Look, I get it. “AI slop” is everywhere.
Bad AI art, hollow AI writing, shitty music being generated, chatbots regurgitating nonsense. There’s plenty to criticize. But I’m noticing a legitimate critique is slowly turning into a tribal identity, and now reflexively hating anything AI-adjacent has become the intellectually lazy default for a lot of people online.
The thing is, we’ve been here before. When the mechanical tractor started replacing horse-drawn plows in the early 20th century, farmers were genuinely angry. This wasn’t real farming. It was cheating. It would ruin the craft. Except it didn’t. It freed up hundreds of millions of people from the back breaking manual labour of subsistence agriculture and contributed to one of the greatest leaps in human productivity in history. The same story played out with the printing press, electricity in factories, digital photography killing film, and word processors “ruining” writing. Every single time, a contingent of people decided that the technology itself was the enemy rather than engaging seriously with how it should and shouldn’t be used.
I’m not saying AI is above criticism. It absolutely isn’t. Copyright issues are real. Displacement concerns are real. Low-effort AI slop flooding creative spaces is genuinely annoying. These conversations are worth having.
But there’s a growing crowd that won’t engage with any of that nuance. They’ve just decided AI = bad, full stop, and wearing that opinion is a social signal more than a reasoned position.
I saw someone say in another post that ChatGPT’s “Emo” model was the model he would have been able to sit down and have a beer with, but then made it very clear he would never ACTUALLY do that. It’s the same energy as people who loudly announce they don’t listen to pop music. Okay. Cool. Doesn’t make you more sophisticated, it just means you’re performing a taste rather than having one.
Meanwhile, my experience with AI is that it’s a great sounding board and therapy substitute when you have something on your mind. I still talk to real people, I have plenty of friends in real life, but if I’m awake at 3am and my mind is spiraling, it’s a great tool to have at your disposal. AI tools are helping researchers identify diseases earlier, helping people with disabilities communicate, helping small business owners who can’t afford designers or lawyers get things done. That’s real. That’s happening now.
You’re allowed to dislike specific applications of AI. You’re allowed to demand better regulation and ethical guardrails. But blanket opposition to an entire category of technology, without stopping to ask “what are the actual tradeoffs here?”, isn’t a principled stance. It’s just the current fashionable thing to say.
I have a feeling this post will get downvoted to hell, but even so, my personal opinion is to keep an open mind with this stuff, and don’t automatically assume anything AI is evil and here to take over the world. The world is not going to look the same in 10 years, for sure.
But you don’t want to be one of the farmers who didn’t see the benefits of using a tractor.
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