No AI December 2025 (noaidecember.com)

No-AI December is a new global movement and study inviting people to abstain from generative AI tools for one month each year. Participants pledge to avoid assistants and content generators — callouts include ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Copilot and similar tools — and to rely on “RI” (Real Intelligence) instead. The initiative offers a simple rule (no AI tools in December), community support via Discord, daily journaling prompts, resources, a participant badge, and an opt-in research study to capture experiences and reflections. Organizers, including co-founder James Bedford (interviewed by Spomocník), encourage people to minimize AI use in non‑work activities too and to register interest for an exclusive invite to the study. For the AI/ML community this is both a behavioral experiment and a design signal. By deliberately removing generative assistants, No-AI December creates a controlled opportunity to measure effects on creativity, productivity, human collaboration, and perceived dependence — and to assess downstream issues like skill atrophy, user trust, and even digital carbon footprints. It also highlights a key technical nuance: many everyday products still rely on non‑generative ML (recommendation, prediction, automation) that may be harder to avoid. Findings could inform product design, human-centered AI practices, education, and policy by providing empirical data on how people work and create without AI augmentation.