Rage Over Drops of Water

People have called my process lazy. They’re not entirely wrong.

I don’t like doing unnecessary work. We just have different ideas about what counts as “necessary.” For me, staring at a blank screen or agonizing over the placement of a few words ain't it.

I’ve seen people label AI-assisted work as “soulless,” “fake,” or “not art.” Sometimes, I agree, though those labels aren't exclusive to AI. I’ve also seen fully human-made work churned out with just as little care—optimized for algorithms, not expression. In other words, enshittification.

If you spend enough time on platforms like Threads, you’d think people like me are personally responsible for the economic and environmental costs of AI.

Personally? I would have pointed at the model developers who mined the Internet without explicit consent. I'd also point to the tech companies driving up the stock market with their empty promises, along with the businesses who think they can increase profits by replacing staff with bots. 

Maybe zoom out a little more at the fast-paced, productivity-driven, FOMO environment that birthed this tech.

But that's not who folks online point fingers at.

They focus on people like me. For being open about using it as a tool.

It's a forced binary meant to create a sense of moral superiority. Performative at best, and misdirected rage at worst.

The harms are real. I’m not claiming clean hands. I did the moral calculus and decided that, for me, the trade-off was worth it. I needed a way to bypass the inner critic that turns a blank page into something close enough to the prose in my head. More time for my family, my community, and my own care, and less time sitting there while my brain insists, "You suck as a writer, Jess".

With how my brain handles execution, reducing that friction is often the difference between something existing at all and staying stuck, swirling around in my head. My inner critic has a whole list of the times I told myself I'd make/write/do something, but never got around to starting.

It's easier to judge from the outside, especially if you're the type that needs to punch down to feel good. And for those who feel that they are qualified to be the moral arbiter of where everyone else spends their time, energy, and money — news flash, this isn’t the only place where I have to make moral calculations.

When my ferret chews through an important computer cord on a Tuesday night, I can rearrange my schedule for a forty-minute round trip to a big-box store, or order it on Amazon and have it at my door the next morning for a fraction of the cost. I know which answer I'd choose. I’ve clicked that checkout button a hundred times without losing sleep.

When I shop for clothes, it’s not just about style. It’s about sensory tolerances — fabric, breathability, how it sits on my body, whether there are tags (no, please). My go-to brand for years: A New Day by Target. The company that rolled back its DEI initiatives and pulled back on LGBTQ+ Pride month merchandise. I'm queer, and live in Minnesota; I'm well aware. For some, the boycott has been easy, to the point that they laughably brag about it not feeling like a loss. Yet whenever one of my work shirts gets too stained or frayed, I'm faced with a choice: do I uphold a boycott and wear things that feel off-sensory-wise, or replace what I have with something I know works, knowing full well the money is going toward a company that does not support my community?

At the grocery store, I know what I should do: avoid excessive packaging. In reality, I've thrown out enough moldy hummus containers to know how that ends. Sure, I could divide the container. That means having separate serving containers, dividing the hummus, and washing the reusable containers. That is a lot of "task friction" to deal with. So I buy packs of single-serve hummus—the kind that costs more, uses more plastic, and keeps me from wasting food I never got around to preparing. Not ideal, but at the end of the day, I'm fed, and the food didn't go to waste.

I use the self-checkout when available because interacting with a cashier would break the flow of interesting thoughts running in the back of my mind. 

None of this makes me a monster. None of it makes me a saint, either.

We are all constantly negotiating the distance between the world we want and the one we actually live in. The moral calculus isn’t clean—it’s a running tally full of asterisks and footnotes, which includes our interpretation of whatever the social contract actually is.

AI fits into that pattern for me as another entry in the ledger.

Pointing to other trade-offs isn’t meant to excuse this one; it’s meant to show how we already live with contradictions we rarely interrogate this closely.

This doesn’t mean all uses of AI are equal. A company replacing several employees with barely-tested AI agents has a much larger impact than an individual using the tech to make a weird picture or a few lines of prose. Yet the person generating an image they probably wouldn't have commissioned anyways is the one getting more online flak.

Critics raise valid concerns about AI’s consequences. But those concerns are often framed as absolute—an all-or-nothing stance we rarely apply to anything else in our daily lives. We accept trade-offs elsewhere without demanding purity. Here, suddenly, the expectation shifts.

I don’t think that’s because people are uniquely ethical about AI. I think it’s because AI has become the symbol of how late-stage capitalism exploits people and the environment, so opposing it is a way to protest the system that birthed it.

And I don’t expect my use of AI to feel acceptable to everyone—especially to people whose relationship to creation is tied to the parts of the process I’m bypassing.

I know there will always be people who examine choices like this from the outside, without truly knowing what I’m actually navigating. They will come to neat, certain conclusions. That’s fine. This isn’t written for them. It’s for people who genuinely want to understand the “why” behind my process—and for me to push back on the idea that AI users are a monolith or a caricature built from worst assumptions.

Though I'll admit, AI does feel different. Not morally different—but emotionally. There’s something about watching a technology move this quickly into human expression that hits a nerve in a way Amazon or streaming never did. Maybe it’s because language feels like the last space that was fully ours. Maybe it’s because we’ve already ceded so much—our attention, our privacy, our social lives—and this feels like the final room.

That unease matters. I’m not interested in dismissing it.

This isn’t just about jobs, creatives, and the environment. 

It’s about meaning-making. About the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what it means to create. There’s an identity wound here that spreadsheets don’t capture.

We’ve always defined ourselves, in part, by what we make and how we make it. Art was evidence. Proof that we were here, that we felt something, that it mattered enough to shape into form.

Now, a machine can approximate that form, quickly and at scale. And we’re being asked to recalibrate what creativity means.

AI has created an existential crisis - one that many of us don't have the bandwidth to deal with.

I know, there's a lot more at stake than just jobs or the environment.

It's about who gets to create, and what counts as "art".

I feel like a paradox by having it assist me in the creative process. This work exists now when it didn’t before. It's my voice, even if I have to mark up some AI-generated fluff to get there. 

I’m making the same kinds of trade-offs everyone makes—visible and invisible, clean and compromised.