Why I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

A software engineer has published a blog post arguing that generative AI is "actively harmful for humanity," accusing major tech companies of stealing human-created content to train models and then selling access to that stolen material through subscriptions. The author distinguishes generative AI from other machine learning applications, calling the technology "capitalism in perfection" that enables automated disinformation at an unprecedented scale. The post warns that AI represents a "slow acting poison" that will lead to widespread enshittification across industries as companies seek to rent-seek through token-based access.

Why I am against GenAI and everything it stands for Published on: 2026-05-26 It's been a few years since I posted a blogpost. It's time to do so again, good ol' "screaming into the void" as they say. But something changed. This time, I scream not into the void, but into a churning mess of scraper bots, eager to slurp up human written content so that it may be digested in a long pipeline of training data intended for the newest hype-technology: generative AI. After cryptocurrency and NFTs, AI is the next big thing pushed by people who don't have good intentions, but this time, it's a lot worse than previously, and it's very likely here to stay. So buckle up, buckaroos, it's a wild ride. GenAI generative AI is a wide term. GenAI can mean LLMs which generate text, as well as models which generate media such as images or videos. When I rant about GenAI in this blogpost, I explicitely don't mean machine learning algorithms which have been used in countless industries in numerous settings to solve hard, real world problems. An example of a useful ML algorithm would be image processing like searching for a stop sign in an image where neural networks outperform classic approaches that would use discrete algorithms that detect colored features with a certain geometry. This is an exciting field that I imagine is currently underfunded in comparrison to generative AI. I hate everything about generative AI. I argue it's actively harmfull for humanity. Hear me out. GenAI: Capitalism in perfection Generative AI is trained using human-created material, which is stolen https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations in vast quantities off the internet. Models are trained on this data, and then access to this trained model is sold in the form of a subscription. This is peak capitalism: The rich steal from the public, and then sell temporary, time limited access to the stolen material. There's no altruistic spin in this. I don't believe the lies about how AI is supposed to better humanity a single second. If all of this was done to better humanity, AI development would be done in public, data would be legally obtained, models would be released for free, access wouldn't be gatekept behind ever increasing subscription costs. In German, there's a word that describes what's being done here: A "Hehler". Somebody who knowingly buys stolen goods and resells them to others. Only that in the GenAI world, goods are stolen, and the big AI companies don't even pay anybody for it. AI is like a slow acting poison which spreads and contaminates every industry currently under huge capital expenditure , until big tech can rent-seek in form of token expenditure while advancing sloppification of everything it touches. It's going to be very bad in a few years when the inevitable enshitification of AI makes a bad situation even worse. GenAI: The perfect misinformation machine Even before AI, disinformation was a huge "industry". For instance, the Internet Research Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet Research Agency was a russian disinformation organization which pushed pro-kremlin talking points and was part of the effort to get Donald Trump elected in the US who is the most pro-russian president ever in response . They worked by having rooms of russians post pro-russian disinformation and propaganda on social media, around the clock. Unfortunately, they were and are pretty effective in swaying people into certain worldviews. This effort was part of the powers that brought up Trumpmism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpism in the US link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links between Trump associates and Russian officials . Now, with LLMs being able to generate slop comments around the clock in automated form, this problem switched to overdrive. You have an uncountable number of online bots in every larger community which start off by posting innocent content, and then switch to political content, almost always with the goal of generating emotional response. If you're ever mad on the internet in 2026 due to a comment, it's pretty likely it's because it's a fake comment, generated by an LLM, designed to enrage you. You shall be mad, since that makes you more likely to align with extreme political parties, which in turn are in some way financed by outside powers and weaken your country by obstructing important reforms. In Germany, where I live, both the BSW https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/russland-verbindungen-des-bsw-europaabgeordnete-raeumt-kontakte-ein-100.html left fringe and AfD large far-right party are believed to be financed at least indirectly through corruption by russia https://www1.wdr.de/daserste/monitor/sendungen/alternative-fuer-russland-die-afd-und-der-kreml-100.html . AfD talking points revolve around better relations with russia, abolishing renewable energy which makes Germany less energy dependent on autocracies , sticking with the internal combustion car which needs oil , deporting foreigners, leaving the EU which would kill German economy very fast , climate change denial... all the usual right wing bullshit. Bullshit which is beneficial to russia in particular. If you hate disinformation, you should reject LLMs, specially LLMs trained explicitely with right wing traits, like Grok. GenAI: Encouraging suicide and harmful behavior There's a Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths linked to chatbots which collects cases where people have killed themselves after consulting an LLM. I won't dive into this, you can read the page yourself. I don't even know what to write here, it's just fucking tragic. Imagine being psychologically vulnerable, maybe in some bad place in life, and then some LLM recommends suicide to you, and in your desparation this seems like the best action. I don't have words for how fucked up that is, and yet here we are, GenAI is a trillion dollar industry. GenAI: Killing Education There was a recent article on futurism about how GenAI is killing education. Not only does GenAI absolutely wreck concentration capabilities https://jolt.richmond.edu/2024/03/06/tiktok-brain-can-we-save-childrens-attention-spans/ of young people consuming short form slop videos, big tech is doing its best to inject it into the classroom. Just like Microsoft did for 30 years by making sure that kids were brought up on Windows and Office in school, companies are now offering academic access https://chatgpt.com/business/education/ to LLMs. I like this quote from the article: “Honestly, if we ejected all the genAI tools into the Sun,” Gehl concluded, “I would be quite pleased.” Preach, brother. GenAI: Reduction of critical thinking skills This is related to the previous point, but it's not just academia which is hurting. It's general thinking skills in general. This point is more ancedodal, but you may share this view from your observations. There's a certain percentage of the population that completely stopped thinking themselves once AI started going mainstream. They use ChatGPT for everything . You ask something, and the response is prefixed with "ChatGPT says...". This happens IRL in discussions as well as online in Reddit or even oldschool forums. I absolutely hate it. What did these people do before AI came along? Did they never solve a problem on their own to begin with? Is the state now maybe even better for them but not for the person they are communicating with, that's for sure ? I don't know. Academia seems to agree https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721 that this is a problem, GenAI: The loneliness epidemic AI makes the modern trend of people staying at home on their sofas and scrolling mindlessly on their phones even worse. There's a trend amongst young men https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/ to isolate themselves from girls their age, instead relying on AI to "keep them company". This is sad on so many levels, and it doesn't bode well for the future when large amounts of people stay lonely. Lonelyness fuels extremism and hate. It makes real life communication a lot harder too, because people deeply invested into this harmful, fake form of "relationship" will not have learned how to form real partnerships. They may not have evolved a sense of compassion for a partner with needs different to themselves, since AI chats simply don't foster this. AI chatbots will never have an own opinion that could influence yours, they will never understand how you think, they don't evolve, learn and experience the world as you do. Everything about AI is fake. Pope Leo XIV recently even criticized https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/25/pope-leo-encyclical-ai-artificial-intelligence-slavery exactly this element of generative AI, alongside other very important points. The Pope is tweeting critically about AI, that's how bad it is. GenAI: How to become a bad programmer If you're reading this blog, there's a high chance that you may like computers. I sure do. I think they are neat as fuck, and I liked tinkering and building things using computers so much, that I made them my career. I got my first computer when I was 6. I am almost entirely self taught, dispite having a university degree. My first language was Delphi; a proprietary Object Pascal language with a powerful WYSIWYG/RAD approach to UI design, with peak popularity somewhere in the end of the 90s. I couldn't tell you how long it took me to program my first little tools that did fun but useless stuff like opening my cd rom tray by keyboard button press, or hid the Windows taskbar I put that on a thumb drive and used it to annoy my computer science teachers back in school . I spent countless nights without an internet connection learning how to do things and how to solve problems. This is not how it goes today. Young people today are most of the time not even exposed to an environment where they need to figure out how to get something working. Everything nowadays is an app, everything has a touchscreen. All of this was bad enough, and then GenAI came into the picture. With GenAI, every last shred of "trying things until it worked and learning something in the process" evaporated. No more tinkering. No more learning by trial and error, no more developing a "feel" for the feasibility of a technical solution. You prompt a slop generator, and it gives you a solution. Often times at work, I observed that people can't even explain the solution, they simply drop it into where it needs to go or not , and somehow, magically, it seems to work. And I am not talking about not remembering flags for Linux cli tooling tar , looking at you , I am talking about people copy pasting entire piped xargs commands into their terminal and then praying that it doesn't ruin your day somehow. No thinking, no learning, just slop everywhere. Yes, people did this before AI using Stackoverflow snippets, but at least you had to fit the puzzle piece into your architecture, and think about the code in some way or form. Not anymore. And then we have the vibecoders. People who prompt what they need and have LLMs generate the whole program called "oneshotting" , or parts of it, often times without even reading the generated code. People keep telling me how they are using the LLM only as an assistant or "sparing partner", but I can for sure say that everybody I know professionally who uses LLMs for coding is doing a whole lot of slop generation, and very little code reading. At best, code reading is done in the MR/PR when it's time to review the 9001 lines of slop code. Doesn't everybody love those MRs? Minimal work by the author, maximal review work by everybody else. Vibecoding is only faster if you don't do your job with the needed amount of scrutiny. I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails, you're in for a very, very bad time. There will be new roles in organizations that have the job of sorting out the stinking excrements of vibecoding. I do not want to be that poor soul that needs to wade through millions of lines of slop every day, but I probably will be at some point. And I know people will now say that every organizations code is already a hot mess - yes, true, but watch how the dimensions of the problem grow exponentially worse the further along we move. Some people will read this and say that the ongoing development of coding agents is going to improve this. That it will all sort itself out, because LLMs will keep getting better. Even if those people are right which I don't think they are , do they really think this will come cheap? At what point do you think the shitification of AI companies will begin? It probably already started with frontier models getting worse a few weeks after release https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 while pricing stays constant or increases, magic how that happens. This AI craze has cost hundreds of billions of USD, shareholders will want to see a return on that at some point. Just wait. And by the end of the day, even if you think all of this is bullshit and that GenAI makes everything better in programming: why should anybody employ you, if you have no redeeming skills left due to brain atrophy, when the employer could just subscribe to an LLM provider to do your work? I simply don't get programmers that use LLMs by choice. People online in AI-hyped communities kept saying that everybody not using AI will be left behind. I disagree, I think you'll be left behind if you do use and rely on AI. Oh, and how can people look past the fact that LLMs doing things isn't deterministic? You can prompt them to do something that worked 10 times, and have absolutely no guarantee that the 11. time will yield satisfying results. They are a glorified slot machine, not a dependable piece of software. Last, but not least: Slop communication GenAI usage is often favoriably described by people who use it to send long emails or write long documents. They say it makes their work easier, they are faster when writing. I say that's selfish, and it slows down the whole organization. When somebody uses an LLM to barf out 500 words on why they disagree on a topic when a two line mail would have been enough, congratulations, you just burned multiple man-hours within the organization because 34 others need to read through the slop to extract the reason for the disagreement. I used to spend quite some time writing detailed responses where needed. I hand wrote them and made sure I got the essentials condensed, making sure that I didn't waste anybodies time. Now, people send so much slop everywhere, bloating up communications and making emails a fucking chore. Nobody invests time into their written communication anymore. It even goes a step further: people are now asking LLMs to summarize the slop emails of other poeple because they are too long and complicated. Imagine that, somehow ironic. LLMs used like that are similar a network tunnel with proxies on each side, and the transfer encoding between the proxies is slop. Final thoughts So, after all this ranting, I hope I was able to present some arguments why my opinion is stacked against GenAI so much. I haven't even touched on the whole datacenter craze, how hardware prices are absolutely insane because of GenAI, how companies are struggling to build actually useful digital products because of DRAM pricing, how many people are losing their job because of AI, or how environmentally bad it is to build gas power plants for the sole reason of training slop generators https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai . I think all of this is clear to anybody who made it this far down, and I won't bore you with it. You already know. And I know there will be a few people who argue that I'm wrong because LLMs do fill a useful, non-harmful role in a select few applications and think it's thus wrong to completely reject them. Yes, you are right, there are good applications, like translation to a certain degree; some literature is best translated by a human because of intricate wording . But I am against inventing the Torment Nexus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment Nexus just because it has some fringe attribute a small amount of people will find practical. Anyhow, I am not delusional, I know the GenAI genie can't be put back into the bottle. We will be stuck with GenAI for the rest of our lives. The internet will not return to how it was before GenAI, and a lot of the problems I have outlined in this post will continue to grow worse due to AI. I just hope that the setiment against AI will continue to sour https://fortune.com/2026/04/16/anti-ai-sentiment-is-rising-and-its-starting-to-turn-violent/ , and that humanity may prevail while maybe stopping everything from going to shit. I hope the AI companies collapse, alongside the vast majority of AI investment that big tech has commited to it and big tech collapsing would be quite neat too . I hope that one day, there is a path out of this mess, and that this giant machine of social and technical distruction is stopped. I don't know how, though.