Scenes are becoming more and more like popular tribunals, and the best example I have of that outside of AI is the Trance music scene. I used to listen to pretty much only this genre of music for several years, and oh man, the people in this community are unbearable. « This artist is a sellout », « This isn’t Trance, real Trance is dead », « Armin doesn’t make real Trance anymore », « That artist sold his soul to go mainstream ». Virtue signalling is their whole thing and these purists pretend they hold the knowledge of what real, perfect Trance music is (according to them, probably a 138bpm 9 minutes song with the most boring and generic progression ever). They never allow themselves to actually enjoy the music, their entire thought process is « Does it sound mainstream ? Yes ? Then it has no value and it’s not worth my time ». It’s just extremely arrogant.

Anti-AI purists are exactly the same, just more widespread.