This is Part 3 of 5 in the Anti AI sentiment arc. Last time: The Algorithm Never Taught Them How To Think. The arc began with What the Room Was Holding.
Being late to something everyone else seems to have found first is not a neutral experience. It triggers something specific — a cocktail of shame, defensiveness, and the urgent need to reframe the situation so the lateness becomes a choice rather than a failure.
I’ve written before about that feeling itself — the unbearable sense of having missed something, and the mind’s instinct to make that someone else’s fault. This post isn’t about the feeling. It’s about how to spot it happening in someone else, before they’d ever admit to it themselves.
The tell
Here it is, plainly: the person who is genuinely unbothered by AI doesn’t build a case against it. It’s just a tool they use or don’t, the way nobody mounts an argument about staplers. The person building the case — elaborate, insistent, unprompted, always ready with the next reason it’s overhyped or dangerous or not for people like them — that’s usually the person who’s bothered. Not excited-bothered. Ashamed-bothered. The volume of the resistance isn’t confidence. It’s the tell.
The position hardens in direct proportion to the distance from the platform. The further someone feels from having boarded, the louder and more elaborate the case against boarding tends to get. Not because the case is wrong on its specifics — sometimes it isn’t — but because the case is doing a job that has nothing to do with its specifics. It’s converting I feel behind into I have chosen not to go, which is a much more comfortable sentence to say out loud.
Something happened in my house the other night. Chase and Sharon visited, and we were having a wonderful conversation. The subject of AI came up. He uses AI sporadically and inefficiently and was complaining about how bad it is, how the prompts need to be so accurate before you do anything, and how this problem is here and that problem is there. It reminded me of this post. It’s not that he’s late to AI, but he’s still vehemently complaining about it because he’s not using it in a way that works. He needs more knowledge or more conversation with the AI to help him to build the appropriate work practices that will improve his experience with AI.
He’s not unusual. One study of 450 people found that the habits we carry over from search engines and virtual assistants shape how we talk to ChatGPT: command-style prompts, and barely a change between turns. And Korn Ferry reports on a study finding that people expect a good answer within two prompts and give up after the fourth failure.
So I’ll say it plainly: this post isn’t really about being late. It’s about excuses.
“Bloody AI, who needs it?”
My old workmates say, “Why should I use AI? I’ve got Google. I get everything I need out of Google. I’ve got no need to go any deeper than that. Bloody AI, who needs it?” They’re retired now. They spend their days doing the crossword puzzle, bird-watching and sipping coffee, staring at the garden, looking after the Grandies, wondering about their health and how to properly fix the catio roof which the pussies are escaping from. Google didn’t help with that, so they haven’t done it yet. The frustration also extended to search engines. It’s not just AI that people have a hard time accepting or adopting. This rejection goes way back.
I have to use myself as an example here. I was chatting with a friend only yesterday about how I’ve never been an early adopter until now. When the internet first came out, it was the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t working on computers that had internet at work, and so it wasn’t thrust upon me. I was certainly not interested in getting myself a home computer.
Now, guys, we’re talking 1992 here. I had a baby in August of that year, and I was on 6 months’ maternity leave. The internet was way, way too new, so there was no way I was going to adopt it then. It took me a long time to adopt usage of a computer that had internet. It wasn’t until 1988 that offline computers actually made it into our offices - that was when floppy disks were 5 and a quarter inches and the top of the range machine had a 40mb hard disk - yes 40 megabytes for everything we wanted to store on the office computer. Today you could store a text file and not much more in 40mb.
I was working at the Post Office and I became a whiz at Symphony and Word Perfect. That’s like Excel and Word now. Then they rolled out a whiz-bang computer system for the point of sale, when everything had been done before on paper, in triplicate, by hand, with a pen. I became the one who knew it like the back of my hand. The one who was phoned by the other offices when they couldn’t work out how to balance the till or how to fix a problem. This was when I adopted tech, long before there was internet.
In 1993 after I returned from maternity leave, my job was to roll PCs out to the Area Managers offices, along with fax machines and photocopiers. The top of the range Olivetti computer cost $8900 AUD back then. The one with the 40mb hard drive!
I worked for a big corporate, and the bigger they are the slower they move. We got electronic messaging in around 1994 and Windows computers using Win3.0. Still no internet was rolled out to us plebs. Somewhere between then and 2000, we got email and internet. I finally got a computer at home when I noticed my 8 year old getting so good at Nintendo, and asking for the ability to play with friends. I had to get the Internet connected begrudgingly. See - even I had no reason to need it - till then. But I’d held off getting it. Made excuses to my son that he didn’t need it, that he sees his friends at school every day, that it was expensive, that it was difficult to organise, that the status quo was just fine, that I was happy doing everything the way I’d always done it. Selfish, wasn’t I?
But see, there’s the reason for this post. The excuses are just a cover for our fear. Of Change.
That fear has been measured, too. A survey of 206 medical students and doctors linked resistance to AI to threats to their sense of capability and recognition. It used a hypothetical AI, so treat it as a clue, not a verdict. But it’s a clue pointing the same way.
Late, again and again
I didn’t join Facebook till 2009 - late, just like internet adoption.
I didn’t get an iPhone till 2012 - late, just like joining Facebook.
I didn’t get AI till 2025 - late, just like getting an iPhone. But let’s just look at that ’lateness’ to AI. ChatGPT came out in 2022 - my record to date has been pretty ordinary. I kind of think I’m not late to this one. Statistics probably agree that I wasn’t in this case.
I was late to Netflix too. I was late to all the streaming services, because it was too expensive or I didn’t have time to binge.
I did use ChatGPT once in 2025, but I used it like a search engine, and to me, that doesn’t count as “using AI”. Using AI is about having a conversation with it and getting it to do things for you.
What changed in me, to make me ready, unafraid, brave, interested even?
What changed in me
Back in 2000, I joined a project where we introduced Electronic billing. People in the community were gagging for it, they said. My job was to liaise with the clients who wanted to use our platform and to manage the projects. I guess I became good at technology after that. It was my first project where the IT team and the Business team were co-hosted in one building. It was like a start up. That whole experience was a joy. Everyone was pumped to get this Product out, make it a success, enrol hundreds of companies to use the platform and attract millions of customers. It was a monumental project in my life. Changed my perspective on just how we could improve on our day to day by leveraging the clever people in the developer community! Coming from ’the business’ side, as I did, you only get exposed to the theory of the tech. Sitting with the IT guys, I got exposed to the IT side, and I embraced it. That’s when I truly became a Business Analyst, Project Manager, Product Manager, jack of all trades. That’s why it was easy for me to embrace AI. Because I embraced tech.
So many of my colleagues didn’t. I guess I feel sad for them.
What this is for
This post isn’t for the student weighing real, substantive reasons — cost, access, a genuine ethical line they’ve drawn. It’s for a much narrower case: the person who’s noticed their own conviction getting louder lately, with no real reason behind it, and wondered, quietly, what that might mean.
One last story, because it’s ironic. I remember all the 8am ’scrums’ and Project Meetings, where John Wise would tell the room that XML was the way to go. He was shot down by half a dozen people saying ’It’ll never last’. He was a wise man, that John; XML is now part of the spine/backbone of so much of what our technology does and uses.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.
