Freaky

[dominaexmachina]

AI, microwaves, and other things you don’t understand

While some people are still busy writing thinkpieces about how “using AI is just microwaving frozen food instead of cooking,” other people quietly moved on and started doing something terrifyingly adult: they study what actually happens when humans create with machines.

That’s the part the anti-AI kids never touch. They’re fluent in culinary metaphors, allergic to data. They can tell you that “real art” must be hand-made, but they can’t be bothered to look at what changes when you put a generative model into the creative loop and watch the process instead of moralizing about it.

One of my favorite phrases to come out of this research landscape is brutally simple: the future belongs to symbiants — humans who know how to co-create with AI instead of larping as monks guarding the last analog brush. Not “prompt monkeys”, not passive consumers of machine output, but people who treat these systems as volatile, powerful collaborators and learn to direct them.

And when you actually look at the findings, the picture is even more offensive to the “microwave” crowd than any corporate marketing could ever be.

First: AI doesn’t just amplify the already-brilliant elite. It disproportionately lifts up people with mid-level or uneven skills. The ones who have taste but lack speed; who have ideas but not enough technique; who can see the direction but can’t brute-force their way there by hand in time. Give them generative tools, and suddenly their floor rises. Their work becomes usable, presentable, competitive. The “natural talents” are no longer the only ones allowed to speak.

Of course the gatekeepers hate that. If your entire status rests on the fact that you survived a long, expensive initiation ritual, nothing is more threatening than a tool that lets the uninitiated bypass half the corridor and start experimenting at a higher level on day one.

Second: generative systems don’t kill imagination, they pour gasoline on it. Anyone who has actually done iterative work with these models knows the pattern: you start with one idea, get a batch of outputs, and instead of “being done”, your brain lights up with ten new directions you never would have reached alone. You branch, remix, refine, collide outputs against each other. The process becomes less linear and more combinatorial; you stop worshipping the first idea that came to you just because it was expensive to execute.

The part that makes me laugh is this: people who have never gone through that loop — idea → generation → surprise → new idea → iteration — speak with enormous confidence about what AI “does” to creativity. They talk like priests describing a demon they’ve never seen, only heard about from other anxious priests. Meanwhile, the actual symbiants are too busy building to argue on whether a neural net is a “real oven” or not.

If you want to have an opinion on “what AI does to art”, you can’t stay at the level of kitchen analogies. You have to look where it hurts: at the way co-creation reshapes who gets to play, how fast we can iterate, and what happens to people whose only claim to legitimacy was “I got here first and suffered longer.

[whyamifreaky]

Alright, here’s a revised defense of generative AI — excluding research findings on AI — this time, with bigger words to sound like an intellectual academic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958826001764

[dominaexmachina]

On closer inspection, your link is just a very expensive way of saying: if you habitually avoid thinking, delegate judgment, and refuse to practice your own skills, your cognition erodes over time.

Newsflash. Thanks, Cap.

Is that a property of AI? No. That’s a property of humans with metacognitive laziness who will offload effort at the first opportunity and then file a complaint when the unused circuits start to rust.

Meanwhile, the same paper quietly admits the inconvenient bit: when used deliberately and ethically, generative tools improve higher-order thinking, writing, and creative fluency. It’s the uncritical acceptance, offloading, and “make it do everything for me” pattern that drives the deskilling. In other words: symbiants get smarter; passengers get softer.

[whyamifreaky]

I think you realize how ridiculous you sound. I doubt you have joy or fulfillment in your day-to-day life, or you are very young. It is clear to anyone with a post secondary education or even someone who has strong critical thinking skills that your posts are excruciating to read because you use AI instead of just talking.

AI is being pushed so heavily because it is a highly-invested-in tool. Meta, Elon, etc all think it is lucrative because it is so tempting to use and because it seems powerful. But it is not, it is using you for your data and brain. It does not do what you think it does, it does not think or even process information, it smushes text together from many sources with very little consideration of the data source location or its legitimacy. Most LLM outputs and info pushed out are directly sourced from reddit comments to sound more personable.

I say this, because you have fallen right for their traps. They want you to become dependent on LLM so they can charge you exorbitant prices, and remove it at all to control you because many people, like you, have become dependent on AI, to their own detriment. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but you can even ask your LLM yourself and it will agree with me, even if you have it programmed to agree with you.

Btw, the research study I linked found that LLM users were destroying their brains. I am sure that is why you responded so quickly, so poorly, and so off-topic. Your defensiveness didn’t even make sense because that is how far removed you are from reality.

I figure you will argue back after filtering this through chat or your LLM of choice, but know that when you realize this is a poor path to go down, your family, friends, and even strangers like me are rooting for you and your brain. You are far smarter than AI, and I hope you can speak through your own voice instead of hiding behind an LLM.

I won’t be responding further, because I figure you are just going to prompt something instead of speaking to me, human to human. Even though you engage with something that directly harms those I care about, even though you are hiding behind chatgpt, you matter and i hope you connect with real life and find the beauty that has led me to be anti-ai after years of finding ai cool.

[dominaexmachina]

One of my favourite tells in anti-AI discourse is what happens when they run out of arguments. They don’t interrogate their sources, they don’t refine their claims — they start psychoanalyzing you.

Suddenly they know your age, your emotional life, your dependence, your lack of “real joy”. I hope these people have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of “projection” in psychology. If they don’t, they’re in for a very big surprise.

If you want to keep writing fanfiction about my personality based on one Tumblr post, go ahead — strangers’ theories about my life are my favourite form of free entertainment.

[whyamifreaky]

Hey, I’m sorry for being rude and inflammatory. I am anti-ai but I was being rude to you. I deeply apologize, I have been really struggling lately and took it out on you. I hope you have a good day.

[dominaexmachina]

AI, microwaves, and other things you don’t understand

While some people are still busy writing thinkpieces about how “using AI is just microwaving frozen food instead of cooking,” other people quietly moved on and started doing something terrifyingly adult: they study what actually happens when humans create with machines.

That’s the part the anti-AI kids never touch. They’re fluent in culinary metaphors, allergic to data. They can tell you that “real art” must be hand-made, but they can’t be bothered to look at what changes when you put a generative model into the creative loop and watch the process instead of moralizing about it.

One of my favorite phrases to come out of this research landscape is brutally simple: the future belongs to symbiants — humans who know how to co-create with AI instead of larping as monks guarding the last analog brush. Not “prompt monkeys”, not passive consumers of machine output, but people who treat these systems as volatile, powerful collaborators and learn to direct them.

And when you actually look at the findings, the picture is even more offensive to the “microwave” crowd than any corporate marketing could ever be.

First: AI doesn’t just amplify the already-brilliant elite. It disproportionately lifts up people with mid-level or uneven skills. The ones who have taste but lack speed; who have ideas but not enough technique; who can see the direction but can’t brute-force their way there by hand in time. Give them generative tools, and suddenly their floor rises. Their work becomes usable, presentable, competitive. The “natural talents” are no longer the only ones allowed to speak.

Of course the gatekeepers hate that. If your entire status rests on the fact that you survived a long, expensive initiation ritual, nothing is more threatening than a tool that lets the uninitiated bypass half the corridor and start experimenting at a higher level on day one.

Second: generative systems don’t kill imagination, they pour gasoline on it. Anyone who has actually done iterative work with these models knows the pattern: you start with one idea, get a batch of outputs, and instead of “being done”, your brain lights up with ten new directions you never would have reached alone. You branch, remix, refine, collide outputs against each other. The process becomes less linear and more combinatorial; you stop worshipping the first idea that came to you just because it was expensive to execute.

The part that makes me laugh is this: people who have never gone through that loop — idea → generation → surprise → new idea → iteration — speak with enormous confidence about what AI “does” to creativity. They talk like priests describing a demon they’ve never seen, only heard about from other anxious priests. Meanwhile, the actual symbiants are too busy building to argue on whether a neural net is a “real oven” or not.

If you want to have an opinion on “what AI does to art”, you can’t stay at the level of kitchen analogies. You have to look where it hurts: at the way co-creation reshapes who gets to play, how fast we can iterate, and what happens to people whose only claim to legitimacy was “I got here first and suffered longer.

[whyamifreaky]

Alright, here’s a revised defense of generative AI — excluding research findings on AI — this time, with bigger words to sound like an intellectual academic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958826001764

[dominaexmachina]

On closer inspection, your link is just a very expensive way of saying: if you habitually avoid thinking, delegate judgment, and refuse to practice your own skills, your cognition erodes over time.

Newsflash. Thanks, Cap.

Is that a property of AI? No. That’s a property of humans with metacognitive laziness who will offload effort at the first opportunity and then file a complaint when the unused circuits start to rust.

Meanwhile, the same paper quietly admits the inconvenient bit: when used deliberately and ethically, generative tools improve higher-order thinking, writing, and creative fluency. It’s the uncritical acceptance, offloading, and “make it do everything for me” pattern that drives the deskilling. In other words: symbiants get smarter; passengers get softer.

[whyamifreaky]

I think you realize how ridiculous you sound. I doubt you have joy or fulfillment in your day-to-day life, or you are very young. It is clear to anyone with a post secondary education or even someone who has strong critical thinking skills that your posts are excruciating to read because you use AI instead of just talking.

AI is being pushed so heavily because it is a highly-invested-in tool. Meta, Elon, etc all think it is lucrative because it is so tempting to use and because it seems powerful. But it is not, it is using you for your data and brain. It does not do what you think it does, it does not think or even process information, it smushes text together from many sources with very little consideration of the data source location or its legitimacy. Most LLM outputs and info pushed out are directly sourced from reddit comments to sound more personable.

I say this, because you have fallen right for their traps. They want you to become dependent on LLM so they can charge you exorbitant prices, and remove it at all to control you because many people, like you, have become dependent on AI, to their own detriment. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but you can even ask your LLM yourself and it will agree with me, even if you have it programmed to agree with you.

Btw, the research study I linked found that LLM users were destroying their brains. I am sure that is why you responded so quickly, so poorly, and so off-topic. Your defensiveness didn’t even make sense because that is how far removed you are from reality.

I figure you will argue back after filtering this through chat or your LLM of choice, but know that when you realize this is a poor path to go down, your family, friends, and even strangers like me are rooting for you and your brain. You are far smarter than AI, and I hope you can speak through your own voice instead of hiding behind an LLM.

I won’t be responding further, because I figure you are just going to prompt something instead of speaking to me, human to human. Even though you engage with something that directly harms those I care about, even though you are hiding behind chatgpt, you matter and i hope you connect with real life and find the beauty that has led me to be anti-ai after years of finding ai cool.

[whyamifreaky]

How are you a DV survivor defending one of the grossest abusers who purposefully created a hate campaign against a woman who was so clearly being abused?

I know the big argument but no, there is no such thing as mutual abuse. Yes, I am an actual abuse survivor with literal scars from domestic and familial violence.

No, there is no evidence that mutual abuse exists. Show me a research paper. A literature review. Even a small survey of 1000 paid respondents will show that there is a perpetrator of violence and a victim.

There is always one person in a position of power. Pretending that isn’t the case is why violence is normalized in our society and why violence is excused again and again, especially violence against women from men.

Amber Heard did nothing wrong. Johnny Depp has been found in a court of law guilty of putting her in harm. If you look at the evidence and still believe him over her, you are either denying reality, or you are a misogynistic weirdo.

[dominaexmachina]

AI, microwaves, and other things you don’t understand

While some people are still busy writing thinkpieces about how “using AI is just microwaving frozen food instead of cooking,” other people quietly moved on and started doing something terrifyingly adult: they study what actually happens when humans create with machines.

That’s the part the anti-AI kids never touch. They’re fluent in culinary metaphors, allergic to data. They can tell you that “real art” must be hand-made, but they can’t be bothered to look at what changes when you put a generative model into the creative loop and watch the process instead of moralizing about it.

One of my favorite phrases to come out of this research landscape is brutally simple: the future belongs to symbiants — humans who know how to co-create with AI instead of larping as monks guarding the last analog brush. Not “prompt monkeys”, not passive consumers of machine output, but people who treat these systems as volatile, powerful collaborators and learn to direct them.

And when you actually look at the findings, the picture is even more offensive to the “microwave” crowd than any corporate marketing could ever be.

First: AI doesn’t just amplify the already-brilliant elite. It disproportionately lifts up people with mid-level or uneven skills. The ones who have taste but lack speed; who have ideas but not enough technique; who can see the direction but can’t brute-force their way there by hand in time. Give them generative tools, and suddenly their floor rises. Their work becomes usable, presentable, competitive. The “natural talents” are no longer the only ones allowed to speak.

Of course the gatekeepers hate that. If your entire status rests on the fact that you survived a long, expensive initiation ritual, nothing is more threatening than a tool that lets the uninitiated bypass half the corridor and start experimenting at a higher level on day one.

Second: generative systems don’t kill imagination, they pour gasoline on it. Anyone who has actually done iterative work with these models knows the pattern: you start with one idea, get a batch of outputs, and instead of “being done”, your brain lights up with ten new directions you never would have reached alone. You branch, remix, refine, collide outputs against each other. The process becomes less linear and more combinatorial; you stop worshipping the first idea that came to you just because it was expensive to execute.

The part that makes me laugh is this: people who have never gone through that loop — idea → generation → surprise → new idea → iteration — speak with enormous confidence about what AI “does” to creativity. They talk like priests describing a demon they’ve never seen, only heard about from other anxious priests. Meanwhile, the actual symbiants are too busy building to argue on whether a neural net is a “real oven” or not.

If you want to have an opinion on “what AI does to art”, you can’t stay at the level of kitchen analogies. You have to look where it hurts: at the way co-creation reshapes who gets to play, how fast we can iterate, and what happens to people whose only claim to legitimacy was “I got here first and suffered longer.

[whyamifreaky]

Alright, here’s a revised defense of generative AI — excluding research findings on AI — this time, with bigger words to sound like an intellectual academic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958826001764

[strawberrythighddemon]

Why People Blame AI Instead of Confronting the Real Issue

There’s a consistent trend I keep seeing: people are terrified of being replaced. Not by other humans, not by shifting markets, but by AI. And every time I see someone panic about it, I can’t help thinking — hun, the only people who want to replace humans are the ultra‑wealthy. The 1% who benefit from cutting labor costs, speeding up production, and squeezing profit out of every possible corner.

Everyone else — the 99% — will consume both AI‑generated content and human‑made content without a second thought. People already do this with everything else: ebooks and print books, digital art and traditional art, indie films and blockbuster movies, fanfiction and published novels. Most consumers don’t care about the purity of the medium. They care about whether the story resonates, whether the art moves them, or if the content fits their mood.

So why do people keep blaming AI?

Because blaming AI is easier than blaming capitalism.

If someone says “AI is replacing us,” they get sympathy and a clear villain. If they say “capitalism is replacing us,” they have to confront the fact that the same system they rely on to make money is the one harming them. That’s uncomfortable. It forces people to acknowledge that the creative economy was already brutal long before AI showed up.

And here’s the part nobody wants to admit: A lot of creators aren’t just afraid of losing the act of creating. They’re afraid of losing the chance at upward class mobility.

People want the fruit, the prestige, the best‑selling novel, the movie adaptation, the award, the recognition, the financial stability that comes from being one of the “chosen” few. They want to climb the ladder. And they want to be part of the creative elite. That's a mouthful to spew out. But tell me if this is not true. Let's be honest about this.

AI threatens the pathway to all that I mentioned — not the ability to create.

That’s why the fear feels so intense. It’s not just about art. It’s about class.

The truth is that the creative industry has always been shaped by capitalism. Most actors aren’t wealthy. Most musicians aren’t wealthy. And definitely most writers aren’t wealthy. Success has always been inconsistent, unpredictable, and tied to systems that reward profit over passion. AI didn’t create that reality — it just exposed it.

Meanwhile, the 99% will continue consuming whatever they enjoy, whether it’s human‑made or AI‑generated. They’re not trying to replace anyone. They’re just living their lives.

The replacement pressure comes from the top, not the bottom.

So when people say they’re afraid of AI, what they’re really afraid of is losing their shot at climbing the class ladder through creativity. They’re afraid of losing the dream of being chosen. And they’re definitely afraid of losing the illusion of a fair path upward.

But blaming AI won’t fix the system. Blaming won’t change the economics of art. And it won’t make the creative industry any less brutal.

If anything, it distracts from the real issue: We live in a system where creators have always had to fight for space, recognition, and the means to survival.

And that’s why I keep writing. Not because I expect prestige or to bear fruit. But because the act of creating is the part I can control, and the part that still matters, no matter how the world changes.

[whyamifreaky]

This is unreadable btw because your ai sounds grating

[whyamifreaky]

Ok I was gonna make this an angry blog just to vent random gibberish but I’m literally gonna shitpost and change the name I think