Why TF is Everybody So Mad About A.I.?

Artificial intelligence used to sound like some far-off sci-fi concept. Robots taking over the world? Cool. Siri becoming sentient? Creepy, but fine … but now that AI is here, lurking in our art, our writing, our feeds, and even our DMs, people are pissed … and honestly? They’ve got good reason to be.

It’s not just about tech “innovation.” It’s about what AI is doing to jobs, creativity, trust, the environment, and even the way we interact online. Let’s discuss why the general public isn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for our new algorithmic overlords.

AI Is Eating Artists Alive

The biggest outrage? AI artwork. Platforms like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion can pump out a “painting” in seconds that looks like it came straight from the mind of a seasoned illustrator. The catch? These tools are trained on massive datasets scraped from real human artists, without their consent.

Translation: your favorite digital painter could wake up one morning and find their distinctive style cloned by a bot… for free. Why would a brand pay them when they can type in “anime girl with a sword standing in neon rain” and get 20 options in 30 seconds?

This isn’t innovation, it’s exploitation. Actual artists spend years honing their craft, not to mention paying for supplies, software, education, and rent. Having their work gobbled up to feed a model that undercuts them is not “democratization of art.” It’s wage theft wrapped in code.

Writers, Meet Your Replacement (Apparently)

It’s not just visual artists. Writers, journalists, and copy creators (…yours truly,) are all getting undercut by companies swapping out staff for AI-generated content.

Why pay a writer $60,000 a year to craft thoughtful blog posts when ChatGPT can churn out ten in an afternoon? Sure, the blogs might be bland, repetitive, and lacking actual soul, but hey, cheaper!

This devalues not only creative professionals but also the actual quality of information online. Suddenly, the internet is flooded with low-effort, keyword-stuffed, AI drivel designed to please search engines rather than human readers, and people notice. It’s not engaging, it’s not original, it’s digital fast food: cheap, fast, and making us sick in the long run.

The Environmental Mess Nobody Talks About

AI isn’t just stealing jobs, it’s guzzling electricity like it’s getting paid to (the gag is, nobody but the folks who earn the servers are getting paid here.) Training large models like GPT or image generators requires insane amounts of energy. A study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that training one big AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their entire lifetimes (yep, manufacturing included.)

That’s just the training phase. Running these models daily, millions of prompts, images, and conversations, burns through even more energy. Multiply that across thousands of servers, and suddenly AI doesn’t look so sleek and futuristic. It looks like another massive environmental drain at a time when, you know, we’re supposed to be reducing emissions.

So when people say AI is “the future,” many are wondering: at what cost?

Bots, Lies, and the Dead Internet Theory

Another major reason people hate AI? Trust. Or rather, the complete lack of it.

Generative AI makes it ridiculously easy to pump out misinformation at scale. Fake news articles, AI-generated propaganda videos, deepfakes that blur reality, it’s all fair game now. Politicians, scammers, and grifters don’t even have to try hard anymore. The bots do it for them.

This ties into the “dead internet theory,” which suggests that most of what we see online isn’t even human anymore. It’s bots talking to bots, AI articles commenting on AI tweets, AI reviews on AI products. It’s like the internet is becoming one giant feedback loop of nonsense … and honestly? Sometimes scrolling your feed feels exactly like that.

Sex, Lies and Exploitation

One of the darkest and most disturbing corners of generative AI is its use in creating fake sexual images. These aren’t just harmless “deepfakes,” they’re often trained on harmful, exploitative material and used to generate non-consensual content of real people who never agreed to be depicted that way. In many cases, this tech is even built off child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which means it doesn’t just recycle trauma, it creates new CSAM that actively puts children in danger and directly caters to pedophiles. No one consents to these images being made (especially given that children can’t consent,) and the fact that AI can so easily be weaponized for this kind of abuse highlights just how dangerous and unregulated the space truly is. The law is NEVER fast enough to catch up with technological crimes, and AI is developing and changing at a terrifying rate.

AI Is Cheapening Online Culture

The internet used to feel … fun. Messy, sure, but human. Remember the early 2000s? Weird blogs, chaotic MySpace pages, unhinged fanfiction, and original memes that weren’t just recycled templates with new captions.

Now? Everything is starting to feel the same. Perfectly curated, optimized for engagement, and increasingly, “written” or “drawn” by AI. That unique spark, the weird, creative, human touch, is fading. Instead of lifting us up, AI is flattening our culture into something dull, predictable, and eerily sterile.

The irony is, AI is supposed to be “creative,” but all it’s really doing is remixing what already exists. That’s not creativity, that’s regurgitation … and when everyone’s consuming regurgitated content, culture stops evolving.

The PR Spin Doesn’t Fool Anyone

Big Tech wants us to believe AI is this magical tool that’s going to “empower creators” and “make life easier.” But, when you peel back the press releases, you see what it’s actually doing: making corporations richer while stripping creative workers of their livelihoods.

People aren’t dumb. They can tell when they’re being fed corporate spin. Nobody likes the idea of billion-dollar companies saving money by cutting jobs and outsourcing art, writing, and even customer service to bots, while executives kick back and rake in record profits like they always do.

So … Why Is Everyone Mad?

AI isn’t just a neutral “tool,” it’s reshaping entire industries in a way that feels exploitative, unsustainable, and soulless. It’s not that people hate technology (obviously,) it’s that they hate being told to embrace a future where artists are obsolete, misinformation is rampant, culture is watered down, and the planet pays the bill.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The outrage isn’t going anywhere, and honestly, it shouldn’t. People pushing back on AI aren’t “anti-progress,” they’re pro-human. They want a future where innovation works with creativity, not against it. Where technology supports art, writing, and community instead of gutting them for profit.

Maybe, most importantly, people want a reminder that the internet, our culture, our conversations, our creations, shouldn’t be run by robots, it should be run by us, the human race.