Chris Trottier on Nostr: Great. You did it. The witch hunt against AI has now put me in the pro-AI camp. The ...

Great. You did it.

The witch hunt against AI has now put me in the pro-AI camp.

The truth is I now don’t give a damn if something could have been generated by AI. Because if AI is being used to generate a long story with personal experiences, meandering asides, and a rich narrative arc—then it would take an extremely advanced AI, with super detailed prompts, and human editing.

At which point, it’s genuinely easier to just write the whole damn thing yourself.

But also, you’re all out to lunch if you think usage of AI is morally wrong.

Do you really want to use humans to manually upscale images? Really? That’s what you want to do with your art degree instead of making cool shit?

You want to manually proofread some high schooler’s essay for grammar and punctuation?

You want to convert voice transcriptions to slide decks?

No, don't lie. You don’t. This isn’t the kind of work you imagined yourself doing after finishing your master’s.

“But AI is taking our jobs!”

It’s not as though highly qualified people were getting rich off that work. Before AI, those jobs went to Fiverr.

And it’s not as though people on Fiverr liked that work either. They were underpaid, overworked, and ghosted by clients who wanted the moon for five bucks. AI didn’t destroy paradise—it razed a slum built on desperation and called it “opportunity.”

Now that same work gets done faster, cleaner, and cheaper by machines that don’t cry, sleep, or worry about rent. And yeah, that’s cold. But pretending that makes it immoral is just romanticizing exploitation.

You know what is immoral? Burning out talented creatives on menial tasks just so they can afford to make one painting a year, or maybe shoot their indie short on weekends if they’re lucky.

AI didn’t kill creativity. I’m not going to stop doing creative shit because AI can simulate the creative process, fed through an algorithm, based on a statistical framework.

But instead of worrying about dumb shit like upscaling or formatting, now people can spend more time on actually making art.

If you don’t appreciate that AI has real productivity benefits beyond generative use cases, maybe you’re not so concerned about art. You’re just here to gatekeep.

Because here’s the dirty truth. All those AI witch hunts have nothing to do with creativity—just the tools being used.

So what’s then the next demand? That we write everything physically by hand? Chop wood, hand carve them into sticks, insert the lead ourselves—before the writing commences?

Or maybe writing itself is too high tech. Maybe we should all just revert to verbal recitation for these stories to be “real”. That’s how Homer would have done it, right?

Screw that.

If art makes you laugh, breaks your heart—it’s human enough for me.

You’re either in this to make something beautiful or you’re not. And if you’re not, then get out of the way for the people who are.