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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23099 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated.

I think it's the other way around. People grow to dislike text that "sounds like AI" because they don't like AI. Em-dashes weren't a problem until AI started using them; "It's not X, it's Y" wasn't a problem until AI started using it; and so on.

Sometimes people dislike AI for inherently ideological reasons, and maybe the tide will shift on that. But I think more frequently, AI becomes synonymous with "a thing that you didn't put as much effort into" because that is factually what it is, and knowing how much effort someone put into something is socially important. (For many people, their biggest exposure to AI output comes from lazy good-for-nothing coworkers/bosses/scammers, and they hate those people!)

Photographs didn't become popular by becoming indistinguishable from paintings. They became their own thing, and people have a decent understanding of how much effort goes into them! If you submitted an inkjet print of a photo to a painting competition, people would still get mad at you.

There are cases where AI that is clearly AI has gotten some mainstream acceptance; people enjoy DougDoug streams and, to some extent, weird demos that obviously couldn't be done another way. But in areas where it's competing directly against art forms that require more effort, people just look for other ways to prove they put in the effort. (Many artists have started recording time-lapses of themselves painting to show that they actually did it; many writers deliberately avoid clichés that AI uses.)

Beyond that people associate AI output with lazy people I think they dislike them because they happen too much and it's indicative of "lazy thinking" on part of both the human and the AI. The argument devolves into a particular style rather than the style being chosen because it supports what the text is supposed to do or communicate.

Is kind of like how some people always tie things back to their hobby horse, except in style form but with the same sort of tortured reasoning and insight loss.

Hopefully this is a transitory problem.

knowing how much effort someone put into something is socially important

That's perceptive.

But the problem is that this also applies to the printing press. Who actually gives a shit about copyist monk stolen valor when we could make the whole of Europe read?

Type made on a printing press continues to be seen as much less valuable than handwritten calligraphy; that's why some people still hand-write their wedding invitations.

Because "valuable" and "expensive" are synonyms, the printing press brought books into reach of a lot more people. But all the forms of art that AI copies were already broadly accessible to everyone. You could already get a near-infinite amount of drawings and videos and TheMotte comments for free online, that's where the AI companies got their training data from.

It is often argued that AI will allow more people to create those things. From the consumer perspective, that just means it's harder for me to find the people who put a lot of actual effort into them, which is what I was mostly looking for in the first place (especially in a social venue like TheMotte), so it's net-negative.

I just find it funny that people reinvent Guénon's tirades against the reign of quantity the second that industry comes for them.

Your love of handwritten text is the same as my love of handmade objects. Quaint but ultimately secondary to the pursuit of ends.

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