The Book

How Not To Use AI

50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age

This book started as a feeling I couldn’t shake.

I spent nearly two decades inside the machine — Meta, Uber, Apple, eBay, Microsoft — helping the biggest companies on earth read the internet. I was good at it. I understood data, behaviour, the gap between what people say and what they do. I understood the infrastructure.

And then I watched an entire industry take a technology trained on the full breadth of human expression and reduce it to an autocomplete engine for corporate productivity.

They had the collective intelligence of the species compressed into statistical patterns — and they used it to write emails faster.

The book is for people who suspect that’s not the whole story.

The book’s argument in a single sentence: they think they built a Large Language Model. We needed a Large Listening Medium.

The book hit #1 on Amazon UK's High-Tech Business & Finance list and #2 in AI & Semantics — in four months, self-published, with no publisher, no marketing budget, and no permission.

What it is:

Fifty contrarian principles — not rules, not hacks, not prompts. Principles. Each one is a way of seeing AI that the dominant narrative doesn’t offer. Some are practical. Some are philosophical. Some will make you uncomfortable. All of them are designed to move you from the posture you were handed — command and consume — to one you choose: partnering in listening.

The principles aren’t sequential. You can open to any page and find something you can use that day. But underneath them is a coherent argument: this technology was trained on us. It contains multitudes. Using it only as a productivity engine would be an abuse of what’s possible and plays right into the ‘broligarchs’ hands..

Who it’s for:

Anyone who listens for a living — therapists, educators, journalists, programme evaluators — who senses that something essential about their practice is being automated away.

Women who adopted AI, felt something wrong in their body before they could name it in their mind, and want language for that feeling.

Founders and entrepreneurs — especially those building practices, firms, or movements outside institutional walls — who need a framework for integrating AI that doesn’t compromise what made their work distinctive in the first place.

Researchers and insights professionals who know their methods need to evolve but refuse to let a model replace their judgment. The book names what’s being lost in the rush to automate listening — and what becomes possible when you refuse.

Authors, speakers, and thought leaders who are building bodies of work alongside AI, not in spite of it. If you create ideas for a living, these principles will sharpen how you think about originality, voice, and what’s actually yours.

Coaches, facilitators, and fractional leaders who work at the intersection of people and systems — and who need to hold a clear position on AI that isn’t worship or rejection.

Strategists, consultants, and advisors who carry ideas into rooms and need better ones. If your clients are asking you about AI and the answers you’ve been given feel thin, these principles will restructure how you think about the question.

CEOs, VPs, and senior leaders making AI decisions for their organisations — who sense that the standard playbook is missing something but don’t yet have the language for what. This book gives you that language.

Anyone working in social impact, equity, or purpose-driven organisations who sees AI being deployed without the ethical infrastructure to hold it. The book offers a different foundation.

Anyone who’s been looking for a third path with AI — not worship, not rejection, but a clear-eyed, self-authored relationship with a new kind of medium.

What people are saying:

Readers keep telling me the same thing: they thought they understood AI, and then something in these principles rearranged what they thought they knew. Not more information. A different frame.

The book hit #1 on Amazon UK’s High-Tech Business & Finance list and #2 in AI & Semantics — in four months, self-published, with no publisher, no marketing budget, and no permission.

How it relates to this Substack:

The newsletter shows the ideas in motion. The book gives you the ideas to move on your own. And if you want to build the practice — the Billion Person Focus Group Masterclass is a two-day weekend intensive where practitioners learn the methodology.

This book was self-published. No media machine. No corporate backing. It found its readers the same way the Substack did — through people telling other people that something in here named what they’d been feeling.

If it finds you the same way, I’d like to hear about it.