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.
"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. I believe that
Always take a step back, think of the bigger picture. You'll always gain something out of seeing things more holistically.