u/thirdaccountttt

A lot of anti-AI arguments would make more sense if they were aimed at companies, employers, copyright law, worker protections, or the economic system in general

Instead, people act like AI personally invented underpaid artists, lazy corporations, spam, plagiarism, layoffs, bad working conditions, and soulless content farms

Those things were already here

AI can absolutely make some of those problems faster and bigger. But banning or shaming the tool does not fix the reason companies treat creative workers as disposable in the first place

If the issue is exploitation, aim at the people exploiting. Screaming at random AI users online is just easier than dealing with the actual system

AI search is becoming the new panic topic, and I get why publishers are scared.

Google is pushing AI deeper into Search. Chatbots are answering questions directly. Media companies are worried that fewer people will click through to their sites.

That concern is real.

But let’s not pretend the old system was some beautiful golden age of quality information.

A huge chunk of the modern internet became SEO sludge: articles padded to 1,200 words to answer a question that needed one sentence, recipe pages buried under life stories, fake comparison posts, affiliate spam, clickbait headlines, pop-ups, trackers, autoplay ads and paywalls stacked on top of each other.

AI search did not create that mess.

It is partly a reaction to it.

People want answers because the web trained them to hate searching through garbage.

There should be rules around AI search. Sources should be credited. Publishers should be able to make licensing deals. Original reporting should not be scraped and swallowed with no value going back to the people who made it.

But acting like AI search is uniquely destroying a healthy internet is dishonest.

The old web was already rotting under ads, SEO spam and platform incentives.

AI search is not the whole disease.

It is also a symptom of how bad the user experience became

I don’t think all anti-AI people are secretly status-obsessed, but a lot of the loudest outrage has that vibe

For years, certain skills gave people social status online. Drawing, editing, writing, design, music, whatever. Then AI came along and suddenly people outside those circles could produce things that looked decent without asking permission first

That clearly pisses some people off

Instead of admitting “I don’t like that this makes my skill feel less exclusive”, they turn it into some massive moral crusade about souls, theft, laziness, culture, humanity, and whatever else

There are real debates to have about AI. But a lot of the rage is obviously not careful criticism. It’s people being angry that the gate got weaker

AI and climate change are connected, but the conversation around it is usually way too simplistic.

Yes, AI uses energy. Yes, data centres use electricity, water, chips, cooling systems, land, and infrastructure. Pretending there is no environmental cost is stupid.

But saying “AI causes climate change” like it is some simple direct pipeline is also wrong.

The relationship is more accurate like this: AI growth is correlated with rising data centre demand, and in some cases it causes extra energy use because more compute is needed to train and run models.

But the emissions are not magically created by AI itself. They mostly come from the energy system underneath it. AI powered by coal or gas is obviously worse. AI powered by renewables, nuclear, cleaner grids, better chips, and more efficient models is a completely different story.

That is why I am still pro-AI.

AI is also one of the strongest tools we have for climate work. It can help model extreme weather, improve energy grids, detect methane leaks, optimise buildings, speed up battery research, improve agriculture, reduce waste, and help scientists process massive amounts of climate data.

So the question should not be “AI or the climate?”

The question should be: who gets to build it, what powers it, how transparent are the companies, and are we using it for actual climate solutions instead of just more ads, spam, and slop?

AI can make climate problems worse if it is built carelessly on dirty energy.

But AI can also help fight climate change if the infrastructure is clean and the technology is used properly.

Correlation: AI growth and energy demand are rising together.

Causation: AI can directly increase electricity demand.

But the climate damage depends on the energy source, efficiency, regulation, and use case.

Blaming AI itself misses the point. The enemy is dirty energy and reckless deployment, not intelligence as a tool.

I get why people are worried about AI, I do. But a lot of anti-AI stuff feels like people finally noticed how fucked creative work already was and then just decided AI caused all of it. Like the writers strike. AI was part of it, yeah, but it wasn’t the whole thing at all. A massive part of it was pay, streaming residuals, writers rooms getting smaller, shorter jobs, less security, all that stuff. Studios were already squeezing writers before AI became the internet villain of the week.

Same with artists. People talk like before AI there was this healthy creative world where everyone got paid fairly and respected. Be serious. Artists were already dealing with shit commissions, stolen work, repost accounts, content farms, exposure nonsense, algorithm chasing, and platforms that reward pumping out constant slop. Will AI make some of that worse in places? Probably. I’m not pretending every concern is fake. But acting like banning AI would bring back some fair, stable, beautiful creative economy is just fantasy.

The actual problem is companies exploiting people. If a studio underpays writers, that’s the studio being scummy. If a company fires artists to cut costs, that’s the company being scummy. Blaming some random person using AI to make art, write, code, learn, or mess around with ideas is just lazy. People are mad at the tool because it’s easier than admitting the system was already rotten.

One of the weirdest anti-AI arguments is the idea that human-made work is automatically meaningful and AI-assisted work is automatically worthless

That sounds nice until you remember humans make lazy, ugly, soulless garbage every single day. Bad movies, bad ads, bad logos, bad writing, bad fan art, bad corporate slop, bad music, bad everything

Being human-made does not magically make something good

The value of a thing should come from the result, the intent, the use, the audience, and the thought behind it. Not just whether the person suffered enough while making it

AI can be used lazily. So can literally every tool. The lazy part is the user, not the existence of the tool

The latest data-centre panic is a perfect example of how anti-AI people turn every solvable engineering problem into a moral crusade.

Yes, AI needs power. So did railways. So did factories. So did the internet. So does every serious technology that actually changes the world.
The IEA projects data-centre electricity use could roughly double by 2030. In Ireland, data centres already used 22% of metered electricity in 2024. That is a real infrastructure challenge.
But “AI uses electricity, therefore stop AI” is an embarrassing argument.

The obvious answer is not to cripple one of the most important technologies humans have ever built. The answer is to build the power, cooling and grid systems needed to support it.
The US is already pushing grid operators to change how they handle huge users like data centres. China is already running a wind-powered underwater data centre near Shanghai, using offshore wind and seawater cooling. That is what serious countries do.

They do not whine that the future is too energy-intensive. They build around it.
AI should be forced to pay for its infrastructure. Data centres should bring power, use cleaner energy, reuse heat where possible, improve cooling, and reduce load when grids are strained. Fine. Regulate the buildout properly.

But the anti-AI position is not “make the infrastructure better”. It is usually just “make the technology go away because I personally hate it”.
That is loser politics.

If AI demand exposes weak grids, fix the grids. If cooling is wasteful, improve cooling. If power is dirty, build cleaner power. If permitting is slow, modernise permitting.
The countries that understand this are going to dominate the next century.

The countries that treat AI like a sin instead of an infrastructure race are going to end up dependent on the ones that built it.

A lot of anti-AI anger seems to come from the fact that people who were previously locked out can now create things they couldn’t make before

Someone who can’t draw can visualise a character. Someone who struggles with writing can draft a story. Someone with no design background can make a poster. Someone with no budget can make concept art, thumbnails, memes, game assets, mockups, music ideas, or whatever else

That doesn’t mean every result is good. Obviously there is still bad AI content everywhere. But bad content existed before AI too. The internet has always been full of lazy posts, ugly edits, weak writing, bad fan art, spam, scams, and low-effort garbage

The difference is that AI gives more people access to creative output without needing years of technical skill first

That scares people who built their identity around the gate being hard to enter

AI is not the death of creativity. It is the death of pretending creativity only counts when it passes through the old barriers

Before someone twists this: no, this does not mean every anti-AI person is a CCP bot. Plenty of people genuinely dislike AI for their own reasons.

But it does mean anti-AI panic is exactly the kind of thing foreign influence ops can exploit.

OpenAI just reported that two PRC-linked influence operations used ChatGPT to generate posts, comments, and images targeting US AI debates. One campaign, “Data Center Bandwagon”, pushed narratives about AI data centres raising electricity prices and hurting local communities. Another, “Tech and Tariffs”, attacked US tech policy while specifically avoiding criticism of Xi Jinping.

That matters because China is not some neutral observer here. The CCP has openly treated AI as a strategic national priority for years, and Reuters just reported that China is preparing a roughly $295 billion AI data centre buildout to compete with the US.

So when the West gets flooded with “AI must be stopped”, “data centres must be blocked”, “AI development is evil”, “AI infrastructure is dangerous”, etc, we should at least ask who benefits from that becoming mainstream.

Again, this does not prove every anti-AI take is foreign propaganda. But it does show the anti-AI movement creates a very useful opening for hostile states: amplify public fear, slow Western AI infrastructure, weaken public trust, and let authoritarian competitors keep building.

The anti-AI side loves acting like they are “resisting Big Tech”. In practice, some of their arguments line up very neatly with the interests of governments that would love the US and Europe to kneecap their own AI progress

One thing I keep noticing is that a lot of anti-AI arguments only sound noble because they’re framed as protecting "human creativity".

But when you strip the wording back, loads of it is basically: "I had a skill that gave me status, money, attention, or a sense of uniqueness, and now more people can produce decent results without going through the same gatekeeping process I did."

That doesn’t automatically make AI evil. It means the barrier to entry dropped.

This has happened constantly with technology. Cameras changed portrait painting. Digital art changed traditional art. YouTube changed TV. Home music software changed studio access. Every time, the people who had the old advantage acted like the new tool was fake, soulless, cheating, lazy, theft, or the death of the craft.

AI is just the newest and fastest version of that.

If your argument is "people may lose income", fair enough, that is a real economic issue. But if your argument is "people should not be allowed to make good-looking art, writing, music, code, or videos unless they suffer through the same process I did", then that’s not ethics. That’s status protection.

A lot of anti-AI arguments only work because people apply a totally different standard to AI than they apply to humans.

Humans learn by looking at existing work. Artists study styles. Writers absorb phrasing, structure, tropes, pacing, genres, references, influences, everything. Nobody calls that theft unless someone is directly copying a protected work.

But with AI, suddenly learning from existing material becomes “stealing”, even when the output is new and not a copy of anything specific.

If someone wants to argue that AI companies should pay for training data, fine, that’s at least a real policy debate. But the idea that every AI image or AI-written paragraph is automatically stolen property is just lazy moral panic.

You don’t get to redefine learning as theft only when the learner is a machine.

I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this, because my image generation filters feel way stricter than what I see other people posting.

I’ve seen people apparently able to generate images referencing things like Hitler, Nazis, the KKK, violent scenes, NSFW-ish stuff, etc. I’m not talking about trying to make propaganda or anything like that, just historical/reference type prompts or edgy fictional stuff.

But on my account, anything even remotely violent, sexual, politically sensitive, or sometimes even involving religious symbols seems to get blocked or heavily restricted.

It feels like some users have way looser limits than others, or maybe the filters are inconsistent depending on wording/account/model/version.

Has anyone else had this? Are image gen filters personalised/account-based, region-based, random, or just extremely inconsistent?

This is one of the biggest contradictions in anti-AI spaces

When they want to insult it, AI is “soulless slop”, “garbage”, “fake art”, “nobody likes it”, “nobody wants this”, and “it can’t create anything good”

Then two seconds later, when they want to panic about it, AI is apparently so powerful that it will destroy every creative industry, replace artists, flood the internet, manipulate culture, and permanently change society

Both can’t be the main argument at the same time

If AI is useless slop, then it is not an existential threat to creative work. If it is dangerous because it is useful and competitive, then pretending it has no value is cope

A lot of anti-AI rhetoric only survives because people switch arguments depending on what sounds better in the moment

Every week anti-AI people act like the entire technology can be judged by bad Facebook images and lazy spam posts, while the actual useful stuff keeps moving.

The FDA recently accepted an AI-driven liver model into its drug-development qualification programme to help predict drug-related liver injury earlier: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-alerts-and-statements/fda-accepts-first-silico-drug-development-tool-under-istand-program-help-predict-drug-induced-liver

Reuters also covered it here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-fda-review-ai-based-tool-predict-drug-related-liver-damage-2026-06-03/

Cleveland Clinic has been rolling out AI scribes so doctors can spend less time typing notes and more time actually focusing on patients: https://www.businessinsider.com/cleveland-clinic-ambient-ai-scribe-reducing-doctor-workload-2026-06

AP reported that wildfire-prone US states are using AI cameras for earlier fire detection, including systems that can spot possible smoke before a fire gets out of hand: https://apnews.com/article/194656fe63ea89dbc4661eaf8b79f6bb

And a recent study found generative AI reduced working time by 3.8% among workers using it, even if those gains do not always show up cleanly in productivity stats yet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12695

This is why the “AI is just slop” argument is so weak. Slop exists, sure. Spam exists. Bad use exists. But that is not the whole technology.

AI is already being used in medicine, admin work, disaster detection, research, coding, accessibility, education, translation, and creative tools. Normal people are getting more capability and less pointless busywork.

At some point, the anti-AI position stops looking like “ethical concern” and starts looking like people saw a few bad outputs online and decided an entire technology should be kneecapped