You're Not a Prophet. You're Just Afraid.
There's a recurring character in online discourse about AI. Earnest. Outraged. Absolutely convinced they're the only person in the room who sees what's happening. They write long posts about being treated like "a crazy person screaming about the end times" — and the thing is, they sound exactly like a crazy person screaming about the end times. Not because they're worried. Worry is human. Because there is zero structural thinking underneath the noise.
In their cosmology, AI is simultaneously destroying the planet, creativity, human cognition, and our ability to trust anything we see. Quite a workload for software.
And who's responsible for this apocalypse? Two entities:
AI itself and the people who use it.
The companies building reckless infrastructure? Absent.
The people making deepfake porn? Absent.
The platforms monetizing rage and credulity? Absent.
Just "AI" — an abstract demon — and "people who generate little pictures of their cats". Very tidy cosmology. God, devil, sinners. No human agency required, no power structures to trace, no actual decision-makers to name.
This is where concern stops and embarrassment begins.
Deepfakes don't appear because AI decided to be malevolent today. They appear because specific people choose to sexualize and humiliate other people, and now have a faster, cheaper way to do it. The model didn't pick a victim. A human did.
Data centers don't appear in drought-stricken regions because AI craves water. They're placed there by executives optimizing for land price and energy deals, perfectly content to let someone else pay the ecological bill. There's no dark compulsion. There's a board deck.
Users who outsource thinking to a model aren't "victims of AI mind control". They're people who found it easy to stop and nobody built any culture around not doing that. That's an education problem, a product design problem, a cultural incentive problem. It is not a silicon problem.
But the Eternal Concerned doesn't want to trace any of that. They want a ban. Broad, immediate, satisfying. Because they personally don't need to generate images — therefore, logically, nobody really does. It's the reasoning of someone who sees no women's bathrooms in their daily life and concludes no one needs them. Dressed up as ethics. It's just a private preference in a trenchcoat demanding global compliance.
Notice the structure, because it's almost elegant in its self-defeat:
They insist AI makes people stop thinking — while demonstrating the most spectacular failure to think about responsibility and agency.
They claim AI kills creativity — while their argument is a carbon copy of every moral panic about every new medium in the last century.
They complain people treat them like an end-times lunatic — while demanding a universal ban on general-purpose technology because their anxiety should apparently set the ceiling for everyone else.
That's not ethics. That's a child who wants the lights on in the whole city because they're scared of the dark.
A genuinely adult position about AI is uncomfortable in a completely different way. It sounds like: yes, large-scale models are here. The question is under what constraints, built by whom, accountable to whom. Yes, they amplify harm when plugged into rotten existing incentives — so you target those incentives, and those actors, not the silicon. Yes, people are cognitively lazy — so you invest in literacy and norms and design that reinforces agency, rather than pretending smashing the tool will grow one where there wasn't one before.
That's hard work. It requires naming names, tracing power, and accepting that humans are the problem and also — inconveniently — the only fix available.
Blaming AI as if it had free will is a spectacular way to avoid that work entirely. You don't have to confront the men creating non-consensual deepfakes. You don't have to confront the executives building extractive infrastructure. You don't have to confront your own intellectual passivity. You just get to demand a ban and feel morally alive.
Outsourcing your thinking to fear and mistaking the noise for wisdom — that's not resistance. That's just a different kind of not thinking.
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