Hating AI is good, actually

Jonah Peretti is very lucky. Buzzfeed—the viral media company he founded 20 years ago and was once valued at $1.6 billion—was running out of cash when billionaire Byron Allen agreed to buy 52% of its shares. At the same time this new partnership was revealed, Peretti announced he’d be stepping down as CEO of Buzzfeed to serve in a new role as President of Buzzfeed AI. So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect. 

Lately I’ve felt myself rapidly radicalizing into what I can only call an anti-AI evangelist. I’ve never been quiet about my feelings on the subject—I even wrote a screed about it last month—but as more and more examples show how easily it can be used unethically, I’m not just skeptical. I'm against it. 

I wouldn’t call this a particularly bold stance, given the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal declares an “AI Rebellion,” noting that public opinion on the subject is souring “at breakneck speed.” What is novel, I think, is recognizing that people who loathe AI and the way it’s being foisted upon society are an actual constituency to be taken seriously. I figure that if billionaires and brands are going to try to beat us into AI submission, it’s only fair we get to take a few swings. We’re told that if we don’t use AI then we’ll get left behind, but what if we’d like to leave the AI boosters behind instead? It’s time to give a voice to those who don’t view AI as an inevitability but a liability. 

Now is our time. 

The soundtrack of the past week or so has been the boos of graduating college students as out-of-touch adults try to tell them that they need to embrace AI or else. Perhaps most prominent were the boos of University of Arizona graduates as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told them, “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.” 

These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.” What Schmidt doesn’t get is that these young people have already been forced onto the ship and there aren’t enough seats.

A few days before Schmidt, record company CEO Scott Borchetta took the stage at Middle Tennessee State University’s commencement to extoll the virtues of AI. When the students, whose job prospects have shrunken significantly because of the AI bubble, booed Borchetta, he shot back: “Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool.”

Sage words from a man reportedly worth $450 million.

It may seem callous for a commencement speaker to respond to graduates’ existential dread with “deal with it,” but billionaires and tech companies have been feeding us this message for a while now. You may not like AI, they preach, but because of choices we are making for you, life will be increasingly unlivable without it. Yet while they try to force-feed us this bleakly inevitable future, actually existing AI keeps making the humans who use it look like idiots.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on a new book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” by media executive Steven Rosenbaum. He readily copped to having “used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process.” But he didn’t disclose—likely because he didn’t realize it!— that his book contained misattributed or completely fabricated quotes created by those very tools. Only when reporters began to question the quotes did Rosenbaum promise to “investigate” how they’d been included. 

But Rosenbaum was unrepentant. He told the Times that if this debacle “serves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” And he went on to say: “These AI errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and AI and its impact on society, democracy and editorial.”

Ronsebaum’s big whoopsie is certainly a warning, but not in the way he thinks. He himself is the warning; a cautionary tale about relying so heavily on a flawed technology that it completely undermines your legitimacy. The errors may not diminish some of the book’s larger questions, but they diminish the value of the book itself. If you can’t make the effort to verify the contents of your book, then why should anyone make an effort to read it?

Two other literary AI-crises unfolded Tuesday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But also potentially a sign that AI use has reached the critical mass billionaires hoped for. Only, instead of making things better, it’s just made them stupider. 

One of the crises involved the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a prestigious annual fiction award, and the winning stories. When this year’s winners were published online by UK-based literary magazine Granta, one immediately aroused suspicion that it was partly AI-generated. Some, perhaps to sardonically prove a point, ran it through AI that claims to detect the presence of AI. Later, Granta’s publisher admitted to doing the same thing. “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated,” the statement reads. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’.”

But the use of AI on AI only caused more confusion. “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” the publisher wrote. For a well-respected publisher to simply throw up its hands and say “perhaps we never will know,” deeply rankled some human writers, to say the least. 

The other scandal surrounded Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s admission that she used AI in her writing process, clarifying that she uses “artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts.” The casualness with which she mentioned it during an earlier interview indicated she wasn’t particularly tortured about using it. 

“Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’” Tokarczuk reportedly said, per a translation from Polish. “Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.” 

This brings up the idea I’ve seen pushed by other writers who openly used AI and say this technology is merely like a sourdough starter, creating the conditions for something to be made where there was once nothing. The problem arises when you don’t know where the starter ends and the creative process begins. And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists?

To understand the crusade for, and increasingly against, AI, one must regrettably log into LinkedIn. Originally known as a social media platform for job searching and professional networking, it’s morphed primarily into a place where tech evangelists assert supremacy by loudly and frequently listing out the ways they harness technology to achieve peak performance. None of the posts read like something an actual human would say, and I would guess the people posting this shit don’t talk like that in real life. But it’s not real life. It’s LinkedIn. A haven for sycophants to gain validation for their originality all while saying the same things as everyone else. Typically I scroll through for amusement, and sometimes post to promote my 100% human-made work.

While LinkedIn may seem like an impenetrable space for AI skeptics and outright haters like me, my passive scrolling has somewhat confirmed what the WSJ labeled a “rebellion.” One trend I noticed a month or two back is that marketing professionals, TED talkers and communications gurus alike have started calling out what they see as easy tells for AI-generated writing. 

At first, I took it as a hopeful sign that AI use wasn’t going completely unchecked. After all, according to a Pew study from September, “U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships,” with 53% saying AI will make it worse, and 16% saying it will both of those things better. But after reading enough of these posts, I came to realize people on LinkedIn weren’t mad others were using AI; they were mad people were being so sloppy about it, not even bothering to massage the machine’s language to conceal their process.

And of course with most trends, there’s a backlash to people calling out AI. One defender called the popular groundswell against AI slop “the new McCarthyism.” Some of these posts about AI policing are imbued with a sense of outright betrayal. How dare you draw attention to an unethical shortcut that we all use, even if some of us are better at using it than others. How dare you let people see your writing is actually just two LLMs in a trench coat. Again they’re not mad that people use it: they’re mad that people are catching on.

But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. I’m not a hater based on vibes. I’m a hater based on facts. And those facts deserve as much respect as the billionaires who continue to dump money into losing enterprises.

Just ask Pizza Hut. 

A not-insignificant part of my frustration with the AI ethos saturating LinkedIn is that it increasingly serves only one, narrow vision of success. It’s the success that comes only to the organized, the efficient and the hyper-optimized. And above all, to the deeply certain.

But as someone who’s built a business myself, the one thing I can be certain about is that there is absolutely another way. You don’t have to be part of the grindset or be a girlboss or a sociopath or use shortcuts to be successful. You don’t have to outsource thinking to a machine to demonstrate you understand the future. You will only be and do those things if what you’re actually seeking is power. 

“People hate AI,” the CEO of an AI-infrastructure consulting firm said on a podcast, per the Wall Street Journal. “AI is less popular than ICE. AI is less popular than politicians.” And much like ICE, AI has sunk its claws into communities that don’t want it. 

Despite the braying of the tech elite, we still have agency. We still have a choice.  Players with many billions at stake have a vested interest in removing your agency, and reclaiming it hurts their bottom line. There’s no way to say for certain who will be right about AI in the end, but the current evidence points towards disaster. And it’s safe to acknowledge it.

This story was edited by Jesse Hicks.