The Bluesky observation that crystallized this story's argument came without self-pity: trying to do research without AI has become harder, not because AI is performing well but because the environment assumes you are using it [7]. Search results, information aggregators, and increasingly the outputs of peer literature are shaped by AI's presence — which means opting out means navigating a landscape optimized for users who opted in. That is a different problem than 'AI is too useful to quit.' It is an argument about infrastructure: when enough of the field…