A few articles were written last year about "AI vegans"(^1, ^2). In these they describe "AI vegans" as people who refused to use AI on ethical grounds. But upon reading those articles, I think the classification used by Sean Boots is much more accurate "AI vegetarian"^3. The main difference I see between the vegetarian and vegan philosophies is the degrees of separation from the unethical act we allow ourselves to be. A vegetarian will consider the ethicality of the immediate results of an act, a vegan will consider the secondary flow-on effects. So I think what these news articles are inspecting are in fact "AI vegetarians" because while they personally will not use generative AI, they do not address the products that incorporate AI into them. But there are "AI vegans" out there, those who not only refuse to use AI, but also refuse to use anything built by or with AI.
This is an extension of the AI vegetarianism idea, but it further recognises not only the harm to the self done by using AI, but also the collateral damage done to the things we use by AI involvement. Slopcoding is being heavily integrated into prominent software projects such as vim, neovim, ghostty, etc. This is having a measurable impact on the quality of the project in terms of usability, as well as the stability of it. Contributions are barely run past humans anymore and they lend themselves to unstable changes that don't take into account the long-term goals of the project. This leads to regressions, competing development directions, and large chains of errors that have to constantly be reverted. Additionally, supporting projects built on this system sets a precedent where we expect other open-source projects to keep pace with these impossible fast iterations and to devolve into similarly unethical tactics. Thus, AI veganism recognises these harms, and seeks to avoid using any software which involves itself in AI (here we mostly mean generative machine learning models from large corporations such as Claude, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, etc.). The biggest resources for this are:
Through these communities I have found passion in finding and uplifiting human creativity. In opposition to the increasingly LLM written world, I have found myself more involved in creative endeavours than ever before. Like the luddites, I have found joy in raging against the machine, and I will try to contribute my part to an ecosystem of human-made things.