Why Are WE Punching The Wrong Enemy
There’s a strange irony in modern creative culture:
people will use every labor-saving tool in existence — except the newest one, because suddenly purity matters.
Writers who romanticize the age of quills and parchment conveniently forget that:
- no one mainstream today writes on calfskin
- no one mainstream memorizes entire essays before committing a single sentence
- no one mainstream grinds pigment for ink in their basement
- no one mainstream hand-carves their letters into woodblocks
- no one mainstream drafts a manuscript without search, notes, editing software, spellcheck, or reference tools
And yet they’ll say with a straight face that using AI is cheating, while writing on devices that can hold the entire Library of Congress in a chip smaller than a thumbnail.
If we applied their logic consistently, then:
- no writer since the invention of pulp paper is “legitimate,” because cheap paper made creation easier
- no novelist since the typewriter counts, because mechanized keys eliminated half the physical labor
- no one using word processors is an artist, because copy/paste and revision made writing iterative instead of heroic
- and no modern musician is authentic, because tracked recording, synthesizers, digital editing, loops, and DAWs do far more than AI currently does
If “real art” can only be made without technological assistance, then the last true works were created centuries ago —
and everything since is “fake.”
But of course that’s absurd.
The world evolved.
Tools evolved.
And art evolved with them.
The only difference now is that the new tool is powerful enough to expose the insecurities people were hiding behind older tools.
Tools Don’t Replace Vision. Tools Replace Drudgery.
The real split isn’t between “human” and “machine.”
It’s between:
- the creative mind
- and the busywork required to express it
Every era of artistic progress has eliminated another layer of drudgery:
- the printing press replaced hand-copying
- the typewriter replaced hand-drafting
- the digital editor replaced white-out
- the synthesizer replaced needing twelve musicians to test a chord progression
- the camera replaced sketching everything entirely by hand
- the internet replaced spending months in a reference library
And now AI replaces…
some of the mechanical parts of thinking.
Not the vision.
Not the taste.
Not the judgment.
Not the courage.
Not the soul of the idea.
Just the scaffolding.
Rejecting tools because they make your work easier isn’t moral purity — it’s ego preservation.
The Only Real Danger Is Wasting Yourself
If someone is worried about:
- model pollution
- surveillance creep
- cognitive dependency
- or the economic distortions of automation
Those are legitimate concerns.
Those deserve discussion, regulation, and thoughtful mitigation.
But judging people for how they create — instead of what they create — is intellectual vanity.
It is the least useful form of gatekeeping.
Especially now, when the world is genuinely drowning in greed, corruption, ecological damage, disinformation, and institutional decay.
We need better systems, better stories, better ideas, better reasoning.
We cannot afford to hobble ourselves with performative purity tests about which tools are “allowed.”
Complex Problems Require Complex Tools
If humanity is going to:
- build sustainable systems
- redesign extraction economies
- produce better media
- create cultural alternatives to nihilism
- address ecological collapse
- and beat the entrenched forces that profit from ignorance
then we are going to need the full stack of modern tools — all of them.
Including AI.
Progress has always come from the combination of human intention and better instruments.
Turning your back on the instruments doesn’t make your creativity nobler.
It only makes it weaker.
And wasting the mind you were given — refusing to build, refusing to create, refusing to think in full resolution because of some fear of “impurity” — is the only real sin in the whole debate.
The Future Doesn’t Get Better By Accident
It gets better because people decide to make it better.
They pick up the tools that exist, push them to their limit, and use them to shape a world that is less cruel, less chaotic, less stupid, and more humane than the one they inherited.
That is not cheating.
That is the job.
