Talking about AI in 2026

One of my new Year resolutions was to try and talk more about AI this year. As in, be noisier, specially in my position as a CS professor/researcher, about how and why AI as we understand it today is bad and should be resisted.

"AI" is a sore spot for me. To start with the name itself. The idea of Artificial Intelligence is something that has inspired me since I was a kid. Here I mean Artificial Intelligence as the concept of something alive that was created by craft, specially computer craft. I mean robots in sci-fi, virtual worlds, living computers. It was that distant dream that made computers magical.

To see the word today be seen as synonimous to fakeness, corporate greed, snake oil, anti-humanity, intellectual lazyness, all of that makes me extremely tired.

Because of this tiredness, up until now I have tried to avoid the AI discourse, if you can believe it. When given the choice, I would keep my head down, save my strenght, do my thing and just let people do whatever they want. But as "AI" takes more and more space, a nagging feeling would tell me from time to time that it was, yes, my responsibility to resist actively, not passively. That it was due of me to spend the energy to be "annoying about AI".

So I told myself that this year I would dedicate energy, specially professional energy, to stand up on that soapbox. To raise my voice more often about how it is not actually OK to use "AI" casually for anything and everything. To push back about those tentacles trying to sneak into research and education and work and daily life. To become a voice that might not convince others, but might make a few people more confortable in joining their voice against the wave of the status quo. I hope I can find the energy to do that.

And to be honest, it is not like I'm doing this because I'm a super brave person. I'd say that my main inspiration was to see how many people, specially young people, are now treating "AI" and its sloppy outputs as the fake, ugly, uncought thing that it is. So this is less me finding the courage, and more me joining this inspiring chorus.

Because, frankly, besides all its ethical, ecological, and moral faults, AI-slop is just cringe as hell.