AI Strategy

Building an Anti-AI Brand Isn't the Flex You Think It Is

MR By Monét Reid · July 24, 2026 · 3 min read

I am so tired of hearing the same two lines on polarized rotation: "AI is going to replace your job!" / "AI will never replace your job!" Neither holds any value, because both strip the nuance out of the tool and the people they're trying to (de)motivate.

We're all subject to viral one-liners like this every single day, and the result is that most of what gets shared about AI has become a hallucinative game of telephone. Add the anti-AI shaming, the mind-numbing AI-slop, and the savings-draining masterclasses selling you survival, and you're left with a fictional version of what the tool actually is and what it's capable of doing.

Here's what's really hidden behind the headline. AI is being quietly politicized, sorted into two camps that never needed to exist, and the more those extreme one-liners force a side, the more we repeat them without thinking. You can see it everywhere. People use AI every single day, then hold the anti-AI line the moment they're in front of other people. They aren't phonies for it. They just don't want to be placed in the wrong camp. But here's the truth I haven't seen in a single headline: building an anti-AI brand isn't the flex you think it is, because pro-AI doesn't mean anti-human. Using the tool doesn't mean you want 10,000 tech layoffs, or that you love the AI slop burying your content. It just means you picked up the tool.

I'm not telling you to go pro-AI for clout or credibility either. I wouldn't align your brand with AI at all unless using the tool is genuinely the vision behind you and your company. But performing against it has a cost, because the relatability you gain now isn't worth the credibility you'll lose later. This moment asks for curiosity, not judgment, and you can't hold both at once.

Think I'm off? Consider the mainstream weight loss programs that shamed prescription drugs until they could capitalize on them. Sorry, Oprah.

AI is a maximizer of your gifts, and right now it's malleable, so what our future looks like depends on what we do with it now. If you're doing good, it can help you do more of it. And even if you can't justify using it yet, learn how the tool actually works, its technical mechanics and functionality, deeply enough to teach a class on it. That fluency is what lets you help people find the gaps where they can still compete, or fix what's actually wrong with it, whether the problem is AI ethics, its size and environmental cost, accessibility, poverty, or policy.

If a gap looks too big to close, remember how fast this moves. The first computer took up an entire room. Now it's small enough to fit in my husband's sunglasses. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in The Black Swan, "History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps."¹ And in the era of AI, I'd argue that flies.

Ya know, I almost didn't post this. Then I spent an afternoon explaining AI to two servicemen working on my kitchen oven. (I know, poor guys didn't see it coming 👻) But that's the point. The people who could use this most are the ones we keep talking past, and this is the moment to build generational ambition for your family, your neighbors, and the blue-collar backbone of this country, not to gatekeep what you know.

I've been reading about Joan of Arc lately, and two of her lines are worth borrowing here. "All battles are first won or lost in the mind,"² so the moment you decide AI is the enemy, you've lost yours before it starts. And "I am not afraid; I was born to do this."²

Neither am I. Neither should you.