we’re not falling behind—we’re just not buying it
By Lauren Erhart • June 16, 2026
Image: Victor Gilbert, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Note: This blog post was written by a human being. Every em dash was placed by human intelligence, or lack thereof.
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By now, we are all familiar with the AI industry’s favorite ultimatum: Adapt or get left behind. We’ve heard this message in a hundred varieties from what feels like a million different people. Tech companies developing generative AI really want us to adopt their products—perhaps because the giants of the industry have yet to turn a profit—and so they sell us a story of urgency. They prey on our competitive natures, our professional insecurities, and plain-old FOMO and try to convince us that we need what they’re selling, and we need it now.
Recently, though, I’ve seen this message getting pointed specifically at women, usually with other women as the spokespeople. Notable examples include Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins, who both took to social media to lament that women appear to be adopting AI at lower rates than men and to urge their female viewers not to get “left behind.”
In theory, Lowercase Editorial Services is the ideal audience for these messages. We’re a woman-owned business, and we work in a field that faces uncertainty, if not upheaval, due to the rapid proliferation of generative AI.
But in practice, we’ve taken a good look at what AI can offer us and we’re saying, “No thank you.” We’re not worried about getting left behind or being replaced—we’re simply not buying what the AI apologists are selling.
This is an easy decision for us for a few simple reasons:
1. generative AI isn’t very good at writing or editing
“Artificial intelligence” is a marketing term broadly applied to a number of different technologies. Some of these may genuinely be useful, even world-changing, particularly in scientific fields. But most of what’s getting pushed onto white-collar workers with desk jobs, particularly in creative fields, falls under the “generative AI” umbrella—think large language models (LLMs), virtual assistants, and AI slop image generators. And generative AI just isn’t useful to our editorial work.
LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT imitate human intelligence by scraping text from the entire internet. But, as any pedant will happily tell you, the entire internet is lousy with bad grammar and sloppy writing. Given its source material, text produced by an LLM was never going to be excellent, but it also tends to have a certain uncanny sheen that alerts people to its artificiality. Even disregarding the well-known giveaways like excessive em dashes, meaningless metaphors, and sets of three, there’s just a smell test that you either pass or fail. AI writing usually fails.
Similarly, I’ve yet to meet a chatbot that does a better job checking spelling and grammar than Microsoft Word has been doing for the last 10+ years, let alone make the more subjective judgment calls that I make as part of my job every day: This sentence is awkward; how can I make it clearer and prettier? That list has inconsistent syntax; let’s rewrite a couple items. This whole section is putting me to sleep; I’ll work with the author to make it more engaging.
People can certainly get by with AI-assisted writing and editing, but right now it’s nowhere near as reliable or satisfactory (or interesting, or surprising, or fun) as what human minds create. Most importantly, nobody wants to read AI-generated text. Not for work and certainly not for enjoyment. And at Lowercase, we’re in the business of helping our clients produce work that people want to read.
We don’t use AI to write or edit projects because we simply don’t think it’s good enough for the job. We believe quality matters, and we work with people who feel the same way.
2. using AI is not ethically neutral
Even if we did find generative AI helpful to our work, we’d be hesitant to use it because of the immense social and environmental harms it inflicts. Here’s by no means an exhaustive list of all that generative AI has cost us so far:
Tech companies like OpenAI train their models on intellectual property that has been used without the creators’ compensation or consent. This includes pirated, copyrighted works—meaning these companies are profiting from the theft of other people’s labor. It also includes everything from work emails to dating app photos, constituting a gross violation of privacy.
GenAI requires a lot of computing power, which means it consumes a lot of resources. AI data centers gobble electricity and guzzle water at astonishing rates, accelerating the climate crisis that AI proponents insist this technology will help solve.
AI data centers make poor neighbors, not only because they may be driving up your energy bill but also because the noise and air pollution they generate can do serious harm to the people who live nearby.
When executives implement GenAI in the workplace, any jobs that this implementation does not eliminate outright are in danger of being devalued, so that AI acts not as a time-saving tool for workers but a wage suppression tool for employers.
AI chatbots have enabled—and at times ostensibly encouraged—dangerous, illegal, and even deadly behavior in their users. In several tragic cases, these users have been children.
This list could go on for a long time (I haven’t even touched on cognitive surrender or mass surveillance or the AI slop crushing us from all sides like the Star Wars garbage chute), but being concise is kind of our thing, so I’ll stop there.
All of this damage is being wrought by GenAI products that show no signs of delivering the utopia their creators promised us. Instead of solving discrete problems, companies like OpenAI have created “everything machines” that seem to achieve little more than concentrating even more wealth into the hands of oligarchs.
At Lowercase, we work with clients who are making the world better. We don’t want to do that with tools that are making the world worse.
3. there’s nothing inevitable about this
People who stand to profit from the proliferation of generative AI talk about it as though its ubiquity is a foregone conclusion. Everyone from Sam Altman to Demi Moore to half the contacts in your LinkedIn feed says some combination of the following platitudes:
“AI is the future and we need to embrace it. The genie’s out of the bottle. This is the next Industrial Revolution. If you can’t beat the robots, join ’em. We are the Borg; you will be assimilated; resistance is futile.”
People who say this are not just doing free advertising for GenAI companies, but they are also wrong. AI is deeply unpopular outside of the C-suite: A recent survey found that more than one-fourth of all employees, and nearly half of Gen Z employees, admitted to sabotaging their companies’ AI strategies. (In the same survey, 75% of executives admitted their AI strategy was “more for show” than actual workplace guidance. Hmm.) Americans across the political spectrum are united in their hatred of data centers, which has been called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.”
Far from being inevitable, the prospect of GenAI taking over our lives is widely undesirable. This is true not just because of the externalities associated with the technology, but also because of the thing itself. GenAI is supposed to be a productivity booster, a creativity jump-starter, a time saver. All of these selling points are different ways of dressing up its most essential goal, which is to generate wealth. Maybe for you if you’re lucky, but most likely for your boss, or for the guy who sold the software to your boss. And that simply doesn’t interest most people, Lowercase Editorial Services included.
I didn’t quit my full-time job to become a freelance copy editor because I thought it would help me buy a vacation home with my fabulous riches. I do this work because I enjoy it and because I believe there is intrinsic value in helping our clients produce better writing—in helping people make meaning. GenAI is in direct conflict with this pursuit. As Ted Chiang wrote in The New Yorker in 2024:
“The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”
My keen dislike of GenAI, a dislike shared by more people than your CEO would have you believe, is rooted in this dehumanizing aspect that Chiang describes. Most human beings don’t want to spend their one wild and precious life pursuing the accumulation of capital at the expense of all else. We feel, even if we cannot always articulate, that intention matters. Process and struggle and failure all matter. A technology that treats these essential aspects of the communicative process as burdens to lift off our shoulders is not a technology that has any place in my daily life, professional or otherwise.
If, as Reese Witherspoon and others like her seem to suggest, the AI train is leaving the station, I will be perfectly happy not to jump on board.