A friend told me he blocks any social media account he suspects of using AI to produce its content. I told him he should just give up on looking at his phone.
He didn’t laugh. Maybe he thought I was being cute. I wasn’t. The consumer internet is already running on Artificial Intelligence, whether he notices the seams or not. The recommendation that surfaces his next video, the caption suggested under his half-finished post, the customer service chat that answers his billing question, the spam filter that decided what never reached him at all. He isn’t screening AI out of his feed. He’s screening out the accounts dumb enough to leave fingerprints, like mine. I sell Generative AI every day, and I use it every day. I’ve taken a 60-hour work week and turned it into a 35-hour work week, with plenty of room to push the accelerator and do more when required. It is asinine to take a moral position against a cultural shift that’s already happened. For some of us, there is no choice about whether to adopt AI. There is only the doing.
I started my career filing periodicals by the Dewey Decimal system, pulling paper cards out of a wooden catalog drawer. Since then, computing has arrived in waves: mainframes, personal computers, the internet, mobile, cloud, machine learning, and now generative AI. Each wave got the same reception. Skeptics called it a fad. Boosters called it salvation. Most of it got swallowed whole into the plumbing, so ordinary now that nobody bothers calling it technology anymore. Nobody calls electricity a miracle either.
This one is different only in scale, and this one is staying.
That’s not just my situation. Inside the technology sector, professionals are not asked to adopt AI. They are told to, and measured on how well they do it. Refuse, and you choose a different career. I’ve watched companies stall on this for a year, sometimes two, dressing the delay up as caution. Most of that caution is fear: fear of getting the integration wrong, fear of legal exposure, fear of telling the board the truth that the work itself is about to change shape. None of that fear is principled. It’s just slower.
For the people actually building this technology, “Everything-AI” was never a position to take. It was a job requirement. The argument happening online, the side people pick and defend with their thumbs, is a debate happening at a safe distance from where the real decision already got made.
Post something hopeful about generative AI on any platform and watch what happens. Angry replies fill up faster than likes. Strangers who have never spoken to you arrive specifically to tell you that you’re wrong, or worse, complicit. I’ve been called a classless techbro whore. A bootlicker. A few insults clever enough that I gave them a like on the way out.
None of it bothers me. Those with ears will hear what I’m actually saying: the choice is over. It’s done. The only choice left is how we each behave next. Technology disruption has run this play before. Consider industrial farming over the last century. There was a last farmer somewhere who fell dead at his plow, and his land got bought and harvested by a threshing machine the size of a dinosaur. The machine didn’t ask his permission. It didn’t need to.
The reason people reach for insults instead of arguments isn’t mysterious. People engage more willingly with strangers over what they hate than what they mutually enjoy. It’s an old instinct, the one that built armies, turned inward now and aimed at ideas instead of enemies. The algorithm didn’t invent that instinct. It just found the fastest way to feed it, and now everyone is the food.
My friend’s blocklist is the mild version of refusing to be food. Refuse to engage with anything you fear, and you never have to feel the discomfort of being wrong. That’s the harmless end of the spectrum.
I’ve watched this curdling happen in cycles since September 2001. First it was Muslims. Then America elected a Black man, and Occupy Wall Street’s self-righteous demands merged with the Tea Party’s grievance against government, and Make America Great Again was born from that spiritual union, a big tent party built on grievance, blame, and punishment, very loosely followed by policy principles. Those shared culturally dark emotions are effective at galvanizing mutual perception and feeling across segments of society. They are not effective governing principles. Now the same pattern is running again, online, sorted into new factions: AI-Worshippers, AI-Curious, and Anti-AI Blame Lords.
Fear of something you can’t control through your own behavior has to go somewhere, and too often it goes toward blame. Blame curdles into hate. Hate finds a target close enough to hit. Online, disagreements about software have escalated into people wishing death and pain on each other. Concretized ideas. Poisoned accusations. And eventually, somebody mentions a gun.
Ideas are not wars. They were never meant to be fought like one. There is right, and there is wrong, but the test isn’t who shouted louder or recruited more allies to their side of the comment section. The test is simple: does this idea serve a fulfilling life, or does it harm one? Abandon the ideas that fail that test. Keep the ones that pass. That’s the only fight worth having, and it isn’t fought with insults.
And here is what is actually at risk of being missed while everyone fights over insults. There is a real opportunity in this technology, one most people skip past on their way to their scrolling iPhone cult meetings. I have had serious, good-faith conversations with people who disagree with me about almost everything regarding AI, and we still land on the same starting point: this technology has real value. The disagreement begins after that: over what it costs to use it responsibly, and over whether modern leaders are capable of defending a moral line against unchecked profits, sometimes sourced in human misery and the potential of environmental catastrophe.
That cost is not abstract. It’s data architecture. It’s security. It’s integration done correctly, not bolted on after the fact. Before any company should be trusted to put a model in front of customers or employees, somebody has to answer harder questions than “does it work.” Where does the data live? Who can touch it? What happens when it’s wrong? Most companies rushing to announce an AI feature have not answered a single one of those questions honestly.
There is a deeper problem underneath the technical one. The large language models running most of this industry were built in part by breaking copyright law at a scale no court has fully reckoned with yet, and by exploiting platform APIs that were never designed to be harvested the way they were. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the well-documented origin story of an entire industry. Pretending otherwise, in either direction, doesn’t serve anybody. The Everything-AI crowd that waves this away as the cost of progress is wrong. So is the Anti-AI crowd that treats it as proof the whole technology should be refused on moral grounds.
Here’s a question worth sitting with for a second before answering it: should an average consumer be allowed to speak directly to a machine that then moves a company or a government? Many of us will agree that leaving companies and governments up to people has not been as successful as we need it to be. We’ve gotten it wrong barely less than getting it right, and we’re in real danger of fucking the whole thing up. Should we place a layer of Generative AI technology between human leaders and industry mechanisms and government resources? Say it plainly, and it sounds dystopian. It is also an important question, and dystopian doesn’t mean wrong.
For every Hal9000, Cylon, and Skynet, there is an opposing Starship Enterprise Computer, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and Halo’s Cortana. But characters working with those fictional Artificial Intelligence technologies were trained on it for the same reason we don’t let toddlers drive cars, or allow people to juggle nuclear weapons. Some technology is too serious for unrestricted general use, and wanting guardrails on that kind of technology is not the same as being against the technology. It means building locks for the doors and assigning someone to check them.
The same logic applies to how the data gets acquired in the first place, and here there is an actual fix on the table, not just a complaint. Picture a painter who places a single, wholly owned image on a blockchain, a ledger that reveals tampering by design, since any change to the record creates a new, visible block in the chain. That painting becomes available to cinematic AI tools under whatever terms the ledger encodes. A film director uses it as set dressing, hanging in the background of an office on a TV show. Every time a human pair of eyes looks at that painting on screen, the painter automatically gets paid an agreed-upon amount in a currency built on the same chain that holds the image. No lawsuit. No negotiation. No platform quietly profiting off art it never paid for. That is what guardrails look like, instead of refusal: a structure that lets the technology keep moving while ensuring the person who made the thing gets paid every time it’s used.
This is the actual alignment problem in front of us. Not whether AI has value. Not whether to use it. Whether we build the resources, name the debts honestly, and put guardrails in place before the next wave moves too fast to control.
Talking about this isn’t enough. Screaming about it is worse than nothing.
Every position covered so far- the blocklist, the insults, the worship, the grievance- shares one trait: it lets a person feel certain without doing anything. Certainty is cheap. Data architecture, security, fair payment, behavioral change. Well, none of that is cheap, and none of it gets built by an argument won online.
My friend who blocks every account he suspects of using AI isn’t protecting himself from anything. But he’s not hurting anyone either. But let’s ask the only questions that matter: Does that activity improve his health? No, it just gives his thumb something to do. Does it improve his productivity? No, the feed runs on the same machinery whether he sees the seams or not. Does it foster a positive, more loving relationship with the people in his life? No, it mostly gives him something to be right about, justify a loop of anger, and feel more alone.
I’m not asking him to love this technology. I’m asking him to run the same test on it that he’d run on anything else worth keeping in his life. Health. Productivity. Relationships. Everything else is noisy stress, dressed up as conviction.
That’s the test. It works on him. It works on me. It works on anyone willing to run it before they run their mouth.
