why, ai, why?

a response to your responses to my last piece on ai

In Feb 2023, I made a request: can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about ai.

In June 2024, I doubled down and once more asked: can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about ai.

In Apri 2025, a mere week ago, I ignored my own plea and wrote about ai.

The response was HOT and, in some instances, BOTHERED!

Some were unhappy with me. Most reported wrestling with similar questions. Almost everyone assured me that they did not, in fact, hate me (I asked).

What most shocked me, however, was my reaction to the reactions.

I wasn't destroyed, distraught, or even befuddled.

I was...fine? No, that's not right. I was thrown off kilter, but in the best way possible. The feedback led me on an Enrique Iglaseas style let me be your hero’s journey into the depths of my own soul. A dark nAIght, if you will (I’m sorry).

1. why i love bat

First, and honestly foremost, it must be said: the readers of Both Are True are the greatest people alive. The way y'all so thoughtfully jumped in to share your fears and tears, jeers and cheers — it was noble and kind.

In gratitude and gratuity, I have mailed a cookie to each of your front doorsteps, a decision my team of accountants and advisors said would bankrupt me.

Little did they know I would use the cheapest mail option out there - just stuffing each cookie in an envelope and hoping for the best. OH - this is actually important -

If you receive the cookie and it's all crumpled up and looks like anthrax, do NOT call the police and say 'oh my god there's anthrax here,’ I’m up to my ears in emails from the FBI about the ‘anthrax cookies’ (their words) and genuinely don’t have time to write.

2. the little darkness

Second, there was a small part of my brain that wanted to prove you all wrong. Here’s an image of that part of my brain:

mr. joshua @pants is the greatest artist alive

This lil part of my brain started building up a legal case against the naysayers that sounds something like this:

So wait, what is the line when it becomes ok to use "ai" - is Google AI? What about Grammarly? What about ok so wait, what counts? Do I need to report everything else I have or haven't done the day I publish the post? The morning of writing this post, I farted several times, one so stinky it made me go "oh no" out loud. It was still in the hour of 4am.

But almost instantly I realized I did not want to go down this road. It was useless and egofull and just not the vibe. So I… didn’t. Progress!

So where does this pull of using AI come from? Lemme tell you:

a history of AI-lence (ugh)

Not to brag, but I've been using Google since the early days.

In the early 2000s, as a kid in high school (class of 06 lets fuckin go!!), I learned how to search for things and got good at telling the difference between shit sources and good ones.

What others attributed to my intelligence, I often thought, was just an early adopter level skill at doing the google good.

I had a computer in my room early on and besides the preponderous amounts of pornography watched on that thing, I learned many lessons, the most important being:

the real purpose of a computer was to help me be lazy as possible.

This is literally written into one of the early creeds of computer programmers - Laziness Impatience Hubris - that cites laziness, impatience, and hubris as the three things that most drive programmers to do what they do.

I'm lazy. We all are. And the allure of using AI to help me for my writing feels so seductive it might as well be a deal with the devil.

A fAIstian bargAIn if you will. Please don’t. I shouldn’t have, but that does bring me to one of AI's biggest problems is the literal letters 'ai' - they don't rhyme well with other words, which makes sneaking 'AI' into words for comedic effect nearly impossible.

Take a simple word like 'bad.' Seems like an easy one to throw AI into, right? No.

bAId?

That sucks and also looks like bald.

And that’s tough for the word bald, which is already going through a lot.

Metaphor you pAIge (ughhh)

Whenever we watch cult documentaries, I say to Lauren, “Yea, I’d definitely fall for this one.” I’m susceptible. Open. It probably makes me good at art stuff but bad at everything else.

So too with AI. I have fallen for the hAIpe (no!! stop this alex stop ok wait that one isn’t half bad).

I feel the pull of it like Frodo must have when he wanted to become The Lord of The Rings.

Ok so wait, which is it - a dark evil ring that gives you all the powers in the world but makes you a massive drag to be around? A deal with the devil? An assistant? A tool? A performance enhancing drug?

This matters, a lot, because the way we conceive of and talk about AI decides how we think about it as an AIde for our work (GOD DMAN IT).

A central question in your responses to my last post centered on if and how to “give credit” to the AI for coming up with certain lines in my essay about date night.

Since I didn’t come up with the line, shouldn’t I cite the AI? But how do you cite a machine that’s an amalgamation of millions of people’s words? Did I steal someone’s actual line and plop it into my essay, all under the cover of “oh its just AI so there’s no single real person on the other side?”

Already, I think we’ve jumped the sh-ai-rk (the dashes suck too stop it alex stop).

In all of the analogies or metaphors i dont remember which is which is a belief that AI has agency. That it is an it at all, a ‘thing’ that can act upon the world.

When you look something up with Google, you google it. You are the noun, google is the verb.

When you use AI for something, the AI does the thing. “AI helped me write this piece.” The AI is the noun.

According to dread-head and tech pioneer / inventor of the term virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, this is a big mistake, and one that plays right into the hands of the companies that own these big AI services.

very cool weird guy love him

In his recent interview for The Grey Area, Lanier points out how the chat interface - the way we interact with these AI models - is not only extremely wasteful when compared to other, simpler and less energy intensive ways of engaging, but also reinforces the illusion that the AI has an identity with whom we interact.

Lanier calls bullshit:

There’s an alternative way to think about what we do with what we call AI, which is that there’s no new entity, there’s nothing intelligent there. What there is a new, and in my opinion, sometimes quite useful, form of collaboration between people.

Ok let’s run with that. If true, then I definitely do not feel good about using the work of others without attribution of some kind.

In his 2023 New Yorker piece (free link), Lanier says that one of the only things all the AI people he talks to agree on is that, “…the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end.”

Is anything else possible? Lanier says heck yes. He calls it ‘data dignity’ and describes it as a model where people are somehow credited and sometimes even paid for the work:

In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar “free” arrangement has been a disaster.

Sounds dope!!

to close

Where does this leave us?

I'm genuinely not sure, but I’ll tell you this, the more I think about this AI stuff, the less interested I am in it.

There's a deadness to it that mirrors the output I most often get when using it.

Seeing the responses to my last piece made me 100% sure that what matters so much more to me than “can I use AI to help me with my essays” is “oh my god I feel so lucky that these amazing people want to read Both Are True.”

Cheesy yet true: the readers are sorta the whole thing. You, you and even you,

Mike Sowden

. Even you. Humans, mess and all.

Which isn’t to say I want to bury my head in the sand. Why would anyone do that? You couldn’t breathe! Ostriches don’t even do that. It’s a myth likely peddled by Big Big Cats to besmirch the ostrich’s good name.

Perhaps most importantly: using AI isn’t fun. There's a thrill but once that’s gone i'm back to myself and feel gross, like I did watching pornography in my childhood bedroom in which I was caught not once (!), not twice (!!), but three times (!!!)¹.

I didn’t use AI for this piece at all and I feel great. Hopefully y’all can feel that through the piece.

OR did the AI just tell me to say that? It didn't, but did it? Am I lying or am I a lion?

That last line obviously is mine because no AI would ever come up with it. It's too good and genius and terrible.

And even if it HAD come up with it, I'd have hated it, because I didn't come up with it myself.

Not in an ego way, neither, but because the tickle my brain felt when it came up with that thought - that tickle is the whole thing. Without the tickle, you must acquittal.

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“Pay that man his moneys” - Rounders

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comments?

1. Thoughts??? Please people let’s keep this convo going! Thinking about AI makes my brain die but talking about it with you all makes me live.

2. What do you think about the ‘it’s a collaboration, not a creature’ thing? I liked that.

3. hi

4. how are you?

5. thanks for letting me know you dont hate me. now i gotta ask: do you hate you?

1. Nowadays, I generally read erotica and don’t feel terrible afterwards. What’s the AI equivalent? I don’t know.