There’s something exquisitely bleak about watching an artist get bullied out of an AI project “for the good of the community,” and then listening to the same community whine about the death of honesty and transparency in tech.

You do not get both.

If speaking openly about using AI leads to harassment campaigns, slurs, and threats against your family, you are not defending art. You are building a world where the only rational strategy is secrecy. Where the smart move is: take the money, use the tools, insist on anonymity, nod along to the mob in public, and do whatever you want in private.

That’s not a bug. That’s the incentive structure anti‑AI hardliners are creating.

You can’t demand “ethical AI,” “informed consent,” and “proper labeling,” and then turn every admission of AI use into a public execution. You’re training people the way you’d train a lab rat: Confess → get shocked. Lie → get cheese.

What happens next is predictable:

Artists and studios will keep experimenting with AI, because the economics and the capabilities are too good to ignore.

The ones who tried to do it in the open will either quit or decide, next time, to keep their mouths shut.

The audience will continue consuming AI‑touched work, because half the time they can’t tell and the other half they don’t actually care as much as Twitter says they do.

And then one day the same people who spent months screaming “AI is theft” will discover that the show they loved, the game they sank 200 hours into, the book cover they gushed over… had AI in the pipeline from day one. Quietly. Contractually muzzled under ten layers of PR.

Cue outrage: “We were deceived!”

No. You punished honesty and rewarded deception. You built a norm where telling the truth about your tools is reputational suicide. What exactly did you think would happen?

The funniest part is the moral posturing. “We’re just protecting artists.” From what, exactly? From experimenting with a medium they might actually enjoy? From owning their relationship to new tools like adults? If your “solidarity” requires stalking, dogpiling, and death threats, that’s not solidarity, that’s a control fetish.

And control is the whole point. This isn’t about AI any more than past panics were about synthesizers or cameras. It’s about who gets to dictate the boundaries of “real” art. The technology just makes the power struggle obvious – and, unfortunately for the purists, unwinnable.

Because here’s the boring, inevitable future: AI will be embedded, everywhere, all the time. It will be in brushes, rigs, renderers, IDEs, search, production management, everything. You cannot boycott “AI” without boycotting the infrastructure of your own creative life. You can only boycott the people honest enough to say they’re using it.

So the people who care about craft will do the adult thing: set their own boundaries, talk about process, figure out where AI helps and where it ruins the fun, negotiate fair credit and compensation – in public, where it’s messy, but real.

Everyone else will just keep screaming “AI bad” while secretly relying on the same systems they claim to hate, and then clutch their pearls when the mask slips and they realize their favorite work was never as “pure” as they needed it to be.

You don’t get transparency in a culture that makes transparency fatal. You get plausible deniability, NDAs, and a lot of very nervous PR emails.

/and ndir either