AI? We Need a Human Rebellion

I want to be clear: I don’t hate AI any more than I hate a hammer.

But throw the hammer at my face? Yeah, I might have an issue with that. It's the same with AI. What I hate is the obsession with it. The smug rush to stuff “AI” into every creative corner like we’re duct-taping the future together with predictive text.

Because let’s be honest: all these "AI" tools are not actually artificial intelligence. They're glorified autocorrect. A souped-up probability machine that doesn’t know anything, and can’t feel anything (even if you project your own emotion onto it).

It's a prediction model guessing what you want to hear, trained on the words of humans who do know things, who do feel things.

And yet the world keeps nodding along, acting like the ghost in the machine is the next Shakespeare. What does it say about us as humans - about how little we value our own weird, messy, inconvenient brilliance - that so many of us would rather hand over our best work to a few lines of code running on a server?

It started out with noble promises.

LLMs and AI tools are here to help make our lives easier! To augment our existence! “You’ll have more time to dream! More time to make real art!” they said.

And what did we get? CEOs laying off editors, writers, designers. Not because AI is better, but because AI is cheaper. “Good enough” is the new genius. Good enough, fast enough, no sick pay, no pensions, no union, no inconveniently human meltdown over originality or ethics.

Meanwhile, the LLMs are scraping our books, our poems, our microfictions and stray Tumblr posts, hoovering up our fingerprints, flattening them into a generic experience of vaguely average facsimile.

Of course, there's no such thing as a completely original thought for humans either - but there’s a huge difference between being inspired by a story, entwining it with all of your own context and life experience, and simply copying it pixel for pixel. Humans understand that. Machines don’t. They just guess.

The best tools don’t do the work for you. They make you work better. They push you back into the drafts with sharper questions, not cookie-cutter scripts.

It’s like Hollywood reboot culture, but worse.

There's another completely new rebooted Superman movie coming out this month. How many times can you blow up Metropolis before it feels like a tax write-off?

Don't we deserve more than just the same bland, safe, recycled noise? Imagine the budget for this new Superman film funding ten, twenty, thirty movies from new voices. They might be messy, unpolished, and their box office takings are impossible to predict - but fuck, wouldn't it be nice to have some original storytelling in mainstream cinema again?

Generative AI is the same. It gives you an okay enough draft, a franchise reboot of ideas scraped from someone braver than you. And we eat it up because it’s familiar. Nostalgia sells, but it's cheap popcorn. There's not a meal's worth of nourishment there, no interesting flavour combinations. No tasting as you go along.

(And yes, as a human I get to mix metaphors until the cows come to roost.)

I want friction. I want plot holes. I want the lines that don’t work until you sleep on them for three weeks and rewrite them on a napkin. I want my poems to be bad before they’re better. I want my stories to have my fingerprints all over them, not just the echo of a thousand other people’s.

I want more "bad" art.

The promise was that these tools would make us more human. So far, they’ve stripped humanity from art, and stripped employment from artists.

We need a rebellion. Not a technophobic rebellion, but a human one. A rebellion for the stutters, the typos, the bits that don’t add up until they do. A rebellion for the jokes no algorithm would dare attempt, the weird genre-bending plots that flop before they fly. Let's agree that it's okay for things to be a bit more rough around the edges. A bit more punk and a bit less polished. Let's get back to embracing the unknown.

More sweat, fewer shortcuts. More spice, less blandness. More story, less franchise. More surprises. More sentences you’ll never predict.

Who’s with me?