“What if the critical AI skill of our era is not how to use it, but how to resist it?”

The argument that “AI is here to stay” and therefore we have to use it is not a valid one. The future is always undetermined and we do have influence on how it turns out. And that includes whether AI is staying -- or not. So what if the critical AI skill of our era, as Karen Costa puts it, was not how to use it, but how to resist it?

There are five main reasons for AI resistance, according to Şimşek and Yasar (2025):

• Socio-economic concerns, like AI taking people’s jobs,
• Ethical issues, since AI systems are opaque and biased,
• Safety risks, when AI gets to make decisions,
• Threats to democracy and sovereignty, “including the use of AI for large-scale societal manipulation“, and
• Environmental impact.

All of these are serious and worth exploring in detail.

So if we wanted to resist AI, for these reasons or others, fully or just inducing enough friction in the adoption to make sure we don’t move faster than we have the chance to safely assess what we are doing, how would we do that? Drimmer & Nygren (2025) suggest four small acts of friction:

• Centering students in our teaching. Not AI, not preventing cheat with AI, just students. They write that “[d]efensive maneuvers, like in-class essay writing exclusively, are acts of deprivation. They deprive students of the opportunity to reflect and refine away from the pressures of the classroom clock.” Instead, we should keep writing assignments and not police how they were generated, but rather make them thought-provoking and give thoughtful feedback on the thoughts reported in them.
• Not optimizing everything. Making space for things that are not on the curriculum and that are not credited: “Reading groups, lightning round presentations, unambitious programs of being in simple, un-CV-able conversations” to focus back on humanity and community, and make space for skepticism.
• Taking some things offline again: Sharing printouts, using leaflets, not making everything be online all the time (but careful that we do not roll back all efforts on inclusion that have been made thanks to assistive technologies!).
• Ask questions — in person, in established relationships — about what problem we are really trying to fix by adopting AI, and whether we are really working on the right problem.

What do you think? Is resisting AI the real AI skill of the era? If you are resisting or introducing friction, how are you doing it?

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Read more:

• Drimmer & Nygren (2025). Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education. https://www.publicbooks.org/four-frictions-or-how-to-resist-ai-in-education/
• Şimşek and Yasar (2025). From Rejection to Regulation: Mapping the Landscape of AI Resistance. Available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5287068

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An earlier version of this post was first published by Mirjam Glessmer on 

https://mirjamglessmer.com/2026/03/11/thinking-about-ai-resistance/ and is reposted here with permission as an example for possible content on this blog.