I F@!&*NG HATE AI SLOP

I use AI every day. For code, for images, for LinkedIn grammar... I'm going to be honest about all of it - the good, the bad, and the part that's been stuck like a splinter in my nail, that I haven't been able to pull out.

I love it and I really hate it.

The Coding Thing

I write code that carries monetary consequences in the real world. This isn't hobby scripting - when something breaks, real people feel it, and so do I. That kind of work demands a very specific mental state: a large uninterrupted block of time, deep focus, and the ability to hold a complex system in your head all at once. The "flow" state, if you want to put a name on it.

AI is genuinely useful here. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It handles boilerplate, it helps me think through architecture, it catches things I missed when I've been staring at the same function for two hours.

But it also constantly tries to pull me out of my own reasoning - it suggests, completes, it wants to do the thing for me, and if I let it, I stop actually thinking and start reviewing - which sounds like the same thing but it absolutely isn't. The moment I'm just approving AI output, I've lost the thread. And in code that matters and every engineer that's passionate about their work knows that. I hate it.

So I try to use it carefully.

The Writing Thing

A couple of hours a night, by the woodstove. This is my time, where I write about things I actually care about, and the writing itself is one of the things I actually care about. Some might say it's content production - whatever dude. It's more like thinking out loud in a form that other people can follow.

My punctuation isn't always where I want it to be. Sometimes I'm circling a sentence and I know what I'm trying to say but I can't find the phrasing - the right shape for the thought - and I'm stuck. And I'm like: "AI is sitting right there". It'll fix the comma and it'll offer me three alternative phrasings. And one of them will usually be pretty close to what I wanted.

And I honestly hate that, because it's right and it feels like cheating. It's still my thought (or so I'd like to think) but I didn't produce the words?

The struggle of finding the phrase is not wasted time. That's where the thing gets made. When I hand it to AI, I get the output but I don't get the process - and the process is most of what I'm actually there for at 1 AM with the fire going.

But also: I'm not going to sit here and pretend I have unlimited hours and zero other obligations. I don't. So sometimes I take the shortcut and I feel weird about it and I move on.

The Image Problem

I'd FUCKING LOVE to do proper artwork for every article or video. Custom illustration, real graphic design, something that looks like I actually thought about the visual as much as I thought about the words. I don't have the hours for that. I don't have the budget to pay a designer for every post.

So I use AI-generated images. And they look like a fine piece of SLOP. They look like AI images, which everyone recognizes now, which means they look like I couldn't be bothered - even when the truth is I was bothered quite a lot and I still am. But what? I shouldn't post because of it? WTF 😆 Just look at LinkedIn and other social media and how reckless are people with it... They don't even edit their AI generated posts to try and seem just a minor tiny little bit genuine and original.

Anyways... This is the slop problem. Not that AI images are bad - it's that they're generic. They carry the aesthetic of "I prompted this in two minutes" regardless of how much thought went into the article underneath them. The image is the first thing people see, and the first thing people see is AI texture and AI lighting and AI everything.

I don't have a solution to this one. I'm just annoyed about it, but I know if I can afford to not do it - I won't!

The Music Thing

GOD SMITE ME WITH HIS ALMIGHTY POWER IF I EVER USE AI FOR MUSIC. ⚡

The Cognitive Dissonance

Here's where I'm actually at: not using AI at this point feels like showing up to a gunfight without a gun. The people competing with you for attention, for clients, for relevance - they're using it. The ones who aren't are either independently wealthy enough to spend twice the time, or they're losing ground and don't realize it yet.

I feel parts of my craft slowly getting outsourced in ways I didn't fully consent to. And I'm not sure the trade is good, but I'm also not sure I can afford to reject it.

What I actually hate isn't AI. It's that AI made a choice I didn't get to make. It arrived, it was useful, and now not using it is the decision that requires justification. The default flipped. The new baseline is: AI helps you. Opting out makes you the eccentric, not the other way around.

I wrote a whole other article about the Borg and how AI is slowly assimilating us. This is me admitting I might be partially assimilated and I'm not sure where the line is anymore. In that article I make many of the same endpoints I'm trying to make here and I know that repetition loses value, so this will be my last one on the topic for a while.

What I've Settled On (For Now)

I protect the parts that matter most. The actual argument in an article - the reasoning, the structure, the thing I'm actually trying to say - that stays mine. I'll use AI to fix a comma or unstick a sentence, but I won't use it to generate the thought. The code logic, the architecture, the decisions about how a system should work - that stays mine. I'll use AI to speed up the execution once I've figured out the design.

The images I've mostly made my peace with - I mean... it's not ideal but it's what I've got.

But I still feel the weight of it. Every time I take the shortcut I know I took it. That awareness is probably the only thing I've got left to protect against the full slide.

I haven't made my mind up yet.