Do we love AI or is it giving the ick?
A reflection on how our fear of technology might say more about us than it does about machines.
Right after receiving an email from some random newsletter I subscribed to ages ago (as you probably did with mine), I started scrolling through the latest topics filling my inbox.
And here’s what I noticed: aside from the subtle marketing that hides between the lines, there isn’t a single one that doesn’t mention “AI”. Somehow every entrepreneur, writer, or founder who writes a Sunday newsletter (like me, apparently) is talking about AI.
And yes, that's the type of writer I follow. But bare with me, I have a point to prove here.
That same week, while helping a client create content for social media, I decided to try an AI voiceover, to tell their brand story in nice English, not my Latin American, Sofia Vergara-style accent. It turned out adorable. The kind of cute that feels somewhere between a Tim Burton film and a Pixar narration.
Until one of my colleagues walked in, took one listen, and instantly shattered my proud-mum moment with a quick: “It gave me the ick.”
That’s when I realised, everyone’s talking about AI, but what’s the sentiment
Depending on your age (and probably your LinkedIn trauma), opinions couldn’t be more different: from trying to master it out of fear of losing your job, to rejecting it completely because it all feels… unreal.
People are either desperate to discover the world of artificial intelligence, or fighting for its death. A war between fascination and discomfort.
And like my sweet Carrie Bradshaw would say, '“I couldn't help but wonder”… what does AI make us feel?
Fear as a feature
Every time someone mentions AI on a global stage, it feels like they’re introducing a new doomsday trailer. “It’s coming for your jobs,” “It’s rewriting reality,” “It might even end civilisation as we know it.”
Now, fun fact which I wasn’t considering before reading Ways of Being by James Bridle, but the people claiming this, are the ones who build it. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the global Mr. “I have power” people that we know (and today basically control our knowledge) are those building up the tools that then should scare us, as they had mentioned in various twits.
Pretty convenient to encourage fear towards the tools they’re building or supporting, considering everyone will desperately learn them to avoid staying behind. Big entities and tech leaders have managed to do something quite paradoxical: sell us innovation through fear. They present AI as both miracle and monster, as if we should admire it from a distance, but never fully trust it.
While reading this book, I found a sentence that stuck with me: technology isn’t becoming human; it’s reminding us how limited our version of being human actually is. So, maybe the fear we feel isn’t really about machines getting smarter, but about the possibility that they might show us how mechanical we’ve become.
Perhaps, “the ick” is just fear with better PR. Our instinctive reaction to something that feels too close, too capable, too reflective. A defence mechanism disguised as disgust.
The Aesthetic of the “Ick”
Feelings towards AI tend to live in extremes. People don’t just fear its growth, they often cringe at it. Show any Gen Z an AI-generated image, a robotic voiceover, or a synthetic influencer and you’ll feel the collective shiver run through the room. It’s not rational; it’s visceral.
That “AI ick” is born from a quiet discomfort, the unease that appears when something tries a little too hard to look human. It’s the same reaction we get when a stranger uses our slang to sound relatable, or when a brand suddenly starts “talking like Gen Z.” Our brains just know: this isn’t real.
But the rejection goes deeper than aesthetics. After listening to Rosalía describe her new album LUX as an act of rebellion against the use of AI, in both music and video, something clicked. Maybe the “ick” isn’t just about unease. It’s rebellion. In a world obsessed with optimisation, saying no to AI feels like reclaiming agency. Proof that you still value the human messiness of things.
And perhaps that’s what will keep us sane in the future: not rejecting AI out of fear, but choosing when and how to engage with it. Doing things manually, slowly, or imperfectly isn’t inefficiency, it’s self-preservation and believing we still exist beyond the algorithm.
The Collective Mood
Curious about whether this “ick” was universal or just me being dramatic, I decided to ask my community on Instagram how they felt about AI.
The results were pretty clear: 62% of the votes said they reject it completely, either because it makes them uncomfortable or simply because they’re tired of hearing about it.
But honestly, I don’t buy that those 500 followers who swore they “don’t use it” aren’t secretly letting ChatGPT tweak their captions or plan their next holiday itinerary. The truth is, we love to hate what we already depend on. So going further in my interesting and twisted questions, I wondered: do we really reject it, or are we just echoing what we’ve read?
That's when I found this research exploring whether AI is actually making us dumber, and the results were refreshingly nuanced. It isn’t the technology that weakens us; it’s how we use it. We are making ourselves dumber by using AI as we use it. When we let it think for us, we flatten our own imagination.
At the end of the day, maybe that’s what all of this is really about: showing up. Not to outsmart the machine or outpace the trend, but to remain awake in our own process. To keep noticing, feeling, editing, deciding. AI might write faster, design cleaner, and sound smarter, but it still can’t care, and caring is the most human thing we do.
It's not our creativity that it's at risk in this era, but our attention.
Smarter tools, but slower minds?
Maybe the real challenge isn’t learning how to use AI, but remembering why we’re using it in the first place. Every tool reflects the hand that holds it, and if we stop questioning our intentions, we risk confusing efficiency with purpose.
The future doesn’t need more people who know how to prompt; it needs people who still know how to pause, to ask, to choose. Because progress without reflection isn’t intelligence, it’s automation. And if we’re not careful, that might be the most artificial part of all: us thinking as machines.
