“Ugh! Not again!” I shouted, exasperated. “This stupid pop-up won’t go away!”
“Um, are you OK?” a quiet voice asked.
I jumped, having forgotten I was not alone. While I was trying to generate slides quickly for an upcoming retreat session, a young colleague was testing out microphones nearby. Three hundred retreatants were about to rush back in, and the pressure was definitely on to get everything ready before they did.
I took a second to recover before saying, “Yes. I’m so sorry! This program keeps asking me if I’d like to have AI help me make my work better and more efficient, and no matter how many times I click ‘no,’ it just keeps popping up!” He looked at me curiously, “But clearly you are pressed for time. Why don’t you want AI’s help?”
It was a reasonable question. Why wouldn’t I want the help of a tool that might make this moment easier? Still, I clicked “no” once again and continued my prep without answering my colleague.
Later when the retreatants left for small groups, he asked again, “Why are you resisting AI’s help?” As a graduate student, he had been engaging in conversations in class about the
