you are a writer who hates ai

If you are looking for a balanced or emotionally-regulated-in-any-way opinion on AI, you have clicked on the wrong blog post. Further, I would say you’re better off doing almost anything else than reading the following manifesto.

No? You’re sure? You want the incoherent rambling? Well, if you insist:

!!!!!!!!!!!!FUCK AI!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUCK IT, DUDE

DAMN I HATE THIS SHIT

Every time you, a real human, blink, an asshole cries because he hasn’t yet been able to teach chatgpt how to close and re-open his eyelids for him. People are hooked up to giant horrendous machines in hospital beds because they have no choice but to let an external, soulless operator breathe for them, meanwhile these Zuckerbergian nitwits are out here unable to send a one-line email without Copilot holding their hand through the trauma of asking Sandra in accounting if she’s received the invoice they’ve submitted yet.

The amount of times I have been confronted by someone using AI. The amount of times I have had to bite my tongue in these situations because the urge the ask them why they couldn’t use their brain instead is so strong.

Dismay is not a strong enough word. I am not-thinking with my emotional brain. I am in full-on vent mode. I am so tired of this shit and so long as our world is ruled by technocratic megalomaniacal billionaires, it’s going nowhere fast. Do you own a Windows computer? Probably. Depending on your Windows settings, every time you open your lock screen, you will be greeted with AI propaganda pushed by Microsoft. And wouldn’t you know it, Microsoft just so happens to have an AI they desperately, desperately want you to buy. Apple has its own AI as well, so don’t worry, if you’re a Mac devotee, you’re invited to the party too. Depression? Disillusionment? Much to my dismay, I work in tech. Though I am not in a technical role, I am exposed to the industry as a whole, and it is exhausting. It withers me. Any feelings of goodwill I manage to drum up about humanity immediately evaporate when I remember that what we are all apparently gagging for is more AI in our stupid giant palm pilots. At least, that’s what Google tells me. Because Google is everywhere. So is Microsoft. And Apple. And Samsung. Barely even matters to list the heavy hitters because everyone has some kind of janky AI they can’t wait to send an email blast full of emojis about. These days, you can’t shake a stick without hitting someone’s AI assistant or AI-powered whatchamacallit.

Querying a novel sucks. I’ve whined about this extensively. To this point, though, I don’t think I’ve mentioned one of the most soulsucking parts of the querying process circa 2025. It’s not the synopsis. It’s not being asked if this novel has been published before, and if it did, how many copies did it sell. It’s not having to personalize yet another query letter for an agent who won’t even give me the time of day. No, no no no. I’m talking about the Yes/No checkbox that I can only assume is now a standard and necessary question in QueryTracker, a querying form used by many, many agencies all over the world:

“Was any part of this book or query package created by A.I.?”

I wither, further. No! No it was fucking not! But guess what, even if it was, how could you tell? AI is notoriously hard to detect. I hereby submit using AI to write a book be considered a trait of genuine psychopathy. Or delusion. Certainly anti-social. Anti-art. Anti-human. Anti-creation.

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: if you can’t write a book, don’t write a book. If you can’t make art, don’t make art.

The kicker is anyone can make art, literally anyone, and still, they will have a tech bro’s wet dream do it for them. Just make art yourself. You should make art yourself. Even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad! But it may also be good, which is good, too. But the most important thing is that YOU made it. Defining “art” is a thorny topic. Surely, one of the few things we can all agree on in this space is that in order for something to be art, it must be made by a person? Elephants who are given paint brushes and go ham on a canvas, you will have to forgive your exclusion. The good news is, as you are elephants, this matters not to you.

I am upset because it feels like we are losing. I don’t even like humans, or myself, and it feels like we are losing humanity, and ourselves, and that is upsetting to me. I don’t know where the line begins or ends between the, “back in my day” old person diatribe and the real, genuine, substantiated fear there is to be had over the current state of technology. How justified is my concern? Every generation thinks the world is worse than it was previously. There is evidence of this going back about as far as humans have been recording history. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that this time, it might be true. The rate at which our technology is evolving (“evolving” a bad word choice, as that implies the natural world being involved whatsoever) is unprecedented and, frankly, awful. Our brains—or at least mine—just can’t keep up. I often feel like my grasp of the world and the state of it is unreachable. Unknowable. Imagine you’re born in 1900 and die in 1985. Or even 1950. May as well be different planets. My life, and the lives of the people who come after me, will be like that, times a hundred. I don’t think we were meant to ever understand the entire world. Big ask for small person. Technology, AI, money, and their unholy throuple is only making it worse. And it was already bad before. I’m upset!

If we were doing something meaningful with all the free time AI is supposedly giving us, maybe I could understand. But when AI frees up your dance card, what are you doing with it? Scrolling social media? Busywork? More AI shit? AI should allow us the freedom to do the things that matter. Does it? Or are we freeing up time just to squander it in other ways? As someone who works in an environment rife with AI, take a guess which scenario I’ve seen more. There is now an entire sub-industry dedicated to teaching you how to prompt AI to get the results you want. Middlemen who exist to create more middlemen. Busywork for busywork’s sake. Business for your business to do more business at your business of business and business. The endless labyrinth of the supply chain, when the majority of the ocean of goods being passed along it are junk. Junk and junk and garbage and junk. Real or digital, it’s all trash. The shit I have seen people ask chatGPT. There are AI voices so realistic now they genuinely sound like you’re speaking to a real person. It’s uncanny and awful. Anytime someone at work has a verbal conversation with AI I swallow down the urge to request they never do that around me again because of how desperately uncomfortable it makes me. Am I being dramatic to say it feels violating to me on a human level? I am a human, and this robot has put on a human skin and is pretending to be like me. I don’t like it. I am exhibiting xenophobia toward robots (and anger toward their creators).

AI is scraping. It’s us, in a funhouse mirror. It steals and it consumes and it eats everything we’ve made that it can get its hands on. AI doesn’t “understand” anything. It has no notion of being alive. It cannot conceive itself. It is not a thinking being. It is an automated tool trained on the unpaid labour of humans. It steals what we’ve created and spits it back in our faces, and the worst part is some people like it. Many people like it. Most people, like with most things, don’t think about it at all.

There are probably things I do and places I traverse that I enjoy and that use AI without me even realizing it. There has always been some garbage on Pinterest, but with AI, it’s gotten so bad I can hardly stand to be there. The anguish I felt upon realizing those adorable quaint pictures of houses and cottages in the woods with colourful gardens bursting at the seams— upon reflection, obviously fake. But when the content is so voluminous, you’re not always hearing every single alarm bell. You’re not clocking each uncanny vibe or blurry face or weirdly placed door knob. We’ve been primed for years and years of endless scrolling to accept slop. This is just an extension of that. Slop so sloppy a human never even laid hands on it.

Remember those ai generated uncanny valley neural slop images circa 2018 or so? Deeply unsettling. Images full of items that, at a glance, seem normal, but look for more than a moment and you couldn’t identify even one of them. There’s a couple reddit threads about the same few photos (“name one thing in this picture” type titles, I will not put here because the images really do engender discomfort and I’ve looked at them enough). Many commenters express upset and anxiety upon looking at these images. There is some false lore these pictures are meant to simulate what someone having a stroke sees, but it seems the much more likely explanation is they are very early AI image generation experiments. And they are horrifying!

Now we have that, but the “realistic” version. Awesome. So, so cool. Like lipstick on a pig.

There must be meaningful uses for AI. I don’t know everything about everything, so I have to believe in some corner of the world, AI is useful in a way that isn’t completely destructive to the people or places or environments around it. Then again, the number of times I have wondered in the last year or so when people espouse how “cool” AI is: so… it’s like a search engine? Which we already had. “As Copilot”, you say? How about I just type my little question into Google? I can use the Gemini (Google’s AI) answer. Or I can scroll (past all the sponsored links) until I find something that looks relatively legit. Before Copilot and Google, there were books. Or other people. Or you just accepted that you didn’t and wouldn’t know. Or, if finding the answer mattered enough, you hunted it down until you got it.

It’s OK to not know something. It’s OK not to have every answer to every banal question that pops into your head throughout the day. It is not imperative to our daily functioning to confirm the name of that restaurant you ate at once two towns over twenty years ago that’s been closed since 2004. Or to learn what skibidi means. Knowledge is power, maybe, but more and more it feels like what Google and Copilot and chatgpt and all the rest give you is not knowledge, but slop. In a genuinely unexpected twist, making knowledge more accessible has made us dumber, not smarter. Wide, not deep. “Jack of all trades” is not the end of the saying.

Take a shot, because yet again, I am talking about how it all comes down to money. AI doesn’t do the slog work, because the slog work isn’t generating income. AI wasn’t implemented first for humanitarian measures, but for capital gains. I presume whatever AI actually could do for us is deeply banal, boring work that does not generate significant income. Or dangerous work that, to this point, humans have had to risk their lives to complete. No, it’s mostly used to take people’s jobs, jobs which, while boring and unfulfilling, are not generally the type of “dangerous” jobs that AI should be taking over. Or steal their art. Or write their university paper (a couple months ago I went on a date with a professor and the absolute horror stories she told me about students using AI… I. WITHER.). Even worse, what if AI does eventually steal the shit jobs, and the people who had those shit jobs can’t find other work? The technology moves faster than meaningful jobs (and the training for them) can be created. We still live in a world where people need money, and are willing to do shit jobs to get it, if that is all that’s available to them. When those jobs are taken by AI (or any automation, really, hello industrial revolution), who looks after those people? We have gotten ourselves into such a mess I have managed to fully pivot back to “let people do unsafe/shit work” because otherwise, they can’t live. I don’t know how we fix this. It goes so much deeper than AI. This is a question of how we, as humans, have structured our societies.

I feel like a punctured balloon. The air has escaped me, along with my ire. I am left, deflated and flabby and pathetic. I have lost. We have lost. It is possible AI will die out, but in its wake, other terrible profit-at-all-costs technologies will rise. I feel like in those near-future dystopian novels where the majority of humanity has escaped to some fictional version of the metaverse, the idea is that people go into those digital spaces willingly as the physical world around them crumbles. In reality, it feels like we’re being nudged forward, one poke at a time, shuffling toward a specific future whether we like it or not. The concept of “choosing” such a fate seems laughable. Many of us are surviving, frog in boiling water style, without even realizing what’s happening. Or even enjoying it. Frog kicks back and thinks its in the hot tub at the spa before it realizes the doors have been locked behind it.

Demoralizing. I am feeling demoralized. Don’t use AI to write your stories or make your art. Hold the line. Use your brain. It’s hard (trust me, I know, most days I can’t think myself out of a paper bag). But it’s possible.