Would I Give Up ChatGPT? Wrong Question, Mate

Saw a headline yesterday that made me put my coffee down for a second. Some tech CEO, running a company that pays people to sell their personal data for AI training, reckons AI critics are hypocrites because they’d never actually give up ChatGPT. The logic being: you use the product, therefore you have no standing to complain about the enormous data centres chewing through water and electricity to make the product work.

I’ve turned this over a few times now, and it doesn’t hold up, but I understand why it’s catnip for a certain kind of headline writer.

It’s the same move as “you drive a car, so you can’t complain about climate change.” Technically true that I use fossil fuels. Also true that I didn’t get a vote on whether my suburb has a tram line, whether the government subsidises renewables properly, or whether a handful of companies get to externalise the cost of their business model onto everyone else’s power bill and water table. Using a thing that’s been made the default, often without much choice in the matter, is not the same as endorsing how it’s built. One Reddit comment put it better than I could: these companies shoved the technology into every product by default and now act baffled that people resent being asked if they’d give it up voluntarily. That’s not hypocrisy, that’s just noticing you’ve been opted in.

There’s a second thing going on here too, which is the assumption that everyone is as dependent on this stuff as the people building it. I think about this a fair bit because I work in IT, hybrid schedule, home most days, and even I don’t reach for an AI assistant anywhere near as often as the industry narrative suggests I should. I use it for scaffolding boilerplate code, the odd rubber-duck debugging session, summarising a document I don’t want to read twice. That’s it. I still write my own emails. My daughter does her own homework, mostly, and the bits she doesn’t I’d rather know about than not. None of this makes me a luddite; I actually find the technology fascinating, genuinely, not in the performative “as a tech worker I must say something positive” way. It’s just that fascinating and indispensable aren’t the same word.

The bit that actually worries me isn’t ChatGPT the chatbot. It’s the infrastructure underneath it, the data centres sucking up drinking water in drought-prone places, the gas peaker plants getting fired back up to meet demand spikes, the fact that nobody voted for any of this at the scale it’s happening. You can think the technology is clever and still think the build-out is reckless. Both things sit in my head at once and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to make a tidier argument.

What gets me is the framing that resistance is futile, that it’s “happening whether you like it or not,” as if public infrastructure decisions are weather rather than choices made by people who could, in theory, be regulated, taxed, or told no. We’ve done that before with other industries that wanted to move fast and let someone else clean up after them. It’s not nostalgia to point out that a bit of friction and oversight usually produces a better outcome ten years down the track than none at all.

So no, I’m not giving up the occasional AI-assisted debugging session, and I’m not going to pretend that makes me a fraud for also thinking the water and power bill for all this should be a public conversation, not a given. Both things are true. Sorting out which parts of this technology are worth the cost and which aren’t is going to take longer than one spicy CEO quote, and that’s fine. Most things worth getting right usually do.