Someone I spoke with last weekend told me the office she works at will never use AI. She'd decided it for all of them, and when I asked why, it turned out she'd never really looked.
We'd been having a normal, friendly conversation, nothing to do with work. It got around to "what do you do," and she mentioned she does admin at a small law firm. So I asked, just curious, whether they use any AI or had ever looked into it.
No. We're too small, it's not necessary for us. A normal enough answer, so I didn't think much of it and asked a little more. Plenty of small offices use it now, have the people there thought about it, has she. No. It doesn't make sense for us, we'll never use it.
I kept asking, still just curious. Did they ever look into it, did anyone ever suggest it, has it come up at all. That's when it turned. She got sharper, wanted to know why I cared, said I sounded like I was selling something. I told her the truth, that I used to work in AI and I'm not selling anything now, just genuinely curious.
That's when it came out. It was never about being too small. "We all agree," she said, and it was clear she'd made the call for everyone. Then she went off. AI is horrible for the environment, horrible for the economy, did I even know what it was doing. I should really do my research, she told me. I should be more aware. That's close to word for word, and her voice kept climbing like the question itself had offended her.
I just listened. There wasn't much to say.
What stays with me is that she never got near the real questions. Whether these tools are reliable, what they cost, whether they even fit a place that size, the things you'd actually want to weigh. She never reached any of it. The whole category was closed before any of that started, shut on something she'd picked up somewhere and hardened into a wall.
Everyone building this stuff is competing on the product, better output, lower cost, easier setup. None of it touched what happened here. The call got made by one person who'd already closed the question, and everyone else inherited it without knowing there was ever a decision to make.
It reminded me of the way people dismiss a new tool right up until it's everywhere. The ones sure they'd never need e-signatures. The ones who swore their data could never live in the cloud. It sounds principled in the moment. But refusing to look was never the same as being right.
What made it land is that I wasn't selling her anything, and she knew it. Once she was sure I didn't want something from her, she wasn't careful anymore. She just said what she actually believed.
I'm not here to say these tools are the answer. Plenty of people look hard and decide not yet, or not this one. That's a real decision, and a fair one. What I watched wasn't that. It was a blanket no with nothing behind it.
The person like her probably isn't reading this, and that's sort of the point. People running on that kind of certainty aren't in threads like this one turning it over, because to them there was never anything to turn over. It was settled before it started.
I don't think she's rare. But I'd like to be wrong.
[link] [comments]