My day job is at a Fortune 100 company (you’ve definitely heard of it). I’m on the enterprise digital team, working on the company’s websites and other online products.
The company has made AI tools available to us: Microsoft Copilot and a handful of others. At first, it was “Use these tools where it makes sense.” Then it was “Look for opportunities to use these in your work.” Today, they told us we must all take 5 hours’ worth of AI training classes and earn a badge by the end of the year.
I have no complaints about the required training. I enjoy learning and I’m interested in how AI is evolving. That being said, I haven’t been using the AI tools much. If they helped me do things faster or better, I might use them. For my role, they do not.
Our use of these tools seems to be sliding from voluntary to mandatory, and that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why? Because generative AI tools were trained on authors’ work without permission, compensation, or attribution, and I am one of those authors. (If you want to find out if your own work was used, visit The Atlantic’s search tool.) I wrote about GenAI’s sad beige prose back in February. Things have not improved since then.
A quick sidebar. Many of us find generative AI unpalatable, but today I saw resistance from an unexpected source. 404 Media reported that a company called Best Beer introduced an AI tool into a craft beer competition. At a Canadian Brewing Awards event, Best Beer asked judges (who must be certified and really know their stuff) to enter their tasting notes into an AI-powered app, which then generated summaries. The judges were not pleased. “It was taking real human feedback, spitting out crap, and then making the human respond to more crap that it crafted for you,” one judge said. “To strip out all of the humanity from it is a disservice to the industry,” said another. A third judge said the introduction of AI was “enshittifying” beer tasting.
AI does not need to be applied to everything just because it exists. The best way I’ve heard it phrased is this: AI is a shiny new hammer, but not everything is a nail. It’s great at summarizing long documents. It’s good at translating and transcribing. But it cannot replicate the human touch. The beer judges agreed, because, like writing and painting, “Brewing is an art.”
I tried to come up with a good metaphor for how it feels to be forced to use tools trained on my own stolen work. My first thought: It’s like being told to eat a bowl of chili that may or may not contain chopped-up bits of your own children. This accurately captured my visceral reaction to having GenAI tools shoved down my throat, but it was a tad dramatic.
My 16-year-old daughter Maggie came up with a better one. She said: “It’s like if you planted a bunch of trees, watered them, grew them for years, and then someone came along and cut off their branches without asking you, then made pencils out of them and asked you to use the pencils.”
Indeed. And that comparison is perfect in a way that no machine could replicate.
Writing by Jen Mierisch 
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