Generative AI may be spreading quickly, but ubiquity is not legitimacy. Beneath the statistics of adoption, a cultural judgement is forming around authenticity, power and the value of human work.
One thing is becoming increasingly clear: AI is not cool.
It may be useful. It may be fast. It may save someone 20 minutes writing a report they did not particularly want to write. But usefulness and coolness are different currencies. Coolness cannot be bought through venture capital, inserted into every search engine or announced from a conference stage. It is a form of cultural legitimacy, conferred by people when something feels original, desirable and alive.
Generative AI currently has reach, but very little mystique. It has adoption, but not affection.
The evidence is more complicated than the technology industry would like, and more complicated than its critics sometimes admit. A 2025 study across six countries found that 61% of respondents had tried a standalone generative AI system and 34% used one weekly. This is not a technology being universally rejected.
Yet the same research exposed a striking cultural divide. Only 12% were comfortable with news produced entirely by AI, compared with 62% for news made entirely by human journalists. People expected AI-produced news to be cheaper and faster, but also less transparent and less trustworthy.
That is the real story. We may use AI while continuing to judge much of what it produces as inferior.
The spontaneous public term for this material is revealing: ‘AI slop’. The phrase describes not merely bad content, but content detached from intention, experience and responsibility. It is imagery without a witness, writing without an accountable author and music without anyone having needed to make it.
This helps explain the renewed attraction of analogue photography, vinyl records, live performance, craft and printed books. It is tempting to dismiss this as nostalgia. But nostalgia alone does not explain why younger generations, with no lived memory of the analogue world’s supposed golden age, are drawn to its materials and rituals.
What they are seeking is evidence of human presence: the grain of film, the breath between notes, the imperfection that reveals a decision was made by someone.
A vinyl record and an AI-generated song are not simply two delivery formats. One points towards a performance, a place, a history and a set of creative relationships. The other may be technically convincing while remaining culturally anonymous.
In a 2025 survey of 9,000 music listeners, 97% could not reliably distinguish AI-generated music from human-composed songs. Yet 73% wanted AI music to be labelled, 45% wanted the ability to filter it out and 40% said they would skip it altogether.
Apparently, being fooled is not the same as being won over.
The problem of imposition
AI is also uncool because it increasingly arrives without invitation.
It appears above search results, inside workplace software, across social feeds and in customer services that once connected people with other people. The Reuters Institute found that 54% of respondents had encountered AI-generated search summaries in the previous week, while only 34% had actively used a generative AI tool during the same period.
The technology is not simply being chosen. It is being installed around us.
This matters because cultural resistance often begins when commercial power is mistaken for public consent. Technological leaders have made decisions about infrastructure, work, knowledge and creativity on behalf of societies that have had little meaningful involvement in making them.
That is where talk of techno-authoritarianism becomes more than hyperbole. The danger does not lie in every chatbot or generated image. It lies in the concentration of computational power, data and cultural distribution in a small number of private companies, increasingly intertwined with governments and military institutions.
In 2025, the US Department of Defense awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI contracts with ceilings of $200m each. The Pentagon stated explicitly that these partnerships would accelerate AI use across warfighting, intelligence and national-security operations.
That does not make every AI company criminal. It does mean that the friendly assistant helping to polish an email belongs to the same technological ecosystem now being built into military strategy. People are entitled to ask where their subscriptions, data and everyday use ultimately lead.
In communication and perception terms, brands/companies that hunt us down are not cool. A cool brand doesn’t need to hunt us down because a cool brand is confident we’ll find them. Begging for attention is not cool!
Who pays for convenience?
The costs are not only political.
The International Labour Organization estimates that one in four jobs worldwide is potentially exposed to generative AI, rising to 34% in high-income countries. Its analysis suggests transformation is more likely than wholesale replacement, but exposure is uneven and women are disproportionately affected.
The environmental bill is equally real. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres consumed around 1.5% of global electricity in 2024. Demand is expected to more than double by 2030, reaching slightly more than Japan’s present electricity consumption. The global emissions share remains relatively modest, but the local pressure on energy grids, water supplies and communities can be severe.
Convenience for one person is often infrastructure for somebody else.
Brands/companies we think of as ‘cool’ understand our personal values and they behave in ways that reflect this understanding.
Drawing the line
Rejecting technological inevitability does not require abandoning every useful AI application. It requires recovering our right to decide where it belongs.
We can begin by doing six very ordinary things:
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Choose human-made culture. Support the people who create it.
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Demand clear labelling of synthetic images, music, journalism and advertising.
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Refuse AI features that replace functioning human services without public benefit.
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Ask employers how automation will affect work, responsibility and creative ownership.
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Demand disclosure of the energy, water and material costs behind AI infrastructure.
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Protect spaces for sustained human attention: books, conversation, making, teaching, nature and collective life.
Singapore has even begun rewarding citizens for logging 15 minutes of daily reading, a modest attempt to counter compulsive scrolling. The financial reward is tiny. The cultural signal is not.
AI may become unavoidable. That does not make it admirable, desirable or cool.
The judgement now forming is not a rejection of technology itself. It is a rejection of synthetic abundance without meaning, innovation without consent and progress whose costs are imposed on everyone while its power remains in very few hands.
Silicon Valley has mistaken scale for love before. It may be doing so again.
Read more of Damian’s articles in Sublime Magazine
Damian Santamaria is an international business consultant on brand, sustainability and innovation for the green economy. He is a Visiting Fellow to the School of Business, Law and Communication in Southampton Solent University, Visiting Lecturer at the School of Media at London College of Communication UAL, an influencer of ethical fashion and Founder/ CEO of SUBLIMETV and SUBLIME Magazine.
