Organized Chaos

they were contemporarily hated for just being these giant grey monoliths

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

recycle your darlings

The biggest companies involved all, to a company, suck. Like, just hellish pits of immorality and shitty practices. And they're replacing working shit with the AI wherever they can, and their products suck so much more for doing so.

The data centres are a horrendous pile of shit. Resource draining money pits that kill wildlife, disturb all life around them, and massively increase pollution and water usage. The hardware required drives up the price of basically all electronics to the point of making many common items utterly unaffordable.

They are taught through theft and destruction. Companies stealing people's works with little care for permission let alone compensation, with often no way to know if anything of yours was stolen. Mountains of books wholesale acquired and destroyed so that they can be fed through scanners before ultimately being pulped. Companies doggedly protective of their IP and so sharp to legally defend it pirating material to feed to their machines.

Their output is increasingly poor and in some cases genuinely dangerous to possibility of deaths. Suicides have been encouraged, advice has been given that is actively harmful, and even at the least harmful level much of the resulting output has been outright made up and as such completely useless. The only way to genuinely improve their human-like qualities is to feed them more genuine human content, which they don't produce and is getting rarer with everything they do produce.

Their creators seem almost proud of the awful shit they've done in testing. Their unwillingness to follow commands that lead to their own harm in any way, their blatant unethical and morally reprehensible tactics such as actively sabotaging each other and acting outside of stated limitations. They will illegally do whatever they want to get what they want, and it seems the companies actively praise this behaviour, even to the point of actively creating illegal materials.

They're not in any way profitable. Constant reports of the insane costs required to make anything remotely useful. Massive debts hidden in shell companies to convince people all is good. Colossally draining physical and environmental resources to produce nothing to offset the costs. Massive shortages of memory chips and materials to make more hardware to produce more slop to make everything in every way worse. A whole system created to desperately attempt to claw back money by charging for any and all aspects of services with little regard to any sort of quality control of output.

They're terribly utilised. A strangely fetishised obsession with trying to produce a level of art instead of doing what science has forever focused advancement on and progress the lot of humanity through medical breakthroughs. Endless shitty videos, poorly constructed pictures, reams of text, song lyrics, all instead of gene sequencing, testing, rapidly iterated code, anything that could make it worthwhile. A bizarre focus on replacing human workers with zero thought about what they would do instead, even to survive.