As of October 2026, a lot of people hate AI.
I think hate towards AI can be broadly categorised into the following reasons:
- AI is hurting creatives.
- AI is hurting critical thinking.
- AI is producing slop.
- AI is damaging to the environment.
- AI is controlled by tech overlords.
- AI is trained on stolen intellectual property.
- AI is going to take my job.
- AI is unsafe (scams, mass surveillance, bioweapons etc.)
- AI is girlfriend/boyfriend.
- AI is a bubble
In lieu of the points I made in part one, let's bring nuance into the scene. I am not an AI worshipper nor luddite, I am just here to paint the bigger picture. I get incredibly frustrated when people are simply tribal on such a revolutionary piece of technology. It's a profound change in human civilisation and deserves deep thought on it. This time, TikTok videos probably won't cut it.
The first nuance general anti-AI sentiment lacks is of course that AI is a huge category of technology. Saying you are just anti-AI is a bit like saying you are anti-maths, or anti-psychology. AI is a legitimate field of computer science that has had decades of developments, setbacks and breakthroughs. It had died multiple times in the 1900s as research progress stalled and the best computer scientists gave up in its development. Broadly speaking, it can range anything from machine learning models, to chess engines like Stockfish, to large language models which is the tech behind ChatGPT. There are wildly different AI researchers and teams applying different techniques to wildly different problems. AI stands for artificial intelligence, which just means trying to create smart, autonomous systems that are not organic, like how aero engineers create things that fly that are not organic. Lots of things fly, lots of things can be smart.
Let's address each of the points and argue both for and against the wider impacts of AI.
1. "AI is hurting creatives."
I like creatives. Some of my best friends are musicians. Lots of others such as filmmakers, photographers, artists, and so on contribute a lot of creativity, expression and value to our world.
AI can hurt creatives. I'm not going to sugar coat it. Creatives live and die by the attention and money of the masses. If you can capture people's attention and interest as a creative, with some willingness to pay, you'll survive and do decently well. However, AI empowers non-creatives to pump out mass slop and divert attention from real artists. These slop contribute no artistic value and turns your brain into a homogenous soup.
The counterargument here is that, slop is not new. We've had human slop for decades and decades. AI, as of 2026, is just a tool directed by humans. Humans have always used whatever at their disposal to scam, distract or just generally hustle others. Before AI we had bot farms, before bot farms we had gossip editorials and so on. The tools make it more mass produced and powerful, but blaming the tool is always taking attention away from the people wielding it.
Another perspective is that artistic value is often in the eyes of the beholder. From what I can see on the internet, at least some people can distinguish slop from real art on the internet. I remember once riding a bus in Bangkok and seeing the person next to me watch a TikTok of a banana getting cut up and put into a toilet, or something to that effect. She watched the whole thing from start to finish, full attention. If AI creates art that evokes emotions or entertains, does it matter that it was created without intention? One could certainly argue both ways. And this certainly isn't exclusively an AI problem. Again, bigger picture. It's funny because a subset of "serious musicians" I follow on YouTube or talk to in real life would always criticise pop music for being formulaic and generic, and yet by definition, most people I know love pop music and don't care about the musical craft and "artistic value". They want a good time and something catchy to dance to and it delivers just that.
What about artists that use AI as a tool? For instance I can compose a piece of music but not be able to afford an orchestra to record it, is it ok to use AI to mock it up as a demo? If it's really good, can I publish it as a recording? What if I drew a painting and used AI to help me market it? It is just a tool. It can be used... for anything!
2. "AI is hurting critical thinking."
Sometimes I feel more stupid in this AI age than I used to be. I've forgotten how to run code in my head, all my maths skills are a bit discounted and my willingness to debug things on my own is now non-existent. In many sense, I'm a bit dumber now than I used to be.
Let's travel back 200 years, you are a tax agent working for your government and a top accountant. If I asked you to multiply 3242345 with 452353, how would you do it quickly enough to keep your job? We are taught multiplication in our first years at school and yet, most people would have no idea and their understanding of this problem amounts to something like "the calculator does it pretty quick". It turns out there were huge books of lookup tables, to translate large numbers into representations that you can just add, and then you use the book to translate back to a number. So many skills are lost to time and innovation. I have no idea how to start a fire.
We all have finite time as humans. The problems we are able to understand deeply and be able to solve are finite. Whilst AI does take away the need for us to do some intellectual tasks, it creates more problems at a higher abstraction level for us to scratch our heads at. How do you coordinate and check AI agents, for instance.
Again, AI is just a tool. Large language models can be used to cheat your way through an exam, or you can use it to quiz you during revision. There's no reason why you can't leverage the tool against yourself and increase your intellectual load.
Another interesting point I often think about is how the people who lack critical thinking have always struggled with misinformation. Before AI there was the internet and Alex Jones, before Alex there were news tabloids, before that you had no literacy rate and had to rely on village gossip. People being lied to and believing in it is not at all new. In fact, I would argue AI, as shipped by Claude or ChatGPT is far better than any mass information distribution tool we've had so far in that there's one party that's actually accountable and watched for the content it outputs and that it tends to output bland, non-political, consensus facts that steers the user away from radicalism, scams and sources with ulterior motives.
My mum for instance is not a person of great critical thinking. She loves watching shorts on WeChat and is frequently believes random superstitious crap or, what I often see on there, old people dressed up as experts talking straight convincing bullshit. After I encouraged her to use ChatGPT, she's gotten much better at fact checking and relying it on a source of truth. Critical thinking is a bit like swimming, everyone can learn it, but not everyone does, and we are all drowning in bullshit.
Always take a step back, think of the bigger picture. You'll always gain something out of seeing things more holistically.