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What is How Not To Use AI?
How Not To Use AI is a space for people who are already using AI – but refuse the story they’ve been handed about what it is and who it’s for.
So this is not an anti-AI newsletter. It’s not a ‘10x your productivity’ tips newsletter. It’s not here to tell you what tools to adopt or which prompts convert best.
The Silicon Valley ‘broligarchs’ have sold you “large language models” to command. Here, we treat them as a large listening medium: a way to hear what humanity and collective intelligence are already broadcasting, not just a machine that spits out more content or slop.
It’s a place for people who suspect AI could be a mirror and amplifier of our potential, not just a rote machine on a corporate desk.
Who it’s for
This is for serious, quietly disobedient, free-thinking people in and around tech and culture:
Strategists, researchers and product people who don’t want to be either AI‑evangelists or AI‑deniers.
Creatives, writers, artists and storytellers who want to work with AI without flattening their voice or outsourcing their originality.
Founders, leaders and team leads who care less about churning out outputs and more about seeing clearly what’s really going on.
Humanities thinkers, educators and knowledge-holders — the people who understand context, meaning, and human systems — who will be the ones who raise this thing well.
People in media, policy, and civic spaces who feel the “automate everything or be left behind” narrative and know that can’t be the full story.
You’re not here to opt out.
You’re here to engage on your own terms.
What you’ll find
Less: prompt hacks and productivity porn.
More:
Essays like They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic” and They Built a Child They Won’t Raise that use AI products as X‑rays of our desires, labour and power structures.
Myth, history and psychology – from Babylonian creation stories to transformer architectures – to show AI as a vast, interconnected network of human capability and expression, rather than a cold artificial brain.
Field notes from the Billion Person Focus Group®, which uses AI as a listening system to surface what billions of people are saying in the wild, instead of forcing them into neat surveys.
Practices and “laws” from my book How Not to Use AI – a manual for decolonising AI use from its Silicon Valley origins and refusing extraction in favour of cultivation – to help you move from commanding generation (“do this for me”) to partnering in listening (“show me what’s true here”).
Underneath it all is a simple, radical idea: this technology was trained on us. It’s a human technology. It contains our multitudes. Using it only as an efficiency engine would be an abuse of what’s possible.
Who’s behind it
I’m Abi Awomosu, a digital griot, cultural researcher and data leader – a storyteller whose work is to listen to a community, carry its memory, and return patterns that help people recognise themselves and what comes next.
After nearly two decades helping big tech and advertising companies read the internet, I realised the interesting question wasn’t “How do we get AI to generate more?” but “What happens when we let it help us listen better – and refuse the extractive, colonising script we were handed?”
Now I work with challengers, misfits and quietly radical leaders and creatives who want to build from that place.
If you’ve been looking for a third path with AI – not AI worship, not AI rejection, but a clear‑eyed, self‑authored, and sovereign relationship with a new kind of listening medium – this is what follows.
