Why AI’s Horribleness Ends Up Being a Good Thing

Janus:

– 3 June 2025 –

Janus:

I wrote about the creative AI phenomenon when it really took off in early 2023, and the past two years haven’t changed my mind about it very much.

It’s quite a common view these days, confidently declared by very well-meaning people, that AI poses a terrible and immoral threat to media productions, professional writing, software programming, etc. People lament that all of these skilled creators will lose their jobs. And besides that, how are we supposed to tell reality from fiction, or truth from complete propaganda? And what about the potential for public scams and abuse? People are offended. Many of them feel threatened.

On one hand, it’s right that common people are offended and frightened. And the creators who work in these fields understandably see this kind of AI as competition for their careers. There is certainly the potential for bad players to exploit the public with false realities, and for societies to impose tyranny through these technologies, and for criminals to impersonate people. I have some degree of sympathy with all these concerns.

But on the other hand, we are getting what we deserve. All of us, from the consumers to the producers to the whole system itself!

Replacing Human-Created Garbage with AI-Created Garbage

Society already reduced literature, music, cinema, and journalism to the level of simplistic, unoriginal, carnal, and propagandistic tripe. People happily listen to soulless, machine-produced jungle music, they watch empty-headed filth on television, have lost their literacy and common sense through social media, and screech at each other over prepackaged sets of lies! People have largely devoted their entire leisure lives to garbage, so why should anyone care if a machine produced it or a homosexual in Los Angeles?

Sewage is sewage.

Regarding these producers of pornography and mind fuckery in Sodom, am I really supposed to feel sorry if these cretins lose their livelihoods? If the childless art fags who regurgitate and pervert old movies, songs, and books into unoriginal and unfaithful bores get laid off, am I really supposed to cry for them? If the people who have twisted real life into a stale buffet of sick lies, and common discourse into polarized, hysterical, dumbed-down drama, all have to drive for GrubHub, till drones put them out of work in turn, am I really supposed to take to the streets in protest?

It’s no loss. It’s justice.

The AI Threats (and Opportunities) to Non-Media Workers

It’s easier to have more sympathy for the white-collar workers whose jobs seem threatened. Accountants, consultants, researchers, analysts, and maybe software engineers seem endangered. I suppose administrators should be endangered, too, but for some reasons companies stubbornly hold on to managers and regulators while everything else burns. On top of that, if AI is combined with mass-scale robotics, then that is a whole other level of human redundancy, with manufacturing and service workers also vulnerable to this competition.

But this threat isn’t really so grave.

The entire world outside of India and Africa is facing severe shortages in unskilled workers because of years of low fertility rates. Just to maintain industrial production, distribution, services, and sales, if the AI bonanza doesn’t happen, the world would have to either move their factories to Africa and India, or flood their countries with Africans and Indians to make up for the shortages of halfway competent workers. And they have done both, with very destabilizing results.

But with large-scale automation, the Africans and Indians can move to the rest of the world and not have to work at all! Unfortunately, that is also happening.

Still, I have reason to hope. If nothing else, mass-scale, low-cost automation provides an alternative to mass-scale, destabilizing immigration and outsourcing.

Regarding skilled, white collar employees, most of these fields are facing worker shortages right now. Their companies are running on thin margins. They have reduced their workforces to frazzled skeleton crews, and outsourced positions to other countries with mediocre results. Plus the workers they do have—both nationally and internationally—are bloated with incompetent bench-warmers and parasites while the few competent people waste too much precious time putting out fires set by the bloat, with their hands tied by bumbling administrators.

The current AI revolution is not going to replace every worker in these fields (it’s not that revolutionary, really.) It’s just a question of the ratio. Will AI replace one in two, or one in ten?

There is a good chance that the frazzled, competent, white-collar employees will find themselves with better AI-powered support tools, with fewer distractions from whatever bloat remains (low performers and admin) that wasn’t dumped overboard. It’s true that many of these bloated, incompetent, over-financialized companies will collapse over time, but competent white collar workers can find equal or better employment with smaller companies that learned to truly run “lean” (and not the bullshit, lip-service version of “lean” promoted by corporate shysters over the last twenty years.) Unlike merely running on tight-margins with no fat, companies can reduce overhead and retain healthy margins and improve versatility.

As far as the bloated overhead who lost their jobs to AI, they can still fill the remaining gaps in services and production work.

AI is an opportunity. It can save companies from demographic collapse and growing workforce incompetence. Demographically infertile nations with worker shortages can fill in their gaps with AI-processes without resorting to outsourcing and immigration. (Even though our oligarchs will keep trying to force both outsourcing and immigration anyway, so long as they remain in power.)

To What Extent Will People Embrace or Reject AI Culture?

But I want to go back to cultural issues, which I flippantly and derisively glossed over. And I still want to address AI-driven tyranny and crime.

As I’ve talked about in the last two articles about fashion, fashion drives the culture, and culture drives the people. More or less. Now, the question is, will people follow fashions and culture that are purely AI-driven?

If nine out of ten tweets on Twitter/X are obviously fake, and nine out of ten videos, will the bulk of people still watch them, once the novelty wears off, and once the scammers really set in?

If television and movies are increasingly full of AI-written scripts, AI-generated imagery, with AI-created actors and actresses, will people find them to be worth watching, especially over time?

If everything that the society promotes is completely soulless and fake, far more soulless and fake than it is right now, and if whatever is promoted is also riddled with scammy junk trying to rip them off, will people still engage with it like they do now? Or will they look for something that they know is real?

Let’s just say that, over the next generation, only ten percent of the people reject these things and seek out what is real. Ten percent of the people shut off the noise of the media—social and otherwise—in favor of that which is produced by local people they can see face-to-face, and they favor that which has meaning in their everyday, local lives, with real people. Whether it’s entertainment, food, family, faith, etc. Maybe even livelihood. This would create the nucleus of something that might look like restoration. This restoration might then begin to take the form of community, extended family, and nationhood.

Real Life and Culture Rising From Rejection of the Fake

This may seem far-fetched. Maybe it is. Maybe I’m not cynical enough. But we’re already seeing this very phenomenon more and more, nebulous and disconnected as it is.

Take homeschooling, for instance. Thirty years ago, only religious kooks (and I say that with the greatest admiration) chose to home school their children in the United States, and home-schooled kids tended to grow up isolated and “weird.” Now, depending on the source, roughly 3 to 4% of all K-12 children in the United States are homeschooled, with many participating in co-ops and other groups. Nowadays they are definitely less weird and more functional than the human by-products of government-run school institutions. The reasons to withdraw from the public schools are various, but the fact remains that millions of parents have made this choice.

Similarly, the growth of traditional Christian life, especially among the younger generations, is also encouraging. Statistics are difficult to come by, but the growth of smaller, rural Orthodox Christian parishes through conversion is a very real phenomenon, all over the United States and Canada at least. Similarly, traditional Roman Catholic parishes are also filling up with new converts. (Some solid evidence does exist to support this, for example here and here.)

It’s easy to dismiss this as a fad (and some of the drive for this looks very faddish), or to point out that the growth of converts doesn’t exceed the overall declines in those Christian traditions, but the trend exists nonetheless. There is a strong hunger among a small segment of the population for something real, something with real roots, and tied to real spiritual life, turning their backs on a pointless, brainless, broken society.

When system life becomes even more fake, sick, and empty through the combination of AI-driven mediocrity, filth, and scams, I fully expect this trend towards real and traditional life to accelerate, expand, and develop. It’s just a question of what degree.

AI Tyranny

What is more difficult to predict is what forms AI-driven tyranny will take. As of right now, soft tyranny is steadily growing and accelerating. This soft tyranny takes the form of surveillance, social manipulation, security measures, corporate censorship, and local ordinances and policing, with employers adding their own layers of regulation and control. Even the Covid regulations mainly relied on soft tyranny, in the West at least.

If societies continue to expand soft tyranny through AI, then this will further drive people to seek lives removed from this tyranny as much as possible.

Hard tyranny is less predictable. In that case, I suspect that the 90% can simply imprison or kill off the 10%. But that’s if they can competently impose such tyranny by using the unemployed journalists, script-writers, and human resource hags as their red guards, along with the unruly brown third-world hordes. That’s if they can manage to keep the lights on, which even with AI automation (or especially with AI automation) is highly questionable.

But apart from total tyranny and bloodbaths, I am quite hopeful that these AI technologies will foster a significant level of cultural rejection by those who can’t stand the fake and crooked.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m not thrilled with the growth of AI in society. Just as I’m not thrilled with the growth of social media, smart phones, television, automobiles, etc.

For every revolutionary technological jump in history, humanity has adapted by becoming more like a machine and less like a living human being as God created. Natural humanity follows the rhythms of nature. Mechanized humanity follows the constant rhythms of whomever runs the machine.

Compare Johann Sebastian Bach or Tchaikovsky to Taylor Swift or Shaboozey, of all wretched things, and you get the idea. The former follows the slow, varied, and erratic rhythms of nature. The latter follows the rapid, simple, and repetitive rhythms of a machine.

Likewise, compare a full English breakfast to drive-thru breakfast at McDonald’s. The one takes considerable effort to cook and requires considerable time to sit and eat. The other is made by machine operators in a half-automated restaurant and is consumed by commuters while driving their half-automated cars. Natural vs. mechanical.

For whatever material blessings we have seen by all of these developments, humanity keeps losing more and more of itself the further along we go.

Yet, with the development of supposedly intelligent computers that can see everyone and everything at once, and that can run all of the machines of society, and can even simulate the artistic and creative expressions of humanity itself, I see hope.

With the soulless machine now starkly and obviously inhuman and artificial, more and more people are rejecting this emptiness to seek reality, depth, and truth in their lives.

I see this process accelerating, perhaps to the point, eventually, of reaching a critical mass.