We probably all know the person, and maybe it is ourselves, who has inundated themselves in AI use, and say they are fully aware of all the dangers, but are so, so careful as to not fall into such traps themselves.

They know AI can incline us to inhibit thinking, poison our relationships, and evade responsibility. They know it is a crutch and a running joke, and even a war crime. But that is not how they use it. No, never. Except, from the outside, everyone else can see: they are not so different from the more ignorant and susceptible people they imagine themselves aloof from.

Part of the function of culture is to protect people from what they cannot protect themselves from alone. We fall into temptations before we know it. Sure, most times you run next to the pool, or have whiskey for breakfast, or eat unwashed food, or get your phone out at the dinner table, or wear maximally revealing clothes, you’ll come out okay. But each comes with risk, and in some cases the risk involves self-delusion.

Cultures draw arbitrary lines around those risks, which colonial ethnographers came to call taboos. They often seem excessive or absurd. But they are excessive precisely because they are realistic about the frailty of human judgment.

A pivotal moment in the acclimation of culture to AI will be the development of AI taboos.

Perhaps the most relevant set of historical taboos to AI are those related to the sin of idolatry—the sin of treating as divine the things that humans ourselves have made. In the Abrahamic traditions, idols distract people from worshipping God and from doing justice to each other. The threat is so grave, and so tempting, that the taboos far exceed the bounds of the sin. No statues allowed, whether you worship them or not. Mosques typically prohibit humanlike depictions of any kind.

There are costs to exceeding the bounds of the sin. But there are also epiphenomenal benefits. The prohibition on graven images has produced an extraordinary tradition of Arabic calligraphy. Prohibitions on certain foods or attire produce in-group solidarity. In any case, taboos are something that humans always do. They arise without formal legislation or decree, whether we ask for them or not, although formal institutions often adopt them. And it often seems like the people who like them least are those who need them most.

I don’t think we entirely know what taboos are needed in societies that include talking, writing, reasoning, self-organizing machines. But the cringey breakdowns of self-control can be a guide. So is the phenomenon of “slop.” Whatever is obviously cringe and slop is a starting point for discerning what might be a helpful taboo.

Allow me to suggest a few preliminary candidate taboos. I’m not sure I’d stand behind them in the end, but I offer them as contributions toward the greater project of cultural wising-up. I’m not the biggest fan, for instance, of human supremacy over machines; like many taboos, these proposals have a whiff of superiority to them. But perhaps that is a necessary form of self-defense.

Share not your raw outputs.

A young software developer recently told me about having asked a higher-up at work for feedback; they got back a response pasted from and attributed to a chatbot. This might feel clever to someone established in their career, for whom AI is a novelty. But it is infuriating for a young person looking for guidance and mentorship—who is perfectly capable of asking a chatbot, and in this case did beforehand, but now was seeking human judgment.

Draw a line. Don’t share raw outputs. The temptation to being inordinately impressed with the results is too great, and you’ll probably insult the other person in the process. Before communicating an idea to someone, you have to explain it on your own terms, in your own words. Even if you are working on AI-assisted code or art, you have to explain what you were doing and why.

Ask not for attention you are not willing to give.

This is an extension of the first. But sometimes the prohibition of raw outputs is not enough. People send each other hybrid slop—material that is partly their own but also bot-augmented, so as to require far more attention to interpret than it took to create.

It is better to send someone a short postcard or a few bullet points than to have a bot unravel it into something far larger, more time-consuming, and intention-refracting. There is simply far too much content in the world right now for us to be able to sustainably tolerate disproportionate expectations on our attention. If you ask for more attention than you give, you shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Name not your bots with personlike names.

Sure, maybe you think you can distinguish your chatbot from a person. Maybe you can’t. But kids and elders (and everyone in between) are definitely developing relationships with these things, and that risks replacing our deeply needed human connections. To prevent this, it might be a start to insist that bots can’t have names that are anything like human ones.

You could take this further. I recently heard a theologian recommend a prohibition on all chat-like interactions. Find other interfaces for AI systems that don’t confuse them with people. Bots might also be forbidden from using the first-person singular.

Earn first the validation of humans.

One pipe dream of the AI enthusiasts is that soon there will be billion-dollar companies with only one employee. (Argentina is allowing for no employees at all.) But at what cost? I have lately seen an uptick of requests for meetings and feedback from solo founders of projects with a vibe-coded project and Claude-styled website. I suspect these are far, far less likely to get anywhere than a project with even two or three people. Convincing a bot to help you tells me nothing. Convincing another human to collaborate with some of their finite time in life is a far, far stronger signal that you are up to something interesting.

This taboo would render it extremely embarrassing to begin promoting a project that has fewer than two provably human participants.

Require not the automation of others.

Companies today are being celebrated in the business press and stock market for laying off people to buy AI tokens. This should instead be a signal of failure, and public policy should punish them for it. Far better would be to demonstrate real productivity gains by keeping those workers and helping them be more productive with automation.

A prohibition against requiring automation of workers or students, in any form, would be a noble taboo. We can expect certain outcomes of each other, but self-automating should not be an obligatory means of getting there. Instead, the goal of organizational life should be to support the development of humans and our expertise, not to replace us.

An afterthought on sanctions

Taboos are often not lovely or easy things. They inhibit creativity and exploration. Their enforcement has involved such excesses as stoning and shunning. Their underlying logic can be plain wrong. Even for decent taboos, people can become fixated on them to the point of forgetting what they are actually for.

We can already see the emergence of taboos such as some of these. Revel in your latest AI chat on social media, and you expose yourself to callout culture. Deliver raw outputs as a love letter, and don’t expect much affection in return. In some form or another, these kinds of crude sanctions are necessary. There have to be consequences for violating a taboo, or it won’t function properly. Those consequences can be compassionate, moderate, and inclined toward mutual support. But they must also exact a cost.

Wield your taboos carefully. But don’t think we’ll make it through this without them.