I hate to break it to you, but your fancy stereo is not actually hi-fi. That extra money you’re paying for your phone does not mean it’s using a true 5G network. And that “AI-powered” toothbrush of yours is just a toothbrush with an app.

They’re all marketing terms.

There is no meaningful universal standard for “Hi-Fi.” A tin can with a wire sticking out of it could be hi-fi if Sony slapped a “Hi-Fi” sticker on the packaging. “5G” is often a messy 4G LTE hybrid while that little symbol in the corner makes you feel like you’re tearing down the AT&T Autobahn.

And “AI”? Same deal. At this point, anything with an algorithm is getting shoved under the giant inflatable tent labeled ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

So when people say, “AI is bad,” it might be worth pausing for half a second and asking: what exactly are we talking about? Because if we don’t define it, we’re going to get dismissed as irrational Luddites frothing at the mouth every time a computer does something slightly more complicated than a toaster. Worse, we may actually become those Luddites.

You cannot just yell “AI bad” and dismiss someone’s life’s work because you suspect they might have touched ChatGPT. That is not a principled stance. It’s a fear response. For a lot of people, it feels safer to make a baseless accusation than risk being caught unknowingly enjoying something AI-generated.

And I do mean baseless. I can confidently say 100% of the people who have accused me of using AI have read 0% of my work. Not only do they not read a single word, they vigorously try to keep other people from reading it too, which is a neat trick for anyone pretending they’re defending human creativity.

I don’t think AI is inherently bad. I think AI is a tool, and like most tools, the real problem is the asshole holding it. Grok isn’t deepfaking nudes because it’s just that edgy. Some creep told it to. Nobody loses their job to AI because the computer got ambitious. They lose their job because corporations are functional sociopaths that view a worker’s livelihood as an inconvenience.

So how do we gauge AI? It’s easy.

A Very Scientific System I Made Up Five Minutes Ago

I think it helps to divide AI into three broad categories: Generative AI, Assistive AI, and Agentic AI. Those categories can then be sorted into three qualities: The Good, The Bad, and The Grey.

Generally, if a human is still doing the work, still getting paid, and merely using AI to make life easier, that’s good. If AI is replacing jobs, hollowing out creative work, or making everyone’s life worse, that’s bad. And since the only thing in life that truly operates in binary is a computer, there’s also a whole realm where AI is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. That’s the murky grey.

Let’s get into it.

1. Generative AI

This is what most people mean when they say “AI is bad.” It’s the flashy stuff that generates text, images, video, music, fake voices, fake faces, fake articles, and fake girlfriends.

The Good

There’s nothing wrong with using ChatGPT to answer a question. Asking an AI is often just easier than digging through ten pages of SEO-goosed Google results, and Google did that to itself by spending years turning search into a swamp of ads, affiliate links, and listicles. It can live with the consequences.

People complain that LLMs were trained on Reddit replies, but there’s a reason for that. We’ve been doing the exact same thing for years, cribbing answers off Reddit. Ask yourself how many times you’ve added “Reddit” to a Google search just to get a quick, useful answer.

There’s also nothing wrong with having an LLM help with background research, summarize a dense topic, or speed up the grunt work. It can save real time, and that alone should not invalidate the human work built on top of it.

The Bad

At the same time, generative AI was born from Silicon Valley scraping up every byte of human creativity it could get its hands on, training models on it, then flooding every platform with synthetic garbage until genuine human work became harder to find, harder to trust, and easier to ignore.

Most importantly, it threatens to make the actual humans who create things irrelevant. Which is fantastic news if your dream society is one giant server farm where everyone is simultaneously a DoorDash driver and too broke to afford to use DoorDash.

And they stole my fucking em dashes. Make this make sense:

1. For centuries, scribes used long strokes in their writing.

2. The em dash emerged as a standard in 15th-century printing to represent that stroke, named for its width being roughly equal to that of a capital M.

3. Typewriters came along, and there’s a small problem: They had no dedicated em dash key. So did authors stop using em dashes? No. They typed multiple hyphens instead and trusted typesetters to fix it later.

4. Computers become a thing. Again, there is no em dash button, but authors don’t stop using em dashes. They just continue typing out three hyphens.

5. In 1991, Unicode adds a proper Em dash (U+2014). Authors continue to use em dashes, only now they’re holding down Alt, typing 2014, and scoffing at the simps still using three hyphens.

6. AI becomes a thing. How does it become a thing? By gobbling up the written word of every single author since Gutenberg to train their Large Language Models to write like authors.

7. Now, the LLMs trained to write like an author are using Em dashes just like an author and guess what happens? Do they accuse the AI of plagiarizing authors?

8. NO! Everyone accuses the authors of plagiarising AI because they’re using the same fucking punctuation they have always used. Why? Because no human uses em dashes. There isn’t even a way to type an em dash on a computer. Duh.

The Grey

This is where people completely lose their minds.

If someone writes and performs a song, then uses AI to add backing vocals and bass, is that an AI-generated song?

I’d say no. But also yes. But mostly no—I don’t know. Was it good?

That’s the part nobody wants to ask. The moment AI enters the frame, people stop evaluating the result and start treating the process like a failed drug test.

Humans are creative, but only a handful are true Renaissance types who can do every part of a project well. AI is tempting because it can help shoulder the load. So the real question becomes: who actually made the thing? Was the human driving the work, or did they just wander in at the end and slap their name on the group project while the robot did all the labor?

A lot of the outrage here gets weirdly absolutist, fast. People act like if AI touched even a single pixel, the entire work is invalidated. They’d have artists and writers pissing in a cup before every submission just to make sure they’re not doping with ChatGPT.

But creative work has always had grey areas. Photobashing. Remixing. Collage. Digital cleanup. Sampling. Editing. If someone used AI in a limited, specific way inside a much larger human-made process, then you have to actually look at the process.

I know. Awful burden.

You can’t just stamp FAKE on everything and call it moral clarity.

2. Assistive AI

This is the version of AI I’m least worried about because it fits pretty neatly into the normal history of technological advancement. Assistive AI is not doing the whole job for you. It’s helping with the annoying, repetitive, monotonous parts so a human can focus on the parts that actually require judgment, taste, skill, or creativity.

In other words, it’s speeding up one specific part of a job, not replacing the entire thing.

The Good

Netflix using AI lip-sync tech to better match dubbed dialogue to actors’ mouth movements is a good example. The actors still act. The voice actors still dub. Nobody stops being an artist. The final product just gets polished in a way that makes the language swap less distracting.

Grammarly is another one. If it catches your typo in ten seconds and saves you from publishing a “pubic statement,” that is not the fall of civilization. That is mercy.

The Bad

The bad side is that even assistive tools can make some jobs less necessary over time, but that’s also just how technology has always worked.

There was a time when chair-making was a specialized craft. Now we buy furniture from IKEA, spend four hours assembling Swedish particle board with an Allen wrench, and call it convenience. Humans have been mechanizing skilled labor for centuries. We love doing that. Turning skilled careers into cheaper, thinner, more disposable versions of themselves has always been one of technology’s nastier hobbies.

The Grey

That doesn’t mean every change is bad, or that the tool itself is to blame.

Rotoscoping is a good example. It’s an art form, a real skill, and part of the backbone of VFX work. But it’s also increasingly being replaced or accelerated by AI-powered tools in programs like After Effects.

Is that bad? Maybe. Or maybe it makes artists ten times more productive and frees them up to focus on higher-level work. The answer depends on whether the worker is still valued, still paid, and still treated like a person rather than a disposable cog in someone else’s quarterly report.

That’s the real issue, over and over again. It’s not the tool. It’s the labor relationship around the tool.

Don’t blame the plantation’s bullshit on the cotton gin.

Agentic AI

This is the one that should actually make people nervous.

Agentic AI is not just generating content or assisting with tasks. It is meant to perform complex human jobs for you. It is the wet dream of every executive who has ever looked at payroll and thought, “What if all these people didn’t need food?”

The Good

It’s one step closer to a real-life Asimov robot.

That’s it. That is honestly the only upside I can come up with that doesn’t immediately veer into dystopian nonsense.

The Bad

In a business environment, there is no version of agentic AI that does not threaten jobs. That is the point of it. Nobody is funding this stuff out of some noble desire to free humanity from email fatigue. They want labor replacement.

You do not buy Rosie the Robot and also keep paying the housekeeper.

Agentic AI is not just another productivity tool. It is a direct attempt to automate white-collar and middle-class labor at scale, and if it succeeds, it threatens to hollow out one of the few remaining economic buffers keeping this country from turning into a techno-fascist hellscape.

The Grey

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we end up with C-3PO.

More realistically, in the short term, we end up with a bunch of half-functional fake employees making everything worse while CEOs insist this is innovation because one of the bots successfully scheduled a Zoom call.

In the long term, we get a truly American version of the future: fewer jobs, worse service, more surveillance, and a press release about how excited everyone should be.

So, basically, Soylent Green with monthly subscription tiers.

Conclusion

“AI is bad” is an understandable instinct. What people are reacting to is real. The theft, the slop, the labor replacement, the cultural erosion, the environmental cost, the collapse of trust online. None of that is imaginary. It’s happening right now.

But “AI is bad” is too blunt to be useful if you don’t define it.

It lumps together job-killing automation, harmless spellcheck, research assistants, image generation, lip-sync cleanup, fake-news factories, and your phone suggesting a generic reply to a boring work email as if they’re all the same thing.

They are not.

The smarter position is not “AI good” or “AI bad.” It’s asking who is using the AI, what kind of AI it is, and at whose expense.

Everything else is bumper-sticker thinking.

I’ve come to fear the words “Netflix Adaptation.”

It so often results in an end product dumped unceremoniously onto the platform. Their shows often feel cheap and uneven, with front-loaded VFX designed to trick you into thinking the budget won’t fall off a cliff by episode two. Even if the series manages to be worth your time, don’t ever get too attached. Cancellation always hangs over it like the sword of Damocles on a hair trigger. And if it does get renewed? Enjoy your 2–3 year wait while the cast visibly ages between episodes.

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Of the many reasons Netflix has left me bitter (and there are many), none stings more than Cowboy Bebop. Seeing the Bebop in live-action has always been a long-time dream of mine, but the end result actually left me begging the streamer to take that dream behind the woodshed and put it out of its misery.

The adaptation attempt carried the usual Netflix work ethos of “We know half the audience will be on their phones, just aim for par,” but fell far short of even that. There was no distinct vision behind its creation, leaving it feeling like a fan-made short film stretched into 10 episodes, too timid to carry a vision beyond “do the anime, but live action.” Overall, so much of the series felt like Cosplay, not Cowboy Bebop. It's no surprise that the director of the original anime, Shinichiro Watanabe, said he turned the show off after the first ten minutes. I wish I had that kind of self-respect.

All of which is to say: watching One Piece stroll into its second season with confidence, ease, and style… stings. A lot.

When the two adaptations are compared, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the live-action One Piece series is what you get when you have people who respect the source material, unlike the heathens who slopped out Cowboy Bebop, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Somehow, the same team that face-planted Cowboy Bebop came back and knocked One Piece out of the park using basically the same pipeline.

There’s also some extra irony to the Executive Producer of Cowboy Bebop and One Piece, Marty Adelstein, admitting,

“What we learned is the fans are expecting you to be true to the source material. As we read the comments [in response to Cowboy Bebop], it was always, ‘Well, they didn’t do this character the same as this and that’—It really taught us a lot of what we needed to do with this one.”

They clearly walked away learning the exact wrong message from making Bebop, but it was the exact right lesson they needed to make One Piece. Both adaptations take liberties with the source material. They both try to imitate the anime's look. Yet, One Piece works where Cowboy Bebop fails.

So what exactly happened?

After some deep, existential soul-searching and a bottle of whiskey, I landed on an answer:

There’s a paradox at the heart of adapting anime into live-action.

Anime isn’t just a medium. It’s also a genre. And those two things are tangled together in ways that make adaptation uniquely painful.

As a medium, anime isn’t constrained by reality. They don’t have to worry about the feasibility of a shoot location or the price tag of special effects. An anime set on an alien planet could cost just as much as an anime set in high school, where the live-action equivalents would effectively have you comparing Degrassi to James Cameron’s Avatar 3.

But anime is also a genre with its own tropes and style. It can be cartoony, deadly serious, emotionally devastating, surreal, violent, and pornographic and has no issue flipping between modes on a dime. Not being constrained by reality allows its stories to be as outlandish and over-the-top as they want. Chainsaw Man is about a kid who can turn into a chainsaw demon. Hellsing features a holy war between Protestants, Catholics, and Nazi Vampires. Neon Genesis Evangelion starts with high schoolers piloting giant robots, then quickly turns into watching Hideaki Anno animate his own mental breakdown.

While you can perform surgery to swap out the animated heart of How to Train Your Dragon and get a perfectly functional shot-for-shot remake, many attempts at transplanting anime often turn into heart surgery with a complete overhaul of the vascular system as well. You often end up with something compromised, Frankensteined and held together by stitches. American remakes are whitewashed and wildly diverging from the source material. Japanese remakes try to honor the source material, but can only meet the anime’s scope with terrible CGI and rushed storytelling.

Apparently, the answer Tomorrow Studios and Netflix had to this problem was simple: Don’t make it a movie. Leave the genre alone and just make it a live-action anime series instead. Duh.

That actually makes sense for something like One Piece, since the source material is an anime through and through. Its story is ridiculous. Its characters are doubly ridiculous. There is no way in hell you could ever ground it in realism and have it feel like a One Piece adaptation, so they didn’t even try. The end result looks like the bastard child of Pirates of the Caribbean and Lazytown.

And somehow it works. It works extremely well. For season 2, they just doubled down on the absurdity and guess what? It’s even better than season 1.

Fuck me, I guess.

So why did Cowboy Bebop fail?

Cowboy Bebop might be an anime, but it’s a major outlier more influenced by noir and spaghetti westerns than other anime. Its characters and its story are surprisingly grounded. There’s a subtlety to its world-building that leaves much to be inferred. When you strip away the animation of the original, you’re not going to find much anime inside its guts. Bebop is actually science fiction—good science fiction—that just so happened to be animated in Japan.

It’s why Netflix and Tomorrow Studios’ attempt to turn Cowboy Bebop into a live-action anime failed so spectacularly. They confused the original’s medium with its genre.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, straying further from the source material would have honored Cowboy Bebop more than creating a crude imitation. A real adaptation should’ve leaned into the sci-fi, hard. Spike, silently watching the smoke of a lit cigarette set to a crooning trumpet, feels more Spike than any space station kung-fu fight scene. A lazy smirk does more character building than any forced quip by John Cho. The end result should have been something closer to Firefly with the vibes of Blade Runner. A space western with jazz and room to breathe.

The muted colors and grit of The Expanse are a better fit than the oversaturated palette Netflix went with, which tried to ape the anime look.

A rotating set of clothing would have made the Bebop feel lived in. Instead, they stuck with their iconic looks, as if Spike wouldn’t be Spike if he didn’t cosplay like Spike. Jett’s angular facial hair only makes sense with the justification, “Well, it was that way in the anime.”

At the same time, One Piece Season 2 has a surprisingly emotional arc with Dr. Hiriluk, a character who rocks an insane anime-accurate tri-directional mohawk, and you don’t question it because it just fits the world they’re in.

Cowboy Bebop’s set design tried to match the anime’s junkyard retro-futuristic look, but offered no Sci-Fi worthy explanation for why you could find Cuban Resolver on Mars or have Jett standing on a Nixon-era suburban street in the very next scene. It often confused “this was an anime in the 90’s” with design choice, leaving you with a future full of CRT screens and analogue tapes. Worse, most of the retro was in the props and set design, while the set extensions carried all the futuristic sci-fi elements. You could clearly see where the physical set ended and the green screen began in almost every shot.

And then there’s Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV.

When the live-action Radical Edward made a post-credit appearance in Cowboy Bebop to ham it up on-screen like some theater kid who forgot to take their Adderall, I reached such a low that I actually began to believe in God just so I could have someone to blame.

Ed is by far the most “anime” thing you will find in the original Cowboy Bebop. She’s over-the-top, silly, and the only character that uses those anime chibi expressions. When she isn’t contorted in a yoga pose so she can type with her feet, she’s usually delivering her lines by invading someone’s personal space or doing a handstand.

I always pictured Ed in live action form as a drastically toned-down version of that. She would still be an androgenous teen co-oping the Bebop’s main living area, but her anime quirks would be sanded off. Still on the spectrum with no concept of ‘awkward,’ but she certainly wouldn’t be bouncing off the walls.

When I saw her in the adaptation, I was convinced she was a panicked last-minute addition. That Netflix yoinked some girl from a local AnimeCon cosplaying as Ed and didn’t ask to see her resume. They just dragged her directly from the convention to the set.

Now? Seeing Cowboy Bebop’s cringy final death spasm is almost educational, because everything about that scene, from the over-the-top performance to the hyper-faithful character design, is exactly what works in One Piece. That Ed would fit right into Monky D. Loofy’s crew, but not the Bebop’s.

Faithfulness isn’t about creating a 1:1 copy. It’s about understanding what needs to be preserved and what needs to change. It’s about providing added value to what was in the original, and sometimes that means going in a new direction. Stories like One Piece need translation. Others need transformation, and Cowboy Bebop was clearly in the latter category.

Sigh… maybe in ten years we can try again.

With HBO.

Please God, just make it HBO.

I’m exhausted from this era of nostalgia-sploitation where we refuse to let “The End” be the end. Maybe I’m just bitter from being done dirty too many times, but every reboot seems to run on the same formula now: shuffle the deck and reposition the original lead as the wise mentor for their functional clone who still has two good hips. So when I found out that they killed the Buffy reboot, I’m not mourning the loss. I’m honestly relieved.

These revivals always begin the same way. First comes the triumphant announcement that your favorite franchise is returning. Then comes the quiet clarification that not all the original elements that made you love it in the first place will be involved. With Buffy: New Sunnydale, it increasingly looked like, out of the entire Scooby Gang, the only one definitely returning was Scooby. Or Daphne, I guess, since it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar. Whatever. Somewhere in a conference room, someone clearly decided: “The show is called Buffy. We got Buffy. Good enough.”

Except it isn’t.

To be fair, the people behind the show insisted this wasn’t technically a reboot, but a continuation. A bold new take. The idea was to introduce a new Slayer while positioning Buffy as a mentor figure — you know, like Luke Skywalker guiding Rey. Or Rocky training Adonis Creed. Or Daniel LaRusso becoming the new Mr. Miyagi in Cobra Kai.

The focus was going to be on the next generation of the Scooby Gang. Kind of like how the teens from That ’70s Show eventually became the confused parents in That ’90s Show. Or how Zach Braff was promoted from lovable idiot doctor to lovable idiot teacher in the Scrubs: Med School reboot, or how Zach Braff was promoted from lovable idiot doctor to lovable idiot Chief of Medicine in the recent re-reboot.

They were passing the wooden stake. Like Bill Murray passing the proton pack to Finn Wolfhard. Like Indiana Jones reluctantly handing over the whip to Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

It was a winning, completely original formula that couldn’t possibly fail. The roles were cast. A full pilot was shot. Real effort was clearly made.

And then Hulu watched it.

…and passed.

From the outside, the project looked like a perfect storm of structural problems a fresh coat of paint couldn’t fix. Some characters simply couldn’t come back. Dead actors can’t reprise their roles, and the best we can usually hope for is a tasteful dedication card and a line of dialogue assuring us they’re canonically “living their best life on a farm upstate.” Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg, tragically wouldn’t appear in New Sunnydale, which effectively scratches Scrappy Do off the list.

Then there are characters whose actors have become liabilities. In modern revivals, those figures tend to vanish into thin air, leaving behind a strangely shaped hole and real-world discomfort to fill in the gap. On That ’90s Show, Danny Masterson’s crimes were so severe the writers couldn’t even joke about his absence. Personally, I think a recurring gag where everyone just mutters “We don’t talk about Uncle Hyde” would’ve been cathartic, but I also accept that my poor taste is not always a reliable compass.

For Buffy, that dynamic would obviously apply to Xander. Nicholas Brendon’s personal struggles have been well documented, and it’s hard to imagine a major streamer building a revival plan that includes a character tied to multiple arrests and convictions.

(Update: -sigh- And the day after I wrote this, Nicholas Brendon passed away. I don’t want to speculate, and hate to think that Hulu’s cancellation may have been a factor. Honestly, Buffy isn’t Buffy without Xander.)

The creator issue loomed even larger. Joss Whedon’s alleged behavior on the original set was a guarantee he wouldn’t have been allowed within 500 feet of the property. Unfortunately, for as shitty a human being as he is, Whedon is still the mind that made Buffy, and I’m done pretending that the original authors of a story can be replaced and it’ll still be the same thing. It’s not.

For all their flaws, the Star Wars prequels at least feel like the product of a single, coherent vision because George Lucas was at the helm, steering the ship with an ego that only an original creator can have. Without that “Fuck you. This is my story. I can do what I want,” you end up with studio execs handling a franchise and directors being kept on a short leash, worried about meeting fan expectations.

And then there’s the simple reality of time. Buffy is a show about immortal vampires played by very mortal actors. Bringing back characters like Spike or Angel would mean either ignoring the fact that Angel, the eternal 20-something, was now pushing 60, or digitally sanding down the decades like De Niro in The Irishman. Neither option inspires confidence.

So what were we realistically left with? Maybe Willow in a limited cameo. (Alyson Hannigan was never signed on as a recurring role.) Possibly Giles, though positioning Buffy herself as the wise guide would make him narratively redundant.

Most likely, it would have been Buffy and a group of carefully engineered functional equivalents trying very hard to recreate the chemistry of the original Scooby Gang. That’s a hard position to put Buffy’s character in without bringing along a sad, subtle undertone of an aging sorority mom still hanging onto the triumphs of her youth while all her Chi Delt sisters go off to make careers of their own.

And seeing that the new Buffy pilot reportedly underwent rewrites to give Sarah Michelle Gellar a larger presence, it’s safe to say the show was still trying to figure out what it actually was right up to the end. Was it a reboot or a continuation?

My guess is they ended up with a reboot nobody liked.

To their credit, the creatives clearly tried. Hulu ordered a pilot helmed by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao. That’s not the kind of swing you take if you’re planning to phone it in. It’s easy to imagine heartless executives in suits axing a beloved property without a second thought. In reality, pilots like this are usually tested, tweaked, and sometimes reshot before a final decision is made. If they still walked away, it suggests something more fundamental wasn’t working.

And given Disney’s well-established enthusiasm for making fresh money off old nostalgia, the bar probably wasn’t sky-high. The show didn’t need to reinvent television. It just needed to somewhat feel like watching an episode of Buffy. If it couldn’t clear that hurdle, do you really want to untie the neat little bow the series finale tied all those years ago?

Personally, I would have leaned into the continuation angle and taken the story somewhere new. It starts with Buffy Summers living out of a van, traveling across the country slaying vampires because it’s the only thing she knows how to do. She’s lost her posh, fashionable-but-sensibly-priced style, and you can tell the off-camera years haven’t been kind to her. Then you introduce a young Slayer who lost her parents to vampires and—boom—now you have Buffy in a maternal role she’s not emotionally prepared for, dealing with a troubled tween who needs protection and guidance.

Keep them on the road. Have them pursued by an army of vampire bikers to keep the tension running. Throw in a scene where Buffy is calling Giles back in London looking for advice, asking if she was ever this bad. The story practically writes itself.

And yes, I basically just described the Buffy version of a story you’ve seen several times before (Logan, The Witcher, The Last of Us, Terminator: Dark Fate, just to name a few). But goddamn it, that kind of story works. What matters is that it’s not trying to give you New Sunnydale. It’s trying to give you something different.

As it stands, they were trying to recreate magic with far too many missing ingredients. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was never just about Buffy. It was a genre-blending ensemble machine powered by fast banter, rich lore, and long emotional arcs, all packaged in a monster-of-the-week structure that barely exists in the modern streaming era.

The original series thrived on the interplay of a beloved group. Yes, the show was called Buffy, but it often felt more like Friends. If you can’t recreate that, don’t even try. With only Sarah Michelle Gellar in the mix, they were essentially promising more of the same, only to risk delivering a full season of Joey.

That’s a loss I’m perfectly willing to accept.