Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why are we resisting AI?

Time Magazine has just named its Person of the Year for 2025. 

And it’s not a single person. It is "the architects" of AI. 

The magazine says "no one" had as great an impact this year than the people “who imagined, designed, and built AI". 

This was the year that we stopped talking about how clunky AI is and instead started sprinting to deploy it as fast as possible. And now the risk-averse are no longer in the driver's seat. 

Which may be true, but the risk averse are still a really big proportion of us, aren't they? 

I think there are broadly three categories of people when it comes to AI; 

1) The ones using it, 

2) The ones apathetic about it and waiting to be convinced that they need it, 

3) The ones terrified of it. 

It's the terrified ones that fascinate me. 

They're the unions convinced AI will take jobs. They're the 47% of Kiwis who don’t trust companies to use AI ethically. They're the rule-lovers who want the Government to set up more rules for AI. 

They're the artists and musicians who are pretending that they can stop AI learning from (they call it stealing) their ideas. They're the people complaining that AI photos and videos and songs are somehow evil and misleading. 

Resisting AI is not a strategy. It's happening and it’s not going away. 

Resisting it is like a repeat of the resistance towards the computer decades ago, which even Time magazine called a fad at the end. 

The way to deal with AI is to accept it's going to fundamentally change everything and then figure out how to make that work for you. 

A case in point is Disney today giving OpenAI permission to use its characters, like Star Wars characters, to make videos. 

Like Mark Cuban said on the show yesterday, AI is going to be big, and we have no idea how big yet. 

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