Haters Gonna Hate, Makers Gonna Make

Coming from the creative world, I see a lot of anti-AI sentiment in my social media feeds. I'm a creative generalist with an innate urge to create. I've been unhappiest in my life when I've lost that connection or ignored that urge. Professionally, I'm a technologist. I've spent over a decade in tech, bridging the gap between tools and the people who use them. So I think about this a lot, trying to square my feelings about AI with the rest of the community.

Technology is always a double-edged sword: fire keeps us warm, but it can also burn down our villages. There are real concerns about AI, and there's also real utility. The reality is that it's not black and white. Take the 'AI slop' complaint: even if every piece of AI content was trained ethically and produced sustainably, low-quality work would still exist. I think some of the resistance reveals deeper anxieties about who gets to be a creator.

This might be a hot take, but many anti-AI talking points don't hold up under scrutiny. There's an irony here: the same people who accuse AI users of lacking critical thinking by "offloading it to AI" are often parroting arguments without checking their validity, or falling prey to confirmation bias. "Ruining education." "Destroying the environment." "Eliminating entry-level jobs." "Generating slop." The list goes on.

Take education and environmental impact, for example. We've panicked about calculators and Google before, and education adapted. Learning to use AI effectively is itself a valuable skill by cultivating curiosity. As for environmental concerns, they're real, and mostly problems of regulation and governance, not the technology itself. And they pale in comparison to other industries that cause far more pollution and water use, like modern agriculture.

From a creative perspective, LLMs make it easier to build and create and tinker, which raises the bar for creativity, quality, and craftsmanship. I'd argue that AI touches a lot of creative output right now. It's just that lazy AI use is clearly identifiable, so it becomes the easy 'slop' target to hate on. People only notice the bad AI because it's the only AI use that they 'see.'

For me, AI has become a thinking partner: a tool to bounce ideas off of, see things from other perspectives, and deal with the grunt work. All of which enables me to iterate much faster and better. At work, it captures meeting details so I don't need to worry about them, allowing me to be much more present and focus more on the human element of the job.

When more people can create, the overall quality of work improves through competition and faster iteration cycles. PageMaker didn't kill the print industry. Illustrator didn't kill hand-drawn graphics. Photoshop didn't kill photography. They gave tools previously held by only a few to a much wider audience, lowering the barrier to entry while simultaneously raising the ceiling for excellence.

AI is here, and it's not going away. The world is changing fast, and I completely understand why people feel threatened by it—I feel it too. But here's the thing: knowing that technology gets shaped by the people who choose to engage with it, I think we're better served by learning to use it for good rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Ignoring AI won't make it disappear; it just cedes the territory to people who will use it without the same thoughtfulness or care. That's why I'm choosing to engage, to learn, and to be part of shaping how this unfolds.