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[Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt while being booed]<\/p>\n
Jonah Peretti is very lucky. Buzzfeed\u2014the viral media company he founded 20 years ago and was once valued at $1.6 billion\u2014was running out of cash when billionaire Byron Allen agreed to buy 52% of its shares. At the same time this new partnership was revealed, Peretti announced<\/a> he\u2019d be stepping down as CEO of Buzzfeed to serve in a new role as President of Buzzfeed AI. So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan\u2019s obsession, as he promises<\/a> (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Lately I\u2019ve felt myself rapidly radicalizing into what I can only call an anti-AI evangelist. I\u2019ve never been quiet about my feelings on the subject\u2014I even wrote a screed about it<\/a> last month\u2014but as more and more examples show how easily it can be used unethically, I\u2019m not just skeptical. I’m against it.\u00a0 <\/p>\n I wouldn\u2019t call this a particularly bold stance, given the front page of today\u2019s Wall Street Journal declares an \u201cAI Rebellion,\u201d<\/a> noting that public opinion on the subject is souring \u201cat breakneck speed.\u201d\u00a0What is novel, I think, is recognizing that people who loathe AI and the way it\u2019s being foisted upon society are an actual constituency to be taken seriously. I figure that if billionaires and brands are going to try to beat us into AI submission, it\u2019s only fair we get to take a few swings. We\u2019re told that if we don\u2019t use AI then we\u2019ll get left behind, but what if we\u2019d like to leave the AI boosters behind instead? It\u2019s time to give a voice to those who don\u2019t view AI as an inevitability but a liability.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The soundtrack of the past week or so has been the boos of graduating college students as out-of-touch adults try to tell them that they need to embrace AI or else. Perhaps most prominent were the boos of University of Arizona graduates as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt<\/a> told them, \u201cThe question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: \u201cWhen someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.\u201d What Schmidt doesn\u2019t get is that these young people have already been forced onto the ship and there aren\u2019t enough seats. <\/p>\n A few days before Schmidt, record company CEO Scott Borchetta took the stage at Middle Tennessee State University\u2019s commencement to extoll the virtues of AI<\/a>. When the students, whose job prospects have shrunken significantly because of the AI bubble, booed Borchetta, he shot back: \u201cDeal with it. Like I said, it\u2019s a tool.\u201d <\/p>\n Sage words from a man reportedly worth $450 million. <\/p>\n It may seem callous for a commencement speaker to respond to graduates\u2019 existential dread with \u201cdeal with it,\u201d but billionaires and tech companies have been feeding us this message for a while now. You may not like AI, they preach, but because of choices we are making for you, life will be increasingly unlivable without it. Yet while they try to force-feed us this bleakly inevitable future, actually existing AI keeps making the humans who use it look like idiots. <\/p>\n On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on <\/a>a new book called \u201cThe Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,\u201d by media executive Steven Rosenbaum. He readily copped to having \u201cused AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process.\u201d But he didn\u2019t disclose\u2014likely because he didn\u2019t realize it!\u2014 that his book contained misattributed or completely fabricated quotes created by those very tools. Only when reporters began to question the quotes did Rosenbaum promise to \u201cinvestigate\u201d how they\u2019d been included.\u00a0 <\/p>\n But Rosenbaum was unrepentant. He told the Times that if this debacle \u201cserves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.\u201d And he went on to say: \u201cThese AI errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and AI and its impact on society, democracy and editorial.\u201d <\/p>\n Ronsebaum\u2019s big whoopsie is certainly a warning, but not in the way he thinks. He himself is the warning; a cautionary tale about relying so heavily on a flawed technology that it completely undermines your legitimacy. The errors may not diminish some of the book\u2019s larger questions, but they diminish the value of the book itself. If you can\u2019t make the effort to verify the contents of your book, then why should anyone make an effort to read it? <\/p>\n Two other literary AI-crises<\/a> unfolded Tuesday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But also potentially a sign that AI use has reached the critical mass billionaires hoped for. Only, instead of making things better, it\u2019s just made them stupider.\u00a0 <\/p>\n One of the crises involved the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a prestigious annual fiction award, and the winning stories. When this year\u2019s winners were published online by UK-based literary magazine Granta, one immediately aroused suspicion that it was partly AI-generated. Some, perhaps to sardonically prove a point, ran it through AI that claims to detect the presence of AI<\/a>. Later, Granta\u2019s publisher admitted<\/a> to doing the same thing. \u201cWe showed Claude.ai<\/a> the story and asked whether it was AI-generated,\u201d the statement reads. \u201cThe response was long, concluding that it was \u2018almost certainly not produced unaided by a human\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n But the use of AI on AI only caused more confusion. \u201cIt may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism \u2013 we don\u2019t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,\u201d the publisher wrote. For a well-respected publisher to simply throw up its hands and say \u201cperhaps we never will know,\u201d deeply rankled some human writers, to say the least.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The other scandal surrounded Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk\u2019s admission<\/a> that she used AI in her writing process, clarifying that she uses \u201cartificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world \u2013 I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts.\u201d The casualness with which she mentioned it during an earlier interview indicated she wasn\u2019t particularly tortured about using it.\u00a0 <\/p>\n \u201cOften I just ask the machine, \u2018darling, how could we develop this beautifully?\u2019\u201d Tokarczuk reportedly said<\/a>, per a translation from Polish. \u201cEven though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n This brings up the idea I\u2019ve seen pushed by other writers who openly used AI and say this technology is merely like a sourdough starter, creating the conditions for something to be made where there was once nothing. The problem arises when you don\u2019t know where the starter ends and the creative process begins. And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists? <\/p>\n [Image from a 2025 Nature magazine study that was retracted in part because of this \u201cAI-generated figure containing nonsense to demonstrate the framework.\u201d]<\/p>\n To understand the crusade for, and increasingly against, AI, one must regrettably log into LinkedIn<\/a>. Originally known as a social media platform for job searching and professional networking, it\u2019s morphed primarily into a place where tech evangelists assert supremacy by loudly and frequently listing out the ways they harness technology to achieve peak performance. None of the posts read like something an actual human would say, and I would guess the people posting this shit don\u2019t talk like that in real life. But it\u2019s not real life. It\u2019s LinkedIn. A haven for sycophants to gain validation for their originality all while saying the same things as everyone else. Typically I scroll through for amusement, and sometimes post to promote my 100% human-made work. <\/p>\n While LinkedIn may seem like an impenetrable space for AI skeptics and outright haters like me, my passive scrolling has somewhat confirmed what the WSJ labeled a \u201crebellion.\u201d One trend I noticed a month or two back is that marketing professionals, TED talkers and communications gurus alike have started calling out what they see as easy tells for AI-generated writing.\u00a0 <\/p>\n At first, I took it as a hopeful sign that AI use wasn\u2019t going completely unchecked. After all, according to a Pew study<\/a> from September, \u201cU.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI\u2019s effect on people\u2019s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships,\u201d with 53% saying AI will make it worse, and 16% saying it will both of those things better. But after reading enough of these posts, I came to realize people on LinkedIn weren\u2019t mad others were using AI; they were mad people were being so sloppy about it, not even bothering to massage the machine\u2019s language to conceal their process. <\/p>\n And of course with most trends, there\u2019s a backlash to people calling out AI. One defender called the popular groundswell against AI slop \u201cthe new McCarthyism.\u201d<\/a> Some of these posts about AI policing are imbued with a sense of outright betrayal. How dare you draw attention to an unethical shortcut that we all use, even if some of us are better at using it than others. How dare you let people see your writing is actually just two LLMs in a trench coat. Again they\u2019re not mad that people use it: they\u2019re mad that people are catching on. <\/p>\n But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. I\u2019m not a hater based on vibes. I\u2019m a hater based on facts. And those facts deserve as much respect as the billionaires who continue to dump money into losing enterprises. <\/p>\n [My new and improved LinkedIn header]<\/p>\n A not-insignificant part of my frustration with the AI ethos saturating LinkedIn is that it increasingly serves only one, narrow vision of success. It\u2019s the success that comes only to the organized, the efficient and the hyper-optimized.\u00a0And above all, to the deeply certain.<\/p>\n But as someone who\u2019s built a business myself, the one thing I can be certain about is that there is absolutely another way. You don\u2019t have to be part of the grindset or be a girlboss<\/a> or a sociopath or use shortcuts to be successful. You don\u2019t have to outsource thinking to a machine to demonstrate you understand the future. You will only be and do those things if what you\u2019re actually seeking is power.\u00a0 <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779361289_349_image.png\"\/)
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