Feb 10, 2026, 6:23 PM

Folks, we've gotta talk about AI. Specifically, how one of the most common criticisms of AI is bullshit.

But first, let's get this out of the way: I am not an AI booster. I hate AI. Fuck AI. Fuck LLMs. Fuck stable diffusion. Fuck facial recognition. Fuck OpenAI, and Anthopic, and Google, and Apple, and Amazon, and Oracle, and Microsoft, and Nvidia, and every other AI grifting company. Fuck them all.

AI is a shitty bubble that provides managers an excuse to fire people while lighting the planet on fire, raising prices for everything we need, surveilling us, and causing droughts. It enables grifters and con artists, and when its bubble bursts we're all going to pay the price for it while investors buy up all the now-cheap resources in the crashed economy.

Fuck AI. Fuck even calling these statistical Marchov chains "intelligence". Fuck the whole god damn industry that equates "we did machine learning on spoken audio and now we can with an acceptable degree of certainty create transcripts for the deaf for almost free" and "we burned 3 million GPUs to create a chatbot that confidently tells you the wrong answer to basic math questions".

Fuck every dead-eyed, soulless AI generated image that some loser is trying to convince you is their "art". Fuck that woman (allegedly) who generated dozens of romance novels with Claude and thinks that's as good as writing.

And a giant and very personal fuck you to the people convincing my bosses that I should be "managing a swarm of AI agents" instead of writing code, the end result of which will likely be the death of all joy at my job and my constant bitterness and declining mental health until I get fired or quit. What will I do for work after that if the whole software craft dies? Fuck if I know.

Now to get to the point: to solve a problem, at a basic level we have to be able to identify the actual problems, what's bad about them, and then we can work on fixing them.

You may notice that I did not say that training AI on other people's work is "theft" or "a copyright violation" or even "a bad thing to do".

It's not.

sigh

Folks, when you publish something--anything, from a novel to your toots to your DeviantArt to your music--you no longer get to have control over what people do to it, with the legal exception that you get a monopoly on distribution and reproduction primarily against works so similar to yours that they compete against you (it's debatable if that's actually good, on the whole, but let's just accept it is for now).

Like, let's be clear: if you're a photographer, and you publish your photographs, and someone makes a collage using small pieces of your photographs and other photographs, that's fine. All else being equal, that's cool and good! New art! It costs you literally nothing, diminishes nothing you have done, and there is new art in the world. Someone poured their self into repurposing what they found, and transforming it into new art.

This.

Is.

Good.

Now, let's say the collage was a swastika. Fuck that! Fuck that Nazi!

To be 1,000% clear, though, the problem was not that the Nazi used your photographs to make a collage. The problem was that they're a Nazi and they made a swastika.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Too many people seem to think the problem is that companies legally acquired a bunch of art, then programmed a computer to generate collages based on that art. (See end note about "legally".)

One problem with this thinking is that there is literally no way to prevent "AI" (remember: not a real thing) from doing this that wouldn't also prevent a bunch of really cool things. Since "AI" is not a real thing, the law would either have to be so narrow as to be easily dodged by the AI companies, OR it would have to be so broad that it would ban all kinds of cool, useful, and good programmatic remixing.

I've now hinted at the next problem with this thinking: the "solution" would be more restrictive copyright laws.

When has that ever worked out for us, as either creators or as regular folks?

Almost never, if ever at all.

More restrictive copyright laws are going to, once again, benefit massive corporations that will use those laws to extract money from us and lock creatives out of their own work.

And, perhaps worst of all, it's not going to solve all those other AI problems: lack of labor rights, slopification, grifting, surveillance, and economic collapse will still come for us, and all we'll have done is given Disney a new stick to bludgeon us with.

Once again: I get it. I hate this shit. Copilot, in particular, was trained on my work, and I was salty as hell for a long time that they used my work to make a machine that they want to use to replace me. I get it. I wanted a judge to throw a red card on the play and send Microsoft to time out. It took a long time for me to turn the corner from, "The problem is they used my code in a way I didn't anticipate," to, "No, the problem is that they're trying to replace me with a pollution machine that sucks at my job."

We need real solutions to excessive compute, and have since the BitCoin hype era.

We need real labor rights, and have since forever.

We need real privacy laws, and have since the DMCA.

We need to tax the hell out of the rich so they don't have money to waste investing in boondoggles in the first place, and have since we stopped taxing them at 90%.

What we do not need is an expansion of copyright that will primarily benefit massive corporations instead of creators.

Let's solve the right problems.

To be clear, companies like Anthropic who literally broke copyright law and torrented a bunch of copyrighted works, fuck them double for that. I wish they were actually punished as harshly as I would be for doing the same thing. That would be the best kind of schadenfreude.

Azuaron