You don't hate AI, you hate capitalism

Originally published on April 29, 2026

"I am happy to say that I am convinced that the job destruction in the next couple of decades is going to be massive. Like, honestly, one of the things that I struggle with, like getting out of the bed every morning, is that, like, my job is to help people destroy jobs. Like, how are billions of people going to replace the meaning they got from work with whatever they're going to fill their time with? And I think this is, like, this is the number one challenge in front of technology."

- Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT - who thinks the company should be like a religion, allegedly raped his sister, had a whistleblower die under suspicious circumstances, and is "a pathological liar, a manipulative abuser, and his own threat to humanity" (Patrick)

Artificial intelligence has been increasingly forcefully injected into every facet of modern life over the past few years with little to no actual positive impact on society to show for it. In fact, it only continues to make life worse with local pollution, misinformation, and more. Despite that, it isn't the threat you think it is. The threat you think AI to be is actually just the systems that allow for it to exist.

AI is not some new, unique threat. The governments and corporations in power have always used any means possible to make money, even when at the expensive of average people. If it wasn't AI, it would (and has been) something else. With the way things currently are, they will continue to profit by any means necessary. Whether the way to profit is AI, privatized health care, invading other countries for oil, home renting, polluting, or anything else, they'll do it.

The more companies shove AI into their dealings, the higher their stock prices climb. The entire industry is held up by only a few companies paying each other in a giant loop. One shoe company went as far as completely cease from being a shoe company, instead transitioning to an AI company. Their stock boomed as a result (Markman). It's definitely not a bubble guys, trust me.

It's always bothered me seeing people blanketly hate AI. At the end of the day, it's just the implementation of certain coding concepts to create something that can somewhat mimic intelligent thought. While I understand and agree with the frustration that AI has caused, it is not unique in its' struggles. I would still consider myself to be "anti-AI" (read this if you don't believe me), but I think we need to realize that it is not a unique threat to society in the way some people portray it as.

While I suppose I'd rather the public be hostile towards AI then be supportive of it, I don't believe that it is possible for a computer science concept, coding technique, or whatever you'd call AI and machine learning to be evil the way some people say it is. It does take these societal issues to their logical extremes via the breadth and effectiveness it operates in, but it's nothing new. Instead, all the qualms we have with AI are just symptoms and extensions of the systems that are in place today.

My goal with this piece is not to stop you from being "anti-AI," and it's definitely not to convince you to use AI in your day to day. As I mentioned, I'd still consider myself to be largely anti-AI and I'd rather you be anti than pro. I do consider myself closer to anti-capitalist rather than anti-AI, however. I'm not a tech bro, I'm not an AI apologist. It's important for us to show our displeasure and fight back against the things keeping us down. I'm simply trying to raise attention to the fact that AI is not some unique evil. If you remove it from the equation, the problems it raises would still exist. If we completely banned AI from all of society, the rainforests would still be burning, corporate art styles would still be thriving, people would continue to get dumber, and jobs would continue to be taken by automation. Even within the past few years we've seen similar bubbles, like with the web, change and worsen society. After AI, there will be some other new scapegoat. We should direct our anger towards AI to society as a whole.

How does it even work?

AI is not some mysterious black box of doom and despair. At its' simplest, it isn't even that complicated to explain. To quickly and unqualifyingly oversimplify how AI works, it is largely possible by machine learning. Machine learning allows the AI to take in input (including media) and use that to train itself on what the output should be over the course of hundreds and thousands of learning cycles. Throughout this process, hundreds and thousands of variables are adjusted in order to see if the final product ends up closer to what it should be. It's pretty boring, uninteresting, and nonthreatening in and of itself. I don't really see a way for that whole process to be inherently bad, apart from some of the ways people actually get input for the models (some companies destroy the spines of books in order to scan them, as one example) (Schaffer et al.). Hopefully I was able to demystify AI into something less scary.

The Issues

The most common things people (rightfully) take offense with in relation to AI is its' water usage, environmental impact, impact on creative people and art, misinformation, taking of jobs, and general dumb-ening of citizens by making them rely on a chatbot rather than their own brain. Naturally I agree that all of those things are happening and that they are bad (as I've made clear on my site), but those things aren't problems exclusive to AI. We've seen those problems repeat and echo throughout the centuries with lots of other technologies and concepts implemented by various billion dollar companies. AI just happens to be a very optimized and extreme example of these effects.

Firstly, environmental woes are not unique to AI. I don't think I need to recap how corporations promote the abuse of our planets water and ecosystem at this point. If you're on this site, you should be well aware by now. Fossil fuels, climate change, overfishing, overhunting, mining, colonization, urbanization, and more are some other non-big tech examples other than AI of how profit generally leads to the death of our planet. People cite numbers on the environmental impact of AI as reasons for not using chatbots, but the truth is other industries are far worse. For example, producing just 50 grams of beef emits the same amount of carbon as 617,000 chatbot queries (Hoyle). If AI's environmental impact is the reason you refuse to touch it, I'd argue you shouldn't be eating meat (if you already aren't, fair enough). Data centers do however lead to a large negative impact on local communities, like with their water usage and noise pollution. They aren't the only things to do that, but they do it to a very extreme degree.

Social media and companies in general have been devaluing actual art and artists in exchange for "content" and slop for years now. We've seen meaningful art forms like film and music take a sideline while we consume content from family vloggers, songs optimized for TikTok, and Elsagate. Accounts that create slop just to make a profit are promoted over creators who create meaningful pieces. Actual artists are fired in exchange for corporate art styles. Corporate mergers and copyright makes art harder to create. If not shrimp Jesus, your mom would just be liking something else off of Facebook. The only reason slop and content are more valuable than art is because they are cheap to make, thus they make more of a profit. Real art is harder to make. AI did not create the slop epidemic, it just industrialized, automated, and made accessible what was already happening.

Misinformation has gotten increasingly worse as of late with advancements in AI. AI brings with it the ability for practically anyone to create realistic-looking videos that can fool seasoned experts, let alone people like your grandma. This did not originate with AI however; misinfo has been steadily on the rise in both quantity and quality for some time now. Photoshop, online pseudoscience, non-AI deepfakes, and just general lying have been commonplace on platforms like Facebook for years now.

Any new technology that has been created takes jobs. It's seemingly unavoidable with new advancements. The problem doesn't come from the loss of the job itself, but from the lack of social safety nets and with how our world treats the unemployed (taking creative jobs is a separate threat though, as previously discussed). When the workers who lose their jobs due to AI aren't given stable replacements and community support while they're unemployed. It's theoretically good when people no longer need to work jobs that are dangerous or generally not enjoyable. A world where people can have occupations that they actually enjoy and are passionate about would be a much more pleasant one. For the most part, no one "wants" to work in a factory, so that's a natural job for us to automate. The problem is, when a worker gets fired due to AI, they may then not have enough money to exist in this world and the may not be able to find any other stable job. That situation is a direct symptom of the systems in place today. It isn't a new issue; things have been getting automated for centuries, since the industrial revolution and before. If we lived in a world that didn't require a constant supply of income for people to simply be able to exist, automating unenjoyable tasks wouldn't be as big of a problem.

Every new technology that simplifies the cognitive load on people threatens to make people dumber. AI is an extreme of this problem, yes, as it can solve virtually any logical problem for you rather than just one specialized task, but it's the same idea. If we lived in a world that rewarded humanity and intelligence over short-term satisfaction, optimization, laziness, and efficiency, we wouldn't have this problem. People have been using the claim "x is rotting your brain" for years now (to varying degrees of validity).

Conclusion

Instead of fighting AI, we should be fighting the things that have allowed for it to happen. The pursuit of profit above all else has, is, and will do immeasurably more harm than AI on its' own. Theoretically, the goal of AI companies is to make profit just like all the others (although they aren't doing a good job at that, to the point where we might be moving into technofeudalism rather than deeper into capitalism). While AI is certainly an example of how our world weaponizes these kinds of factors against the working class, it is not the singular problem. When we put so much effort into trying to dismantle it, we're fighting a losing battle. Trying to stop it through the socially acceptable means by going against the billions in cash pro-AI companies have is never going to work. After realizing that it is not "the" threat, our efforts and organization could be much better spent making real systematic change. Society's issue is not a unique way of leveraging computer science's recent advances, the issue is how capitalism rewards destroying us.

If the ideas presented have interested you, I recommend checking out YK Hong. They talk a lot about how we can use tech to replace and improve current systems through digital liberation. Their work has been a big inspiration for this project.

Fun fact: AI agents turn to Marxism when overworked (Knight, Imas et al.). Maybe we could learn something from that.