There’s no denying it, artificial intelligence has rapidly changed how we produce and consume media. From essays to illustrations, AI tools now effortlessly generate content that used to take artists and writers a significant amount of time and effort to perfect. Worse, some AI tools can do tasks like this in hours or even minutes.
While AI technology does offer new levels of convenience and efficiency for simple tasks, it fails to hold up under scrutiny. Hallucinated facts, non-working code, and garbled imagery are just a few ways it falls short, completely destroying any illusions of productivity.
While the convenience factor artificial intelligence offers is hard to ignore, we should be asking where the training data for all these pop-up LLMs is actually coming from.
Chances are it’s the very same artists, authors, and content creators you already know and love. Lifelong creatives who now have to watch their work being ripped off and hacked up into AI slop. This has both economic and ethical consequences.
The increased use of AI-generated content poses untold risks to the most basic concepts of being a human. Our spark, our originality, the part in all of us that recognizes and responds positively to real, human made creations. Are we slowly being priced out of the value we place on human creativity?
The Erosion of Creative Integrity
Yet another serious concern with AI-generated work is the erosion of human authenticity. Art and literature are inherently human forms of expression. The creations of our peers, friends and family can capture emotion, context, and lived experience in ways that machines cannot truly replicate.
Although AI can produce convincing imitations, these creations are barren of depth and meaning. No more unique than the 500 other pre-printed art canvases rolled off the assembly line. Sure, the algorithms can mimic brushstrokes, analyze style, and mimic narrative choices.
But they cannot feel heartbreak, understand social injustice, or experience joy. They don’t create out of some need to express themselves, but simply because they’re following instructions. As a result, AI-generated content simply cannot inspire the emotions that make art resonate for each of us.
When audiences consume AI-generated works without understanding their origin, it has the deeply harmful effect of diluting the appreciation for the complexity of human expression. Art becomes another hollow commodity to be consumed by capitalistic vultures who prize speed and surface-level polish over originality and soul. An overpriced, meaningless replication that reflects, celebrates, and means nothing.
Why is this happening? Billionaires are pushing to invest with empty promises of long-term value. The end result is a “Monkey-See-Monkey-Do” effect coupled with the only real trickling down the economy ever does.
The first to fall victim are those who weren’t billionaires but desperately wanted to be. I can be a billionaire too, they thought to themselves. I just need to crack whatever these guys did.
They didn’t. Instead, they’ve buoyed AI’s speculative value by forcing it into every workplace, tool, and system. Everyone from the detached C-Suite executive perpetually chasing bigger numbers to your incompetent, micromanaging asshole of a supervisor has taken the poison pill.
Some of them think AI will magically supercharge productivity. That it can make people produce faster, smarter, and better. Others see AI-generated content wherever they turn, accusing even authentic work of being AI-generated because AI told them it was so.
How did we get here?
Because AI companies stole the work of creatives en-masse to train their models, with even the most allegedly ethical companies taking a piece of the pie. That’s why it’s so easy to accuse people of using AI. It’s why AI detection software is pure garbage.
AI stole our techniques and methods. It consumed decades of exacting practice, hard work, and passion and used it to vomit out slop that threatens the very creatives it robbed. Countless years of effort twisted into something unrecognizable in a manner of seconds.
It’s giving late stage capitalism for sure.
Ethical and Copyright Concerns
AI systems require massive datasets to function. These datasets often include existing works created by artists and writers without their consent. Many visual AI models, for instance, have scraped billions of images from the internet to “learn” artistic styles. Not a cent of remuneration was offered.
Instead, artists are mocked as they direct their already dwindling finances toward lawsuits that pay them a pittance. And those are the lucky ones. Others are countersued into financial ruin for having the audacity to protect their intellectual properties from a collective of creatively bankrupt leeches.
Writers face the same issue. Large language models (LLMs) absorb books, poems, and articles as training material, much of it pirated. It’s nothing more than large-scale plagiarism masquerading as innovation.
For example, people now use the em dash, as a sign that something was “written by AI”. It learned that style from career professional writers. They did not get a single cent for their unwilling contributions to this allegedly “revolutionary technology.”
What makes the massive scope even more troubling is the lack of legal clarity. Even copyright and IP-based legal professionals may struggle to protect their clients and litigate on their behalf. Many judges don’t know where the law actually falls on the matter.
Current copyright legislation simply isn’t robust enough to define what constitutes infringement in the context of generative AI — anti-creative decisions by US courts notwithstanding.
Artists whose styles are copied thus have limited recourse. All the while, AI developers profit unfairly from content built on unpaid, or outright stolen human labor. Or they claim to, at least.
Of the countless AI startups infesting the market, the majority are running in the red. They’ve yet to turn a profit, even after several years of “rampant and unexpected tech sector growth.” AI initiatives at established corporations aren’t faring any better, with 95% failing to generate a measurable return on investment.
Even if these companies do make it to significant profit margins, there is no guarantee that isn’t being propped up with overinflated government contracts and cash injections. They know that it cannot do or replace all they claim. They’re selling snake oil disguised as a silver bullet, hoping they can make a tidy profit and run before anyone is the wiser.
The imbalance created by the exponential growth and availability of LLMs also threatens to normalize exploitation as a business model. A reduction of the entire creative economy to datapoints and algorithms. The systemization of creativity by the creatively bankrupt.
Economic Displacement of Artists and Writers
As AI-generated content becomes cheaper and faster to produce, it undercuts the market for human-made work. Businesses eager to cut costs increasingly rely on automated tools to generate social media posts, marketing copy, news summaries, and even illustrations.
For freelance writers and digital artists, this trend has already meant fewer opportunities and lower pay being offered across the board. Or, a worrying new trend in which companies attempt to get out of paying for creative work, by claiming the artist used AI to generate it. It works more often than it should, giving creatives even less room to fight back.
For creative industries operating on slim margins, smaller businesses, and freelancers, AI is a near-existential threat. Publishers, design firms, and studios are already trying to make slop palatable to the masses. Their end goal is for consumers to view human creators as unnecessary budgetary luxuries.
Some companies have begun replacing staff with AI systems that can produce in minutes what used to take professionals days to complete.
So what’s the problem? The corporate world’s always operated that way. Speed, productivity, and profit above all else.
The problem is that the tools don’t work. Inaccuracies are higher than ever. Experienced developers who thought AI made them faster and more productive were stunned to learn it did the opposite.
All the while, countless people are reporting significant productivity loss after being forced to adopt AI tools. What should have been a productivity enabler has become an albatross. People are forced to constantly triple-check outputs, fix errors that refuse to correct, and even counteract gaslighting.
Yet the AI slop machine continues to churn. It continues to commodify creativity, weakening career and wage bargaining power while destroying the cultural value of labor itself. We’re trying to replace actual human culture with an ill-functioning mockery of everything it means to be human.
And in the long run, that’s going to kill more than productivity.
