How AI use became a moral crossing

I’m using an AI application right now. I’m using Google Docs. Google Docs doesn’t just have Gemini embedded; the platform itself is interwoven with generative AI. I can even see Gemini in the corner, waiting. In a few minutes, I’ll check Gmail. It’s also now a generative AI application, with generative AI features thoroughly baked in.

These distinctions aren’t trivial. These are systems that incorporate generative AI features and that are being built and maintained by developers using generative AI.

If I were going to build an app right now, I would probably use a framework like React Native. React Native is maintained by Meta and doubtlessly contains code written by generative AI. In fact, probably pretty much every application I’m going to use throughout my day, from the Adobe suite to iOS, contains code created and maintained by AI, alongside its own generative AI functionality.

That’s just work. But my leisure platforms have generative AI baked in as well; every major social media platform today contains generative AI features. Netflix uses generative AI, not just for its platform but for its actual productions. Spotify uses generative AI and allows AI artists and AI music. I willingly and willfully engage with these platforms.

To a certain degree, AI has become unavoidable. I don’t believe that it is “inevitable” as the industry states, but it is functionally interlaced into everything we do. It’s baked into our new laptops and our new smartphones. It can be avoided, but not without a lot of strife.

And by the way, you use generative AI any time you Google something. 

You’re a bad person if you use AI

Increasingly, creatives are coming under fire for using AI. Except, they’re not even coming under fire for using AI to produce creative work. They’re coming under fire for having a one-off conversation with ChatGPT or using AI to remove the background of an image. Suddenly, they become someone who “uses” or “defends” AI.

And that’s the life of a creative, isn’t it? First the industry takes your job away… and then everyone else moralizes about how you’re coping.

But the reality is that nearly everyone is using AI, with varying degrees of distress and agency. What matters is how we are using it and what intent we have, not whether we are using it. Even Medium allows “assistive AI” use for brainstorming and researching, as long as it isn’t used to generate content.

And though we may not choose to use Google Suite, we certainly choose to use Netflix and Spotify. We may not choose to use Microsoft Office, but we do choose to use Facebook or Threads. We could purchase a dumb phone instead of a smartphone. We can spin up a Linux distro instead of Windows. 

But most of us don’t.

Realistically, most of the people I know who are strongly anti-AI still occasionally use AI. They just either don’t know… or it’s just “once or twice.” Or there are certain things it’s good at. Or there are certain things they enjoy. Or…

It’s not the moral stance against AI that is the problem. Not really. It’s that it’s arbitrary. Virtually anyone can be attacked, at any time, for using AI… but the people who will be attacked are going to be the people who are the most vulnerable. 

Right now, that’s creatives.

The streamlined moralism of anti-AI

Why did AI use become a moral stance? At this point, using AI has become quite efficient. Having a conversation with ChatGPT is not likely significantly more burdensome on the environment than pretty much anything else we do online, which also largely requires data centers. And all the job loss is mostly a smokescreen to hide a crippled economy.

(And again, here, we are not talking about using AI to generate creative works; we are talking about using it for research, analysis, or just casually.)

But if someone is anti-AI, I know something simple: I probably have a lot more in common with them. And that’s because being anti-AI has become a moral shorthand. People who are anti-AI are, in general, humanistic and creative. They are environmentally and politically aware. They care about job replacement and other people.

Meanwhile, most of the people who are pro-AI seem to be, for all intents and purposes, trying to commoditize and package humanity with the least amount of possible labor. They are monetizing human functions that should never be monetized — and operating at a breakneck, unregulated pace to do so.

We live in a very complicated world. And therefore, it becomes really alluring to have this type of streamlined moral framework.

But it’s not a real framework. It’s just our perception of one.

There are tons of people who are casually using AI today who have no idea that this type of intense online and in-industry moralism has emerged. ChatGPT has a billion monthly active users. Gemini has a billion monthly active users. And they’re not using it to rip off screenplays or sell art; they’re using it to look up resources, plan trips, or for some fast encouragement.

And there are a ton of people who are using generative AI, but they’re calling it “assistive AI” or “analytical AI.” Because AI is evil when someone else uses it. But when you or I use it, it’s unavoidable. Despite being the same underlying technology.

Still, this is why this type of moralism has become so pervasive and so heated: it’s easy to use AI to draw a moral line in the sand. It is easy to decide that if someone is using AI, especially if they are using it without shame, that they are a bad person. And it’s easy to signal that you are a moral person, a better person, a safer person, by hating AI.

But really, it’s fine to hate AI

That’s not what I’m saying. Absolutely you can hate AI technology, and AI slop, and the urgency with which it has been incorporated into your life, my life, everyone’s lives. There are real reasons to be resentful and hateful and angry. 

And there are applications of AI that are profoundly anti-human. No one sane is behind using AI to generate novels or paintings or movies. But that is one subset of an extremely broad and robust technology.

Regardless, it’s wildly ineffective for that hatred and anger to bleed into how you treat other people, who are also having AI forced upon them, and seeing it incorporated into their day-to-day lives. A creative is not building a data center. A creative is not deforesting the Amazon.

For creatives, people now can’t win for losing. Pretty much every creative suite today has generative AI baked in, so now we are telling people that they’re going to lose their jobs, and they’re also going to be stoned in a Town Square for trying to keep them. Or, if they do use AI, they had better use it for labor only, and if they ever try to have a side project, they had better make sure that every element of it is hand-crafted in MS Paint.

More than that, we really need to have the nuance to understand that an artist using ChatGPT to research something is not the moral equivalent of an artist using ChatGPT to render a piece of art to sell. There’s no real distinction between “assistive AI” and “generative AI” besides how you’re using AI — and if we don’t let people explain how they’re using AI, we cannot draw those distinctions.