t go that far with mine!

An AI Loather objected loudly. And proved my point accidentally. "But when I tell AI to 'Improve my writing,’ I get useless garbage!"

Exactly. Thanks for making my point.

An Offensive Example

One leader picked apart this Midjourney-generated trumpet. He wrote in all caps that he HATED the image. He HATED the fake plastic look of the valves. He HATED its style. But the trumpet image distracted him from the point I was trying to make: that AI can help humans be more empathetic.

Empathy and connection stem from knowing others — not just their demographics or appearance, but also their daily frustrations, their language, and their fears.

“Persona assumption” is using AI to provide answers from a different point of view. At home, you make AI sound like Yoda or Seinfeld. At work, make it think like your best customer. The image I shared is a simple manifestation of persona assumption: to imagine a trumpet as artist Jean-Michel Basquiat might imagine it. Salespeople can use AI to interpret their pitch from the prospects’ point of view. Lawyers can use AI to understand a jury’s interpretation of their argument. Marketers can understand how their audience might find their content manipulative.

My message was about using AI as an essential instrument to find empathy; I wound up fighting about plastic-looking trumpet valves. Maybe the derailment caused by my AI-generated image wasn’t worth it. On the other hand, some people loved it. Next time, I’ll keep the trumpet.

The Prior Art Paradox

“If you use AI, you’re stealing.” Another war erupted. This one raised my hackles, because it isn't just criticism, it's a moral indictment of AI users.

Questions about creative rights and intellectual property started the discussion. These are fair and valid concerns, and I acknowledged the issue. I returned to the central point: using AI is hard work, and users should never use AI’s output unmodified. I also explained how hard AI toolmakers work to protect IP rights. I brought up the lessons learned from the New York Times dispute, especially OpenAI’s fascinating response, which outlines the many concrete ways they work to stamp out theft and empower publications to control how their content is used, or not, during training.

But the loathers kept returning to the same objection: AI steals.

I enlisted a quote from Rick Rubin for support. Rubin produced Grammy Award-winning music by Adele, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica. He wrote,

"Nothing in the world is entirely new. All art is, in some sense, a remix or a continuation of what came before. We are of the world. We take in the world, combine it with the self, and express it in a new way." 

Originality is overvalued. Being open to inspiration from any and all sources is the real work. The work is to make combinations no one else has thought to make—to see connections others don't—until something new comes into being that only you could have made." 

Rubin uses AI for inspiration. He uses it to make connections. He sees it as a tool to express original ideas built upon what came before. This argument, too, went nowhere. Even Rick Rubin couldn't sway the haters. If a legend can't convince them, who can?

This was my final moment of despair.

My Opening Farewell to the Loathers

The haters were loud. The others were many. I was spending more physical and emotional time with the vocal, negative minority instead of the silent, productive majority. The minority blocked the possibility of progress with the majority.

For decades, I’ve listened to Jackson Browne when I’m sad. One night, while responding to a LinkedIn Loather with a glass of wine, his song "My Opening Farewell" counseled me:

But suddenly, it’s so clear to me,
That I'd asked her to see what she may never see.

Browne was singing about a girl; I was writing to loathers. Suddenly, I realized that trying to convince AI loathers is wasted time. I'm asking them to see what they may never see.

Thanks, Jackson Browne, for encouraging this opening farewell to the AI loathers.

Moving On With AI

I’m moving on. I wasted time fighting the AI Loathers, but I also made new friends and colleagues. At Outlier, I shared three steps to embrace AI. I still think they’re sound.

1. Treat AI prompting as a craft. The more time, energy, wisdom, and care you invest in AI prompts, the better results you get.

2. Embrace AI hallucinations. For creative work, hallucinations are unfairly maligned. If you aggressively consider, question, challenge, and embrace AI output, it can spark new insights and elevate human work. AI can also be wrong. Devour those synthesized morsels. Chew them up.

3. Work hard when you work with AI. Using AI is hard work. Good work. Honest work. Critical thinking work. Consuming, questioning, selecting, editing, combining, and exploring its suggestions is a creative act. But own the responsibility for any bias, errors, or poor choices when you use them.

Using AI in this way, like many things, takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.

I learned something from Jackson Browne: Sometimes the best way to win a war is to stop fighting it. Loathers will loathe. Hypsters will hype. In between, in that vast middle ground, that's where real change happens. There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m moving on. One prompt at a time.