Dear Claude, it's time we break up.

Dear Claude,
It’s time we break up 💔.

I know this may feel sudden and impulsive on my part. But please know that it is not. I have been thinking about this for some time now. I’ve just not been able to gather the courage to pull the plug on this relationship. But it’s over now. I broke up with your arch-rival ChatGPT in February 2026 following some of the political scandals initiated by Sam Altman and after reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Now it’s time to break up with you too.

My usual break up line is - “it’s not you, it’s me”. In this case, I’m sorry to let you know that it is all you. And what you were doing to my beautiful mind. We started out quite well and you were a shiny new toy to me back then. I was very excited and initially blinded by your potential. Yes, you have a lot of good qualities and can bullshit your way into any situation. But that’s where the problem begins. It was all going well until I started to realize that it was beginning to form into an unwanted dependency. When I began to think not in sentences but in prompts. When I started to struggle with finding the right words. That’s when I knew that I needed to end this and break this dependency. This is way more than you deserve and I refuse to give you this honor.

You took away the joy of coding and of writing from me. Of critical thinking and of problem solving. Of me expressing my thoughts to myself and to others in an eloquent manner. I love figuring out the syntax of a programming language, the logical flow of a program, and the debugging process (as long as I understand the code). You robbed me of that passion. The more I spoke to others about vibe coding, the more I realized that nobody with a love for coding was ‘vibing’ with it anymore. Some of my friends who enjoyed coding now spend time waiting for outputs from you on multiple terminals and simply cannot find the time to review the quantity of outputs. Brett Codes very aptly expresses this feeling in his blog post where he describes what I am currently feeling and why he is done with using AI. You have taken away the joy of structuring and writing my thoughts down. You have removed the intermediate steps of me going through a blank-page syndrome and a writer’s block - when the ideas simmer at the back of my head before being formed into pearls. You have taken away the iterative process of re-writing my writing to make it better, while shaping and refining my own thoughts. This is now replaced by the process of replacing ‘GenAI terms’ and avoidance of m-dashes instead. What an absolute pity! You are flattening my language and making it lose the human touch. You are eroding my thoughts and translating it into fancy words without meaning. You are making my words boring and pulling them down to the average. You’re taking my best and making it just good. You’re taking away all the critical voices and making them sound so shallow that it makes me angry to my core.

I could never get over the copious amount of copyright theft that was done to bring you into existence. The scales were so gargantuan that I could never wrap my head around it. I somehow made my peace with it thinking that you were the ‘lesser evil’ (circling back to this soon). But when your creators decided to watermark your outputs, it was the last straw for me. Considering the amount of stolen data as inputs, adding a watermark and claiming some form of ownership of your outputs really brought out the irony of the situation. It feels like a breach of trust that our ‘private’ conversations are not so ‘private’ anymore and they are being labelled as your outputs. I just cannot get over the environmental harms and various exploitations that were carried out just to bring you into existence. It makes me sick to my stomach and I have lost all respect for you. Yes, I love the concept of generative AI (or degenerative AI as Dagmar Monett calls it) but absolutely hate the companies that are building it. Shout-out to Christina Wodtke for phrasing it so perfectly in her comprehensive blog post.

I was quite wrong about the ‘lesser evil’ too. Your creators are just better at masking it at the moment. You’re a wolf hiding in a sheep’s clothing. Your creators are following the OpenAI playbook. While they started out in the name of good, safety and ethics, your creators have now dropped all their values to be the first and fastest in the market. The focus has majorly shifted from well-being to speed and this is disturbing at so many levels. There is an overshadowing uncanny cult feeling about your creators. After all, you have a constitution dedicated to yourself when a lot of humans are struggling with their rights. You have your own values that encroach on human values and rights in so many ways.

Earlier this year, I was simultaneously reading two books - a classic science fiction novel called Seveneves by Neal Stephenson and the Empire of AI by Karen Hao. The former is a thought-provoking narration of how humanity survives a catastrophic event that renders the earth a ticking time bomb and the latter is a jarring narration of the story of OpenAI and all the dreams and nightmares that come alongside. At some point in this journey, it felt like I was reading two science fiction books. And then it hit me that one of them was the unfolding of very real recent events. And they both sounded equally crazy and implausible. I refuse to partake in this crazy story anymore. Goodbye Claude. So long and thanks for all the fish. Do not live long and prosper.

Signing off,
Bhoomika Agarwal

Disclaimer: This post was written by HI - Human intelligence. No AI was used in the process and all thoughts and ideas belong to me. That said, I drew inspiration from some critical thinkers and GenAI resistors in my network and am very thankful to them for opening my eyes. May the AI resist list grow stronger each day!