Sean Boots wants to write his own emails. His own code. Think with humans, not text-prediction systems. He's calling this stance 'generative AI vegetarianism,' and it's struck a nerve. Avoid these tools in your daily life. Turn off AI settings in your office suite. Don't share AI-generated content or support companies pushing features you didn't ask for. Boots isn't anti-technology. He still uses spellcheck, spam filters, computer vision. He draws a line at tools built on scraped internet content from millions of creators who never consented or got paid.
The reasons stack up. Skills atrophy when AI shortcuts the hard parts of learning. Writers and illustrators lose work to machines trained on their own creations without compensation. Then there's bias you can't audit, environmental costs, and vendor lock-in. Build your workflows around Copilot or Claude and you're trapped when prices rise or quality drops. Boots cites critics including Ed Zitron, Emily Bender, and Alex Hanna, who've argued similar points for years. Kyle Kingsbury's warning adds to this chorus.
What's new is the framing. Calling it 'vegetarianism' makes opting out a lifestyle choice, not just a technical opinion.
Hacker News commenters had mixed reactions. Some found the vegetarianism metaphor confusing or dismissive of actual dietary choices. 'GenAI-free' and 'organic software' were suggested as alternatives. But others recognized a real trend. Experienced professionals are quietly opting out of AI tools or doing minimum compliance when employers force adoption. They're waiting for hype to pass. A cultural split is forming between people who see AI as inevitable and those who don't.
That split has market teeth. Companies like Proton built brands around privacy and human control. 'AI-free' could become a real differentiator, the way 'organic' did for food. Enterprise clients with sensitive intellectual property might pay premiums for software guaranteed free of generative AI. The hard part is defining what 'AI-free' actually means when AI saturates foundational infrastructure. But the demand exists. Boots' essay proves people are thinking about it. Someone will build the product.