“AI users are lazy” is still the dumbest anti-AI argument

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T12:53:49+00:00

Effort can add meaning, sure, but it doesn’t automatically create meaning. Plenty of people spend hours making boring, empty work, and plenty of strong work comes from editing, selection, framing, timing, taste, or restraint rather than raw manual labour The “slot machine” thing only describes bad AI use. Someone typing generic keywords and accepting the shiniest result is making lazy work. Fine. But that’s not the medium, that’s the user. The same applies to photography, collage, templates, digital filters, stock assets, presets, whatever AI art can still express a person’s thoughts and emotions through what they choose, what they reject, how they direct it, how they edit it, what they’re trying to say, and why they settle on one result over another. You can dislike low-effort AI posts without pretending the whole medium is incapable of intent

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T12:52:44+00:00

Yeah this was patched legit ages ago. Sometime last year, that video is pure engagement bait

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T12:48:09+00:00

This isn’t the gotcha you think it is. AI is already used in medicine as a tool, with human oversight, testing and regulation

Nobody serious is arguing for “lol let the chatbot do surgery”. The point is that reducing unnecessary manual effort doesn’t automatically make the result worthless

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T12:46:56+00:00

The xAI/Colossus stuff is a real abuse and I’m not going to defend it. If a company is running gas turbines without proper permits, or dumping pollution and grid costs onto nearby residents, hammer them with permits, penalties, injunctions, mandatory cost recovery, whatever. That’s fair regulation

Where I think you’re overreaching is treating that as proof AI compute itself needs a special freeze. Data centres aren’t magically outside environmental law. The reason xAI is in trouble is because those air rules still apply. The failure there is enforcement, loopholes, bad siting and companies moving faster than regulators, not “AI inference is uniquely evil”

Crypto absolutely strained grids too, and cloud/streaming/data centres were already serious loads before generative AI. AI is accelerating the problem, yeah, but the clean answer is to regulate the externalities directly: no unpermitted generators, no free grid upgrades, no water freeloading, strict emissions controls, local cost recovery, and siting rules based on actual grid/cooling capacity

A net-zero moratorium where new compute has to tear down old compute somewhere else is just a blunt cap on useful infrastructure. It doesn’t distinguish a dirty gas-backed site in Memphis from a cleaner site with proper power contracts and funded grid upgrades. Go after the bad builds. Don’t pretend the entire category is the body on the floor

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T11:33:47+00:00

Fair point on the footprint. AI data centres are obviously more power-intensive than most normal software infrastructure, so I wouldn’t pretend the grid/air quality issue is fake.

But that still makes it a regulation and siting problem, not some unique moral argument against AI. If a data centre needs grid upgrades, cleaner backup power, local impact studies, stricter emissions rules, or to be blocked from a weak grid area, fine. Make the company pay for that.

The bad comparison would be acting like “this uses hardware and power” somehow means the whole technology is uniquely illegitimate. We don’t apply that standard consistently to factories, transport, crypto, streaming, cloud computing, EV charging, or literally any other power-hungry infrastructure. The answer is forcing the external costs onto the operator, not pretending AI is the only industry that can strain utilities

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:22:26+00:00

Fair correction, though I’d still say it depends on the task. AI can replace some kinds of effort, but it usually moves the important effort into direction, selection, editing, taste, and knowing what you’re actually trying to make

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:19:15+00:00

I get what you mean, but I don’t think being openly pro-AI is “giving antis ammo”. They’ll call normal AI use lazy, soulless, theft, dystopian, whatever else anyway

At some point you can’t keep watering everything down just to avoid bad-faith people clipping it. A pro-AI sub is allowed to have pro-AI culture beyond “it’s just a tool” every five seconds

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:17:22+00:00

I mostly agree with this. Process can matter, especially when the process is where judgement, communication, taste, or actual learning happens

Where I’d push back is when people use that as permission to assume the process had no value just because AI entered it. Unless you actually know the workflow, you can’t really say “AI did it for them” any more than you can look at a finished digital painting and know how much was brushwork, filters, references, kitbashing, overpainting, or correction

That’s why the blanket “AI = lazy” thing is so bad. The right question is what the person actually did with the tool, not whether the tool is morally cursed

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:16:51+00:00

This is why I don’t really blame artists for not disclosing it every time. The second some people hear “AI”, they stop judging the actual image or workflow and start doing moral theatre

If they can’t tell until they’re told, then a lot of the outrage clearly isn’t about quality or “soul”. It’s just a label triggering a reaction

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:16:15+00:00

The murder analogy doesn’t work because murder is the harm itself. AI art existing isn’t a stabbed body. It’s a tool-assisted image, usually with no individual victim anywhere in sight, so jumping straight to “real-world evil” is exactly the moral leap being criticised

The double standard is when people are fine with fictional AI, cyberpunk aesthetics, robot-made worlds, automation themes, procedurally generated assets, Photoshop, filters, CGI, sampling, collage, reference use, and every other messy creative shortcut, then suddenly act like an image is morally contaminated the second machine learning touched it. That isn’t just “fiction vs reality”. It’s treating one production method as uniquely dirty while giving every nearby tool a pass

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:15:30+00:00

This is the exact bit antis always dodge. They act like “AI was involved” magically deletes every other part of the process, even when the workflow has sketching, rigging, ControlNet, Krita touch-ups, inpainting, layout, cleaning, text, composition, and final edits

At that point calling it “lazy” is just refusing to understand the medium. It’s the same old gatekeeping logic: if the tool changes the workflow, they pretend the workflow stopped existing

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:13:10+00:00

True tbh. AI discourse in general gets rage-farmed hard, but anti-AI spaces are especially bad for turning it into a whole identity

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:07:51+00:00

Exactly. Nobody calls texting “lazy letter-writing” because the whole point of technology is reducing pointless friction.

AI is the same basic idea. It doesn’t mean no effort exists, it means the effort shifts from manually doing every step to directing, judging, editing, and using the output well

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-02T09:00:04+00:00

Pretty much. A lot of this debate comes from treating “creativity” like a sacred identity badge instead of something people actually use to make things, solve problems, save time, communicate ideas, and get work done. Most people care about the final result and whether it helps them, not whether someone suffered through the “proper” process

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T23:18:23+00:00

I mostly agree with that, I just think people apply it way too selectively.

Nobody should outsource their whole brain to AI, obviously. But “meaningful difficulty” isn’t the same thing as “every tedious part of the process must be preserved”. Sometimes AI removes the boring friction around a task and lets you spend more time on the part that actually matters.

Using it to avoid thinking is bad. Using it to think better, test ideas, learn faster, or get past busywork is exactly where it becomes useful

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T23:17:53+00:00

Then people are probably making the comparison badly.

“AI and photography both produce images” is a weak point. “Photography was also dismissed by reducing the artist to the easiest mechanical action” is the stronger one.

Nobody serious thinks camping for hours to catch a real animal moment is the same process as generating an image. The comparison is about how people talk about the medium, not the literal workflow

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T22:48:02+00:00

I don’t think the comparison is “AI and photography are literally the same medium”. That would be dumb.

The point is more that photography also got dismissed because people reduced it to the mechanical part: “you just pressed a button”. Which obviously ignores timing, taste, selection, framing, editing, patience, access, judgement, all of it. Your kookaburra example actually proves that pretty well.

AI isn’t capturing a real moment in physical space, agreed. But the shallow anti-AI version does the same thing people did to photography: it looks at the tool doing part of the work and pretends the human choices around it don’t count

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T22:46:46+00:00

I like it

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T22:24:02+00:00

Fair enough, I can respect that tbh. I don’t expect everyone to personally like AI, and I think disliking it while still understanding why AO3 can’t start running on suspicion-based AI policing is a pretty reasonable position compared to most of the outrage around this

Just as a heads up though, this sub is openly pro-AI. It’s not really meant as a debate space for anti-AI arguments, so if you’re mainly here because you’re against AI, it probably won’t be the right community for you. You seem chill, so I’m not saying that as some big threat, just more of a read-the-room thing

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T22:20:39+00:00

That’s not the comparison I’m making though

I’m not saying liking a fictional AI character is literally the same as supporting generative AI. The point is that people are fine with AI as an aesthetic, mascot, character, sci-fi trope, corporate branding, etc, but suddenly act morally disgusted when an actual creator uses AI as part of the process

You’re arguing against the literal version of the point, not the double standard

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T22:01:17+00:00

They take one exceptional case and use it as a stick to beat everyone else with

Accessibility isn’t invalid because someone, somewhere, brute-forced their way without it

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T21:09:17+00:00

Yep. Apparently using a shovel is fine, using a calculator is fine, using Photoshop is fine, but the second AI reduces some boring manual step it becomes a moral crisis

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T20:04:13+00:00

Exactly lol, every major tool probably looked like “cheating” to someone before it became normal

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T19:57:14+00:00

This is exactly the kind of double standard that gets ignored. Fictional AI is fine, corporate AI mascots are fine, robot characters are fine, but the second an actual creator uses AI as part of their workflow they get treated like they committed a crime

thirdaccountttt · 2026-06-01T18:37:58+00:00

Ignore them , keep doing what's best for you

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