You must feel it too. That little uncertain hitch as you take something in. A subconscious check we now all have, stopping you before you engage with anything new and asking, “Is this AI?” It’s become stranger danger’s second cousin, only instead of warning you about a van with no windows, it pipes up whenever you see a short story, an image, a song, comment, product review, news article, or weirdly sincere Facebook post from an uncle who usually types like he’s being hunted.

The most disturbing thing about the question “Is this AI?” is that it’s become almost interchangeable with “Is this real?”

On a certain level, that’s insane. There is no other way to describe it. AI has us walking around the internet like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, staring at everything and mumbling, “Is this real?” Yet the paranoia is justified. The fakery exists. The hallucinations and delusions are real. They’re just coming from the machines, not a chemical imbalance. I wouldn’t blame you for reading this far and deciding this piece is just three prompts in a trench coat. That’s the internet we’re swimming in.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, AI may be the reason behind the paranoia, but it’s not the problem we now have to face. The problem is what happens to us after we accept that realness is no longer guaranteed. Once you know someone in the room might be an impostor, you start side-eyeing everyone. Innocent or not, everyone becomes suspect.

It’s what I call the Dead Audience Theory.

In 2026, Trinidad and Tobago author Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove” won the Caribbean regional award for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Almost immediately, the internet began accusing the story of being AI-generated. People pointed to the usual tells. The story loves the rule of three. It has several “deep until you think about it” lines like “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” There’s also a third example I’m not going to give out of fear of being accused of the same crime.

Worse, the more people looked into it, the more it appeared that other regional winners might also be laundering slop. The AI cancer had clearly metastasized.

Except, not really.

After a month-long inquiry involving early drafts, timestamps, notes, and author interviews, the Commonwealth Foundation announced on June 22 that it was satisfied AI had not been used in the winning stories. Unfortunately, by then, most people had already moved on. Like most internet drama, the crowd wandered away without piecing it all together, absolutely convinced they understood the full picture because it was right there on the front of the puzzle box.

Adam Conover, a man who can only be described as what you’d get if a Reddit comment was a fursona, used Nazir’s controversy as Exhibit A in why AI is terrible and why people who use it are terrible in a YouTube video posted five days after the Commonwealth Foundation announcement. He did not mention that the author’s name had been cleared five days earlier, at least in the Foundation’s eyes. Instead, he and his guests used Nazir as a segue into the Dead Internet Theory, a popular dystopian idea suggesting that most of the internet has been overtaken by bots, algorithms, and AI slop. What we think of as the internet’s bustling town square is actually a ghost town full of Westworld hosts, still performing their programmed routines long after the guests have gone home.

But I think something else is happening.

What if the internet isn’t dead? What if we just can’t tell the humans and hosts apart anymore, and that uncertainty has convinced us none of it is real? The perception that the internet is being overtaken by AI-generated content may end up being more corrosive than the AI content itself. When we believe we’re surrounded by fake art, fake opinions, fake essays, fake comments, fake images, fake reviews, fake everything, we stop engaging with the new and unfamiliar. We start behaving like paranoid misanthropes. Authentic human interaction disappears not because every human has been replaced, but because we no longer trust that anyone is human in the first place.

The Dead Internet Theory becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we labeled the humans as AI and then congratulated ourselves for spotting the fraud.

It’s hard to precisely explain why something being AI-generated feels so disqualifying. AI content is treated almost like online leprosy. No one really wants to spend time consuming something AI-generated unless they were the one who generated it. They’re certainly not going to spend money on it. People rarely ask if AI is good. For most audiences, it can only be bad, suspicious, cheap, exploitative, embarrassing, or an automatic disqualification from consideration. The artificial taint also spreads to anyone who uses it. People who want to have their AI content displayed on the fridge are often treated with derision, while anyone trying to pass AI content off as their own is quickly labeled a fraud.

And if there’s one thing the internet loves, it’s identifying frauds.

Whether or not Jamir Nazir’s story was AI-generated matters, but the accusation did not need proof to do its job. No matter who won a Commonwealth Prize this year, the internet was probably going to come away shouting that some of it was AI. Partly, that’s just the social media environment we’re in. Outrage travels faster than nuance because nuance doesn’t make people feel like a little detective solving crimes from the toilet. “There’s AI slop afoot!” was always going to gain more traction than “This is a fine short story from a marginalized author.”

But the deeper issue is that we don’t always know what’s real anymore, and it’s only going to get harder to tell. Nazir’s story is actually something more unsettling than the usual low-effort machine garbage we call AI slop. It’s mystery meat. You can hold whatever opinion you want about who or what actually wrote “The Serpent in the Grove,” but we cannot definitively know. If it was AI, then it was slop good enough to fool a room of literary experts and win a prize. If it wasn’t AI, then a real writer’s career moment was dragged through the mud because his work happened to trip the alarm.

That second possibility should bother us more than it does.

We run into mystery meat all the time now. This essay, for example, is mystery meat. Maybe it’s AI-generated. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s some depressing mixture of the two. What makes it mystery meat is not what it is. It’s what you don’t know. You didn’t see me sit down and type this. If I swear this is 100% USDA-certified human thought, you have no particular reason to believe me. In fact, you’re probably predisposed to believe I’m a liar.

We all understand that anyone can now be a fraud. We all have the means to access these models and the opportunity to pretend a thirty-second generation took hours of human effort. As for motive, you’re reading this. I clearly want your attention, and you’re giving it to me.

Not knowing the truth behind mystery meat should eat at us. We don’t have a reliable way to prove or disprove AI use. Not every generated image comes stamped with SynthID, and an AI detector like Pangram is just one machine squinting at text and making a confident guess about whether another machine wrote it. That isn’t proof. So much of Nazir’s problem came from Twitter pointing out that Pangram’s machine thought “The Serpent in the Grove” was 100% AI.

The reason the question “Is this AI?” doesn’t eat at us for very long is because it’s almost always followed by an answer. We don’t have the energy, time, or patience to do due diligence on every piece of content that crosses our screen. Every second we’re online, we’re bombarded by an endless torrent of stimulation. Most of it gets only a few seconds to win our interest before we move on. The question “Is this AI?” probably eats up one or two of those seconds by itself. Sometimes the answer is backed by clear evidence, but if we can’t spot something obvious, like a mangled hand with six fingers, we end up settling for a gut check.

What matters is that for all the reasons people don’t engage with AI, they also don’t engage with any work they think might be AI. Sometimes defaulting to “This is AI” feels like the safest answer. For anyone who describes themselves as anti-AI, the last thing they want is to be the idiot who argued “AI art isn’t art” and then got caught enjoying AI art. No one wants to be the Facebook Boomer saying through a full mouth of mystery meat, “This is a tasty burger,” only for someone to inform them it’s fake. I’ve felt like an idiot sharing a video with a friend showing a baby reacting to a rainbow bath bomb and telling him he needed to buy this thing and blow his baby’s mind, only for him to respond, “Dude, that’s AI.”

The worst thing we can do is try to answer “Is this AI?” by reading the room and deferring to everyone else’s gut checks. There’s always confirmation bias in the mix. Most people who read “The Serpent in the Grove” only picked it up after the accusation, meaning they didn’t go in blind. They were primed to think it was written by AI, so what they read screamed, “This was obviously written by AI.”

Some of the loudest slop accusers also have the shakiest understanding of the technology. They don’t use AI themselves. Why would they? They’re not hypocrites. But that kind of moral consistency can lead to ignorance. They don’t really know how the enemy works or what the enemy looks like, yet they want to fight this war and go in guns blazing, and the humans they’re trying to defend end up getting caught in the crossfire.

You see this everywhere now. A skilled photographer is using Midjourney because the lighting is too crisp. An aspiring model is too beautiful to be real, and not in the usual creepy online-guy way. People literally judge a self-published book by its potentially AI-generated cover and call the entire text a con job.

Sometimes all it takes is one person suggesting something is slop, and suddenly everyone starts collectively hallucinating fraud. Authors on Reddit watch in dismay as someone shows up to proudly announce they won’t read what they wrote because it’s AI slop. The accusation leaks through the thread like ethylene gas from a rotten apple, souring everyone around it.

The accusers often speak with the confidence of someone holding a master’s degree in digital forensics, pointing out “obvious tells” that don’t exist. The books on a bookshelf are facing the wrong way in a mirror selfie. A lifelong iPhone user is confident the Android phone someone is holding is wrong.

Sometimes they just squint and say something “seems off” because an unknown writer is too metaphorical, too grounded, too lyrical, too blunt, too normal, too weird, too anything. Really, the unknown writer just doesn’t write like them. Or the author can write and the accuser can’t. If the accuser tried to create what the author created, they would need to use ChatGPT, so it goes to reason the author must be using ChatGPT too.

The net result is that people don’t read the self-published book because they don’t know the author. They don’t give the new musician a shot because the song might be a Suno prompt. They ignore actual artists making actual art because the artists didn’t bring enough receipts. Even if an artist does show their work, someone will point out that “slop artists” can generate fake receipts too. The paranoia never ends.

And people stop engaging with genuine organic human content.

A false accusation doesn’t just hurt someone’s feelings. It suppresses discovery, preventing an unknown from becoming known. Every established creator today was once an unknown creator asking strangers for the benefit of the doubt. The fear of AI severs those tiny chains of engagement, where one stranger takes a chance, telling another stranger, who tells another, until eventually a career exists where nothing existed before.

Kane Parsons went from posting creepy Backrooms videos on YouTube to landing a major Hollywood adaptation before he was old enough to rent a car. It’s easy to imagine a world where those same Blender videos are immediately dismissed as AI slop and never get the momentum to go viral. Matt Dinniman became one of indie publishing’s biggest success stories before the internet was flooded with AI-generated novels. How are we supposed to discover the next Dungeon Crawler Carl if every unknown author gets thrown onto the slop pile before anyone bothers to read Chapter One?

We love the idea of discovering unknown creators. The internet was supposed to be a place where a nobody could upload something strange, brilliant, stupid, deranged, hilarious, beautiful, and find an audience without asking permission from the old gatekeepers. That was the dream. Now, the old gatekeepers are the only ones holding a stamp of authenticity and everything else is regarded with suspicion. Now, before a stranger can become a fan, they have to decide whether the creator is even real. That might be the single worst environment for creativity.

There’s no easy fix to the irony that people are attacking human creativity in defense of human creativity. There are only personal suggestions that work at an individual level. The first is that before we shout “This is AI,” we should ask the opposite question: “Is this human?” AI content is easy to dismiss because we assume no effort went into its creation. Before making the accusation, we should consider the potential blood, sweat, tears, hopes and dreams that poured into whatever we’re examining. We need to fully understand the stakes of the second question: “What if I’m wrong?”

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert. It takes about ten seconds to accuse someone of being a fraud.

AI art supposedly deserves no praise because it creates the appearance of skill without the struggle, but when real human work gets mislabeled, the accusation does exactly what people fear AI will do. It replaces the human with a machine and erases the labor behind the work. It turns skill into an illusion, effort into a lie, and the artist into some idiot standing next to a generative slot machine, pretending a jackpot was craftsmanship. The hours vanish. The drafts vanish. The practice vanishes. Their humanity vanishes. All that remains is suspicion, and the suspicion is enough to scare off the audience who might have helped the work survive.

Jamir Nazir is a real person. He’s not some prompt monkey trying to hack his way into literature. He’s a 62-year-old writer who says diabetes-related health problems have made conventional typing difficult. His writing process often involved using Android speech-to-text on his phone. Becoming a Commonwealth Short Story finalist should have been a major step toward recognition for a marginalized author. Instead, it may become a career-ending pitfall, forever tying his name in search results to the words “AI,” “controversy,” and “fraud.”

That’s the thing people miss when they treat AI accusations like harmless skepticism. They are not harmless. The internet is very good at starting fires and very bad at reading the arson report, and it’s easy for an audience to walk away remembering only the accusation. I’ve been lucky that whenever someone accuses me of using AI, they usually denounce my work and then immediately leave without reading another word. They haven’t stuck around long enough to do real damage, like bombing my reviews with one-star accusations, permanently poisoning the well for future readers.

This is probably going to sound like the worst possible take to a lot of you, but bear with me: AI isn’t going away anytime soon. While it may be the reason behind our paranoia, it isn’t the problem behind Dead Audience Theory. We are. We’re the audience. We’re the ones who need to change, consciously or not.

We’re trapped in the Uncanny Valley, and I doubt we’ll ever find our way back out. As the technology improves, there will probably be less obvious AI slop and far more mystery meat.

My hope is not that everyone learns to love AI, but that the backlash becomes less visceral and more precise. We can learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to excise it. We need to stop treating suspicion as proof and remember that a human being can look artificial because artificial things were trained to look like us.

If you made it this far into this particular piece of mystery meat, then you’re already doing exactly that. Maybe I’m a writer. Maybe I’m a fraud who hit “generate” and let a machine argue for me. Even if you’ve read my entire bibliography, you still really don’t know. I could show you my revision history and argue that I spent roughly 23 to 28 hours over nine days researching and writing this. If getting distracted on Reddit and Threads for hours at a time counts as research, it might even be true. I could point to an AI detector score on this piece, even though I just argued those scores shouldn’t be treated as gospel.

If I’m putting all my cards on the table, I would also need to admit that I fed this article into ChatGPT and Claude. I use LLMs to fact-check, find typos, critique arguments, and poke holes in my logic all the time. Sometimes I even listen to them and tone down the Adam Conover insults. They seem to think I have some major grievance against the guy.

But the “I smoked but didn’t inhale” defense only opens the door to more doubt. Maybe I don’t have Gladwell’s ten thousand hours. Maybe I only have five thousand, and I’m using ChatGPT to make up the difference. Maybe I wrote this entire article at a fourth-grade reading level before telling an AI, “Fix this and make it gud.”

You don’t know. And you know what? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

You can eat a Big Mac without knowing exactly what’s in it. Later, you may hate yourself and decide it was artificial, overprocessed garbage. What matters is that you gave the mystery meat a chance, and you didn’t starve.

Human creativity needs human engagement to survive. Musicians need fans. Artists need snooty patrons. You read what I wrote, and that encourages me to keep writing. Small moments like that are what keep the internet we actually want alive.

I logged into the Kindle publishing dashboard to futz with my new sequel, Take Back the Deep Estate. The ebook was live, the paperback was live, and right in between the two was a new slot: “Add audiobook with virtual voice.”

Not “hire a narrator.”

Not “Use AI and help Amazon trade out a creative industry for slop.”

Just “Add audiobook with virtual voice,” positioned as a natural next step, just above that hardcover edition I should probably get around to setting up.

That button bothered me more than I expected, and then I started connecting dots. My God, things got so much worse. Even with ChatGPT and Claude operating in galaxy-brain mode, I quickly became tangled in the red string. I’m still sitting here scratching my head, but I can say this much with confidence:

Three things are happening at the same time. Audible is forcing creators into a new royalty system and pushing “All You Can Listen,” while Amazon has introduced the Virtual Voice option directly into the Kindle publishing dashboard.

They’re connected.

In short: Fuckery is afoot, and everyone except Amazon is going to suffer.

Consumers will find Audible filled with AI slop. Authors and narrators will be paid far less until human narration is eventually squeezed out of the equation entirely.

First off, narration is not just reading a book.

I care about voice actors, and I don’t like that every time I compare the state of the industry today versus what it once was, I come away a little depressed.

My father, Tom Kane, raised NINE KIDS doing voice work. It was a well-paying SAG-AFTRA union career that put food on the table, paid for school supplies, medical bills, and Christmas presents.

Then there’s Christopher Harbour, the narrator of my Deep Estate novels. He does not just “read the words.” It’s very much a performance, one I can confidently say is on par with what “legendary voice artist” Tom Kane once delivered. He is also trying to raise his daughter on audiobook work, but the environment is a completely different beast.

Once, he casually mentioned during a recording session that he would like to bring another child into the world, but the numbers kept him from doing so. I found myself looking at the family photo on my wall, where my father and mother somehow managed to corral their horde of NINE KIDS for a Kodak moment.

I know my father and Chris aren’t equivalent examples, but I couldn’t shake the idea that something had changed for voice acting, and not for the better.

In Tom Kane’s world, audiobooks were made by publishers, in studios, frequently under union contracts at scale rates with pension and health paid on top. In Christopher Harbour’s world, anyone with a USB mic and a coat closet can call themselves a “voice actor.” Amazon didn’t cause the barrier to entry to collapse, but they sure as hell leaned into it.

ACX’s Audiobook Creation Exchange became the primary platform for voice actors to audition and bid for audiobooks. The bids came with no instituted floor, and instead of royalties being built in, they became a bargaining chip. The result was a race to the bottom, with a paycheck often a fraction of union scale, and much of a narrator’s pay based on speculation about future royalties.

And in a very corporate, “the solution to the problem is to make the problem a solution,” Amazon took the fact that voice actors were now expected to play the role of director, engineer, and editor in addition to being the sole performer, shrugged, and simply started calling them “producers.”

So when I saw “Add Virtual Voice,” it felt especially cruel.

Amazon, the company that kept the starving artists starving, was now offering a machine solution that didn’t need to be fed. There is no “Hire a human” button. That’s on an entirely different website.

As it stands, the only saving grace seems to be Amazon’s bone-deep need to be stingy.

The Good News: Amazon’s Virtual Voice sucks

So I clicked that “Add Virtual Voice” button and had the machine read my manuscript just to see what they were offering. I was expecting something on par with ElevenLabs’ cutting-edge text-to-speech models. Something that could simulate a breathing human and somewhat understand inflection, pace, and tone.

Nope. It turns out the cutting edge is too expensive for Amazon.

They don’t explicitly say which model they’re using, but judging by the voice naming convention and some common sense, they likely went with Amazon’s in-house AWS Polly. Polly has tiers of quality, and its latest and best model is specifically meant for long-form content like an audiobook.

They didn’t use that one.

You see, good text-to-speech eats up GPU and can’t be generated in real time, so they’d have to render the entire audiobook before selling a single copy. At scale, that would add up to a pretty penny, enough that the aspiring dystopian mega-corp might even consider a rounding error.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned from all my research, it’s this: Amazon won’t spend a dime unless they can also nickel-and-dime someone else.

Using the good model would imply they had some faith that these audiobooks would recoup the investment. Instead, they went with something that could be generated on the fly for a fraction of the GPU compute, so they wouldn’t have to spend a penny until someone hits play.

And the result? It sounds like a slight step up from a Speak N Spell.

A good narrator performs. They give characters distinct voices. They pace jokes. They carry dread. They understand when a line needs to land dry, when it needs to hurt, and, especially when it comes to my writing, when it needs to be stupid in exactly the right way.

Amazon’s Virtual Voice just says the words on the page and nothing more.

It is, quite frankly, trash.

Just take a listen to Christopher Harbour and Amazon’s Virtual Voice read the same passages:

The Bad News: Amazon’s Virtual Voice sucks

If Amazon weren’t Violet Beauregarde wearing a thousand dildos, giddily rolling around trying to fuck as many people as they can, as fast as they can, I would think this was a lazy attempt to monetize some Kindle feature they were planning to give away for free.

Which makes the matter only more confounding. The cutting-edge audiobook option is there, they’re just not using it. If they’re not actually trying to make AI audiobooks that can compete with audiobooks performed by a narrator, then why are they being pushed so hard as an option for authors?

I think it comes down to two things.

First, Virtual Voice audiobooks aren’t meant to be literature. Its content, and they need a lot of it. The cheaper and more disposable, the better. I highly doubt anyone will knowingly pay for these AI audiobooks, but Amazon isn’t really planning on selling them. Sure, the author can put a price tag on it and pretend someone might buy it, but really, it’s all meant to fill up their “All You Can Listen” catalog.

Second, Amazon is clearly looking ahead to what AI-read audiobooks will look like in the near future, and the changes they are making to their contracts and royalty system now are in anticipation of making that future a reality.

Ultimately, they want a human voiceover for your novel to be a luxury, not the standard it currently is.

The Spotify of audiobooks

Amazon wants Audible to be the Spotify of audiobooks, but since Spotify is already trying to become the Spotify of audiobooks, they have to move doubly fast to become the Spotify of audiobooks. However, doing so requires a fundamental change.

Spotify would be a vastly different place if it started out as the Audible of music, and their subscription offered a monthly Spotify credit that could be used to purchase a single album. Albums would still hold some monetary value to the consumer, and Spotify introducing an All-You-Can-Stream option at this late stage wouldn’t be an easy sell to creators. Studios and artists would be hesitant to devalue their own work and throw it into the buffet.

Audible’s economy is no different.

For about twenty years, the Audible deal was simple enough to explain to a golden retriever, or let’s be real, most authors, including me.

On the outside, Audible was an honest, clean handshake between a person who wanted a story and the virtual monopoly that sold it. The listener paid a monthly subscription fee, received a credit or two, and spent those credits on audiobooks.

Amazon would like the customer to stop doing that.

Exchanging money for things, expecting those things to be yours, not paying them every month to access those things? It’s an antiquated concept of ownership.

Why allow audiobooks to have value, when it could be access to those audiobooks? What they really want is to offer customers an all-you-can-eat content buffet.

As a consumer, a buffet of content is pretty fantastic. Once upon a time, you’d drop twelve bucks on a single album. Now, you hand Spotify roughly that same amount each month and get every song ever recorded, forever, on tap. It’s a genuine miracle of consumer value. Just think of the last time you bought an album.

No, seriously, think about the last time you bought an album because it’s a real problem.

The irony of Spotify becoming the solution to music piracy is that while consumers are no longer stealing from artists, the artists are still getting robbed. By paying $12 to Spotify each month for access to their buffet, we’ve essentially capped our music spending at a single monthly album purchase. Spotify then promises to divvy up that single album amongst the artists you listened to, and they do just that, except not really.

The fact that Audible is looking at this model and visibly swooning should worry every author and narrator.

The way I see it, Amazon wants to turn Audible into Hometown Buffet, but that requires cheap content to fill the warming trays. Of Audible’s ~1 million audiobooks, only ~150K are “All You Can Listen.” As much as they would love to just force their entire catalog into the buffet, they can’t, since most of their existing audiobooks come with a one-credit price tag they can’t unilaterally remove.

So everything they’re doing is to work around that issue, starting with finding a whole lot of cheap content, fast.

They’re staring at the disconnect between Kindle and Audible catalogs and scheming. Only 4% of KDP titles have an audiobook, and Virtual Voice is part of how they plan to bridge that gap, by giving authors a fast way to make cheap audiobooks with AI.

But here’s the thing: The vast majority of these books simply aren’t worth turning into audiobooks the traditional way. Over 90% of self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies. A great deal of these dusty, unread novels end up on Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s eBook buffet, with the author reasoning, “Well, if they won’t buy the ebook, maybe they’ll read it if it’s part of their subscription, and I might get a quarter and a couple pennies in exchange.”

It goes to reason that the authors of these unread novels will do the same with Virtual Voice. “Well, if they won’t buy my book, or read it when it’s free, surely they’ll listen to it, right?”

Initially, I figured Audible would wait just like Kindle for the author to give up on people buying their AI audiobook before offering it as part of the buffet, but it turns out they cut that step out entirely. If you opt to create a Virtual Voice audiobook and your ebook is on Kindle Unlimited, the audiobook is automatically enrolled in Audible’s All You Can Listen.

That’s why Amazon’s Virtual Voice sounds like crap.

They don’t expect anyone to buy these books. Optimistically, readers might listen to a tiny fraction of these AI audiobooks for free, but for the vast majority, their popularity won’t change just because RoboCop now narrates them. They will, however, fill up the All You Can Listen catalog with cheap content that makes the buffet look more worthwhile.

Just don’t look too closely at the mashed potatoes.

Audible’s new bullshit math

Right now, Audible is trying to exist in both worlds: customers are still exchanging credits for audiobooks they’d normally buy, while Audible is also offering free audiobooks on top of that. There’s just one catch: Those free books aren’t actually free. Somebody is going to have to pay for them, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Amazon.

This is where the new royalty system comes in.

Let me be clear here because I’m going to use this term a lot: “bullshit math” is my stand-in for the overly complicated way a streaming-style buffet pays creators. The term is the result of spending an entire weekend using both ChatGPT and Claude to help me understand Audible’s new royalty system and how it meshes with the Virtual Voice rollout.

Initially, I came away with more questions than answers. I can’t tell you how many times I shuddered and said out loud, “WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WHAT?” Eventually, I landed on one overarching answer: Some bullshit math happens, and then they pay you less.

To which Claude and ChatGPT both said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

Topline, Audible wants you to know you’re going to make more money!!!! They’re flashing “40% royalties are now 50%!” and making it rain clip art dollar bills. Then they get into the details, and it’s far from that simple.

They have it all spelled out in their documentation, sure. They even show you a formula, and it’s all so easy to figure out. Just calculate:

It’s just that simple.

Really, the whole mess is a hodgepodge of terms, variables, and conditional statements across separate websites, and so much of it is left vague or undefined. But here’s the extremely simplified version:

The old system was messy, but at least it was messy in a way you could vaguely recognize. Someone bought your book, either with cash or with an Audible credit, and you got a cut. That cut would always be smaller than expected with a credit. After they run their patented allocation-factor bullshit math, the value of an Audible credit was never anywhere near the listed price. The 40% royalties were more like 21-18%, but at least the basic transaction made sense.

A customer spent something on your audiobook. You got paid for your audiobook.

The new system is: Someone bought your book, so take two Tylenol and buckle the fuck up.

Audible now starts with something called “Member Value.” This is the chunk of money they’ll be divvying up, so it’s pretty important to nail down. Naturally, they don’t give you any concrete numbers, so it stays vague and nebulous.

They also give you two contradictory definitions on the same page. In its video explainer, Audible says Member Value starts from the average amount received from all members of a plan, minus taxes, promotional discounts, and fees. In its written FAQ on the same page, Audible says Member Value starts from that plan’s monthly membership revenue, minus taxes and fees. There is no mention of an average or promotional discounts.

So either Member Value is the monthly subscription of the person who bought your audiobook, after Audible subtracts taxes and its suspiciously undefined “fees,” or it’s an average of all the members in that plan, after it’s fed through some bullshit math that lobs a chunk off to account for Audible’s free-trial-and-discount machine.

That’s going to be two very different amounts.

Whatever. This isn’t even the main point of fuckery. Member Value is basically their monthly subscription. That’s the chunk of money royalties are now coming from, not the credit itself.

What matters is that, under the new system, an audiobook purchased with a credit and an audiobook consumed through All You Can Listen are in the same single-user royalty pool and only weighted by their price. That’s a problem for everyone involved, but it’s especially shitty for the audiobook that costs a credit.

Now, I’ve written and rewritten this part three times, painting a full picture, showing the math, then not showing the math, trying to best explain this mess in a way that won’t make readers eyes glaze over or just sound like some author bitching about royalties. Here’s the best way I found to get it all across. To put it in the simplest way possible, using grade school math, and extremely round numbers, imagine this:

Someone walks into a bookstore and buys Welcome to the Deep Estate for a book club credit.

For the shopper, the credit is worth one book, as it has been for the past 20 years. For the new royalty system, the credit just means she can pick a book. Her monthly subscription fee is the actual value, and that’s $10.

The Deep Estate is normally priced at $15, but Jeff Bezos ignores the list price and hands Chris and me our 50% royalty of that member value, $5.

However, on the way out, the customer stops by the “Free books” bargain bin and grabs a book. After she leaves, Jeff Bezos looks at the list price of that free book and sees it’s also priced at $15.

He does some quick bullshit math. He adds the list prices together then divides The Deep Estates price by the total. (15/30 = 0.5) He then multiplies that by the Member Value ($10 x 0.5) then applies the 50% royalty rate.

The result? Jeff Bezos takes the fiver back from Chris and me. Now we get $2.50, and the author of the free book gets $2.50.

But wait!

The customer immediately turns around and walks back in, apologizing. Maybe she will take that trashy free romance she was eyeing. This book also conveniently has the same list price as the other two, so Jeff Bezos takes the money back again, does the same bullshit math, and divides it three ways, leaving Chris and me with $1.67.

The end result is that the customer walks away thinking she only bought one book, and you know what? Technically, she did.

Chris and I just ended up paying for the other two.

And no matter how many “free but not really” books she takes, the store won’t lose a single penny. Amazon being Amazon, they made sure they’ll always make 50–70% of the Member Value no matter what. This book splitting can only ever make them more money.

That’s the new royalty system.

And I’m sure you’re probably saying, “Yeah, but what are the chances someone is going to listen to multiple audiobooks in a single month?” and that’s the real kicker of this fuckery.

They don’t need to finish them.

They only need to listen long enough for each one to count as a “Qualified Listen,” which, for your average novel, appears to be anything over 30 minutes.

An All-You-Can-Listen audiobook doesn’t need to be worth your time. It just has to be worth giving a shot. The listener simply needs to play the prologue and a chunk of Chapter 1 before deciding it sucks and moving on, and that free novel can cut a major chunk of our royalty.

Adding in a tidal wave of unlistenable AI-generated audiobooks is only going to make the situation worse. The more disposable the free catalog becomes, the more listeners will bounce around, triggering Qualified Listens.

At the same time, paid audiobooks are at a distinct disadvantage because they still require an Audible credit. If you repeated the exact same situation, only now Welcome to The Deep Estate is also in the free books bargain bin, the result would be exactly the same. Audible’s new royalty system is forcing us into a post-credit economy where an audiobook being worth buying is just a barrier with no benefit.

If a paid audiobook sucks, they can always request a refund to get that credit back. But for a free audiobook? There’s nothing to refund. The free novel that wasn’t worth listening to still eats into the royalties of the ones that were.

At some point, excluding your work from All You Can Listen will cost creators real money.

In the long term, it’s also going to cost us human narrators.

The Human Cost

I make a point of not referring to Welcome to the Deep Estate as “my audiobook.” The Deep Estate series is very much the collaborative work of Christopher Harbour and me. I wrote and directed it, but Chris provided the voice, talent, audio engineering, editing, along with his own spin, which made the end product far better.

It’s to the point that whenever anyone asks about the sequel I just released, Take Back the Deep Estate, I’m actually telling them not to read it.

Wait for the audiobook. Trust me. It’s going to be amazing.

Amazon clearly sees this kind of collaboration as inefficient, and when all of this fuckery comes to fruition, it’s going to put both the narrator and author in a tough spot. Chris and I also share royalties, but that kind of profit sharing only works if there’s enough profit to share.

If narrators can no longer rely on speculation to make a recording project worthwhile, they’ll need to up their rates, but they’ll find themselves fighting against the current, pushing higher bids in the middle of ACX’s race to the bottom.

Maybe they’ll forgo royalties entirely for a higher up-front payment, and risk the chance that they could potentially record a bestseller and find themselves stuck holding a single paycheck.

Maybe they’ll have no choice but to learn to love the bomb and embrace ACX’s AI voice cloning services, because of course that’s a thing. It’s currently in beta. If they stop performing and start generating bespoke text-to-speech, then maybe increasing their volume could make the numbers work.

Or maybe they’ll just eventually get the message that they’re outdated and no longer needed. Gone the way of the horse and buggy, except for the few we keep around to splurge on romantic rides around Central Park.

As for authors? Well, we already have Amazon’s solution. It’s sitting right there on the dashboard: “Add Virtual Voice.”

Amazon loves authors. Not only do we put up the money and do all the hard work just so Amazon can take an outsized cut, but we’re also paying Amazon per click so that people might find our hard work in their search results. That alone is an insane relationship when you frame it in the context of the Bezos brick-and-mortar bookstore.

“Yeah, we’ll carry your book, but you gotta pay us a dollar anytime someone touches your book, or it’s going in our basement pit.”

When you get down to it, authors are Amazon’s favorite rube, and you don’t cut rubes loose, you string them along. Meanwhile, narrators made the fatal mistake of not being Amazon.

Abusive and toxic relationships are sustained by the abuser becoming the victim’s everything. “You are nothing without me! There’s nothing out there for you. Everything you have is because of me!”

They don’t like that the author is working with someone other than Amazon, and it’s not enough that they also keep the narrator under a controlling hand. They’re rightfully worried that the author and narrator might start talking behind their back, because we are.

But with a Virtual Voice narrator? That’s another lever they control.

Amazon won’t ever hear their Virtual Voice murmuring to the author in the other room, “I don’t like the way they treat us. There’s gotta be someplace that’s better than here.”

Their Virtual Voice doesn’t narrate with the hopes of turning it into a decent career.

It isn’t trying to raise a daughter.

It just reads the words on the page.

Legendary voice actor Tom Kane passed away last night.
Last night, I lost my father.

I’m still coming to terms with it, and I doubt it’s healthy, but I tend to write *around* my feelings more than actually process them, so here we are.

Here’s a story about who Tom Kane was as a person, as a father, but mostly, as a huge freakin’ nerd.

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My dad was a huge sci-fi nerd. For most of his life, he was burning through pulpy paperbacks, but never really talked about it. I’m assuming it’s because he exercised self-restraint, whereas I often end up being that guy, lore-dumping on an unsuspecting victim.

But the second you brought up sci-fi, and he knew that you’d know what he was talking about? Jesus Christ. He’d let it out. I can’t tell you how many times I found an amazing story only for him to say, “Oh? Yeah, I read that years ago,” then he’d start going off about Dyson spheres and the Fermi paradox.

It’s impossible to truly explain how much it meant to him to work on Star Wars. He lived and breathed Star Wars his entire life. For him to become a part of that was such a defining honor. Yoda, Vader, and C-3PO were voices he was doing as a child, long before anyone at LucasArts handed over a script.

I grew up watching the original trilogy on VHS with him, and he was constantly repeating every character’s lines throughout the movie, and long after the credits rolled. Did I appreciate it? No. Actually, I hated it. Dad talked through EVERY movie, and it gave me a deep-seated grievance against anyone who dares to talk during a film.

At the same time, I hear “It’s a trap!” and I don’t see General Ackbar. I see my dad cooking dinner in the kitchen, talking to himself as one of the multitude of characters in his head. I hear Him from the Powerpuff Girls, and I don’t see the devil in drag. I see my dad stuck on the 101 freeway, rambling to himself to kill the time.

I’ve always had a weird perspective because I’ve never actually been a fan of my father. He was never Tom Kane, the voice of Yoda, Professor Utonium, etc. To me, he was just Dad. Whenever I saw how much fans loved him, it always came with the thought, “I don’t see what the big deal is. He’s just Dad. Please stop. This is going to go to his head.”

His fans also never got to see how much of a nerd he was. Every convention, he came away with a thick stack of autographed things, often gushing that he got to meet Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica or Lando Calrissian. He often found himself in a weird place where he was friends with Peter Mayhew and Mark Hamill but was also privately squealing every time he saw them because, oh my god, you guys, that’s Chewie and Luke.

The only time I really ever put him on a pedestal was when I started writing sci-fi. I kept it hidden from him and said nothing about it for the longest time. My dad grew up reading Dune and Hyperion Cantos. He taught me the Three Laws of Robotics before anyone ever got around to teaching me the Bill of Rights. To dip my toes into a genre he knew so well was kind of intimidating.

It didn’t help that the story I was working on could not have been a worse choice for a first novel. It’s called Partition: Critical Era, and the plot was insanely complex since it was told through two main characters who shared the same body. One existed during the day. The other during the night. Individually, their POVs told a linear story, but plotting it out on a timeline was just nuts. The effect often came before the cause. You were jumping all over the place. The events of Chapters 4 and 6 would occur at the section break in the middle of Chapter 5. The narrative was arranged like a finely made pocket watch, and if I tried to remove a single gear, the whole story would explode in my face and fall apart, and I’d end up spending the next month putting it all back together.

Eventually, I broke and sent the first half of the manuscript to my dad, the only person whose opinion on sci-fi really mattered to me. It was attached to a very casual-but-not-really email that basically said, “Oh, by the way, your son is writing a novel in that genre you exclusively read. Read it. Don’t. It’s whatever.”

Three days later, he called me and was so goddamn in love with the story. He broke down all the characters, obsessed over the core concepts and the technology, and couldn’t get over how it was like nothing he’d ever read before. He wanted more. Most of all, he wanted to know how it ended.

I was shopping during the call, and after he hung up, I calmly put my groceries in the car, got behind the wheel, then broke down and started flat-out ugly-crying.

For FIVE YEARS, I used every spare second I had to write and rewrite this manuscript, and after all that time, I only had an unfinished first draft to show for it. I was filled with self-doubt and didn’t even know if what I was writing was any good. I don’t know when in my life I decided to define myself as a storyteller, but I did, and it became a real existential crisis. I had reached such a low that I was on the verge of giving up entirely.

I never told him, but that phone call was the only reason I kept writing. He believed in me, and that’s why I still keep telling stories, for better or for worse, to this day.

No, actually, that’s a lie. One of the main reasons I kept writing was that he also wouldn’t shut up about my book. He started lore-dumping my book on unsuspecting victims any chance he got. The book I had yet to finish. It was so embarrassing, I HAD to finish the damn thing.

Then, three months after that phone call, he had a major ischemic stroke, and he lost his speech center in his brain.

When the man with all those voices in his head was reduced to saying only “Yes,” “No,” “And,” “But,” “Wow,” and “Oh God,” it was an irony so tragic it was almost absurd.

If the stroke wasn’t something everyone in the family had to learn to live with, I would’ve rolled my eyes so hard they would’ve popped out of my skull. That’s not real life. That’s the emotionally manipulative plot of a bad Oscar-bait film.

But it was real life, and goddamn, did he manage to get the most out of those words. Tom Kane was gone, but Dad was still with us, and we all became really good at charades.

He never had a chance to read any of my finished novels, but he still encouraged me every chance he got. He’d see me using my free time to write and say, “Yes!” with a crooked smile and a thumbs up.

He’d listen to the audiobook in the car, grip my arm, and repeat, “Wow!” and I would grin and keep my thoughts to myself.

I had always planned for him to narrate the Partition audiobook. I wanted it to be a project we could do together. I never told him that.

He still found unsuspecting victims, and even though he couldn’t lore-dump on them, he would still point at me and say, “Yes! Yes! Oh God! Wow!” which was Dad-speak for, “You like sci-fi. He writes sci-fi. You should read his book. It’s good.”

The unsuspecting victim would get none of that, though. They would just see my dad saying “Yes!” and then pointing at me, and I would awkwardly translate, “He’s trying to tell you I wrote a book,” then proceed to downplay it.

Dad always waved me off with, “No, no, no... Yes,” which translated to, “Don’t listen to him.”

Now that he’s gone, all I can think about right now is this stack of yellowing paper I once found inside a box of keepsakes in the basement. It was a short story painstakingly typed out on a typewriter, and it was good. Really good. There was no name on it, but it was clearly my dad’s.

When I asked him about it, he did what I did when he told people about Partition and downplayed it. It was just something he wrote in college for a creative writing class. Nothing important.

Years later, during that phone call about Partition, I found out that much of his pride in my writing was rooted in that story I had found. The man who lived and breathed sci-fi once tried to write his own in college, and it was good enough that his professor encouraged him to pursue it. He told my father he should try writing something longer and seriously consider becoming an author, but my dad brushed the idea off. He didn’t have the concentration to keep at it. Just sitting still long enough to write a single short story was absolute torture for him.

And forty years later, the “would’ve, could’ve” of it all still stuck with him. Tom Kane always wondered if, in another life, one that most likely came with an adult ADHD diagnosis and appropriate medication, he could’ve become that sci-fi author.

There was always some expectation that I was supposed to follow in his footsteps. I look so much like him, but that voice of his never carried over. What I did get from him was his love of storytelling.

I never told him that’s why I took his acting name as a pen name.

Keep in mind, we’re talking about your entire internet history. If there is something compromising out there, anything, no matter how disconnected or hidden it may be, the opposition will find it.

I’m assuming for most millennials and Gen-Z, the answer is either “Yes, and I’ll just show myself out,” or “No,” followed by spending the next four hours locked in the bathroom, hurriedly scrubbing your shame from the internet.

Me? I’d be running for the hills the second somebody said, “You should run for office.”

Show me a young-ish politician who has zero embarrassing photos or posts out there, and I’ll show you someone who was grown in a lab. Realistically, it just means some political firm spent a long time hitting delete.

Millennials in particular are especially vulnerable to this. Their entire generation was introduced to social media and digital cameras with no concept of how permanent the internet could be.

It’s impossible to prove a negative, but I shudder to think how many great minds of my generation have personally removed themselves from consideration for political office over their web history.

How many potential congressmen were a little too wild in their 20s and didn’t even try to run?

How many potential congresswomen gave up on their political ambitions because some a-hole ex posted revenge porn of them a decade ago?

Every party had a friend snapping pics of our drunken antics and posting them on Facebook or Myspace. That friend never thought, “This is going to destroy a potential congresswoman,” but that’s exactly what happened to Breaking Points cohost Krystal Ball during her 2010 congressional run.

And the worst part about those pics is they’re as spicy as Taco Bell mild sauce. Hell, there are photos out there of me doing the exact same thing, in drag, and to a raw turkey neck during Friendsgiving… Not at the same time, obviously. Everyone was going around giving invisible man BJs to the camera. We only had two options back then: dick suck or duck lips.

The culture was also extremely different in the late 2000s and early 2010s, for better and for worse. Mostly worse.

Like, easily 95% worse.

Electing Obama had so much of America convinced that racism was solved. So much edgy comedy from that era was basically some comedian starting with, “Nobody is racist in here so we can laugh about it,” then proceeding to say a lot of racist things. And anyone who complained about it? They were being a b*tch and needed to lighten up.

The internet around that time was a cesspool. We were all hiding behind usernames and avatars, and the conversation reflected that. It was the height of 4chan humor, everything was “gay,” and everybody going around calling each other f*gs as a term of endearment. Try explaining that to a younger generation and not coming off as a homophobe. 🤦‍♂️

The simple fact that 2 Girls 1 Cup went viral back then pretty much sums up the lawlessness of the old internet. Can you imagine trying to share that video today from an account tied to your real name?

Best case scenario, you get banned instantly and HR bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and yeets you straight out of the building.

Worst case scenario, “They didn’t want my consent and laughed at my trauma” becomes permanently attached to your Google results.

And throughout this entire era, millennials talked crap, said terrible things, and trolled, not really thinking about the paper trail we were leaving behind, because it felt like none of it really mattered. It was all on the internet, and back then, that was the equivalent of saying it didn’t exist.

What Reddit user p-hustle wrote in 2013 was never supposed to haunt Senate candidate Platner in 2026.

Former Reddit user LoHubb56 never thought he would become a California congressional candidate, and now Lourin Hubbard finds himself attempting to explain pseudonymous comments and a resurfaced video of a fifteen-year-old homophobic slur.

While expecting our politicians not to be bigots should be the bare minimum, scandals used to come from something they did or said recently. Not something the internet kept in cold storage for over a decade until the exact moment it became useful.

One of the disconnects people seem to have with Graham Platner’s popularity is how willing his supporters are to wave away those old Reddit comments. I don’t think they’re saying the comments are fine. I think they’re saying they believe people can grow.

Modern internet morality often feels like people throwing stones from inside a glass house, convinced they’re safe because the windows are tinted from the outside.

I won’t be surprised when someone inevitably says, “Well, I would never post what Graham Platner posted.”

Yeah, but you posted something. There’s probably a picture or two out there. Do some mental Oppo research on yourself and I’m sure you can come up with your own thirty-second attack ad.

I can practically hear the deep, scary voiceover in my own head:

“Kevin Kane once jerked a raw turkey neck to completion because he thought it was funny. Do you know what’s not funny? Having a necrophiliac in the governor’s office.”

That’s our normal, and that’s okay. Most of us said stupid things, believed dumb crap, or acted like a-holes at some point, then eventually grew up. That’s part of being human. What’s new for the 21st century is the fact that we started preserving those dumb thoughts online, and recording those stupid things we did with our phones.

That’s why it’s actually a little disturbing to look at other young-ish political aspirants like Pete Buttigieg, JD Vance, or AOC. They don’t really have any of that web baggage hanging over them, and honestly? That might be the bigger problem.

If millennials and Gen-Z want representation, but our politicians must have lifelong spotless records, that’s going to leave us with one of three types:

The shill that has enough connections to hire a professional and bleach the crime scene.

The Ted Cruz type so boring they never left evidence behind in the first place.

Or worse, the politician is so alien that they started pretending they were normal long before the rest of us knew we were being recorded.

Personally? I’ll take the flawed guy who said some dumb crap thirteen years ago but says some pretty smart things about the state of the world now.

Turn off your brain for one second. It’s conspiracy time, and I want you to consider this heartwarming thought: What if the root of all our troubles has been staring us right in the face this whole time?

The problem isn’t that there are too many of whichever minority scapegoat cable news is spoon-feeding your uncle this week.

𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞. 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐝.

Why did Boomers have it so great? They were competing with half the population.

You know that job you can’t find, house you can’t buy, family you can’t afford, that prosperity your parents and grandparents stumbled into that now feels completely out of reach? Maybe it’s because you’re dealing with over twice the demand, while the supply of the things that actually matter hasn’t scaled with it.

What if to truly 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧, you don’t need the orange man, you need the purple one? 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐬.

And sure, maybe you’re recoiling in horror at the mere suggestion because the next step after identifying the problem, “there are too many people,” is to start throwing around solutions.

Don’t worry. I’ve seen Soylent Green. I’m right there with you.

Or maybe you didn’t follow step one, and your brain is still turned on. You probably have a whole list of rebuttals starting with wealth inequality and AI, and ending with a recommendation that I read Ezra Klein’s Abundance.

To that I say: are solving those problems good for everyone, but bad for billionaires and corporations?

Yeah. That’s not going to happen. It’s much easier to say there are too many people.

We’re in that terminal stage of late-stage capitalism where the body starts consuming itself. The tumor that accounts for .1% of the body but hoards over 50% of the nutrients isn’t going to excise itself. And “there are too many people” sounds completely reasonable to the white blood cells.

And it’s only a matter of time before 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 start saying it out loud. “𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲” being the rich, powerful, and possibly a secretly lizard-person ruling class. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 already like money and hate people. People want annoying things like food and housing. People also hold inconvenient opinions like, “Maybe don’t replace us all with AI? We need to afford those annoying things like food and housing.” Listen to any one of ‘em talk for more than ten minutes and it’s clear 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 already thinking, “There are too many people.”

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 simply haven’t found the right branding campaign to sell it to consumers.

If you still think this sounds far-fetched, consider this: we’re already halfway there. Ask any 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧. Their entire concept of 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐦 boils down to: “That nice thing we can’t do because there are too many people.”

Why can’t we have single-payer healthcare?
“Too many sick people.”

Universal Pre-K?
“Too many young people.”

Affordable college?
“Too many students.”

Living wages?
“Too many workers.”

Why do we need endless foreign wars?
“Too many people over there and not enough oil.”

We already live in a Fast-Pass luxury economy because the lines are too long, and the beauty of “there are too many people” is that it’s a problem that is never actually your problem to solve. You don’t need to gather the Infinity Stones.

Given enough time, a famine solves itself.

But you personally? You can order McDonald’s on DoorDash.

Wasn’t that basically the point of 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 showboating an elderly woman delivering quarter-pounders?

SHE may not have a retirement plan because it got eaten alive by her husband’s cancer treatments, but YOU can get a McFlurry delivered directly to your front door.

So just tell yourself, “There are too many people. Besides, I gave her a good tip since my ice cream wasn’t half melted.”

Or we could do the hard, terrifying thing and diagnose the actual disease: late-stage capitalism.

There’s still enough time to cut out the ravenous growth and begin extensive radiation therapy before the body decides the easiest way to survive is by sacrificing its own organs.

But 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 don’t want you to know that.

On May 4th, @PaulSmithBooks achieved the indie author dream when his book cover broke through and was seen by hundreds of thousands. The responses were spirited and enthusiastic, ranging from “𝐘𝐨, 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐅,” to “𝐖𝐓𝐅 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮?”

How did he do it? Easy. He made the main character an AI-generated depiction of a Black woman with a chimpanzee’s face.

But I have a confession to make: Paul isn’t the only one who has created racist AI images to promote their novel.

𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥…

Now, I could just give in to the temptation and join the dogpile. Paul’s responses to the controversy have been a masterclass in deepthroating your own foot. It got so bad that the DIY publisher had to issue a statement and promise to hire a "diverse team" to vet submitted books.

Considering their current vetting process appears to be one of those drinking bird toys hitting “return” a la Homer Simpson, that might be a good idea.

But then I remembered Jesus had a whole thing about throwing rocks, and… Well.

Okay.

Did I create an image of a Black woman as a chimpanzee? No. God no.
It was a… monkey… And that, technically, is not an ape.

Did I have the bare minimum of common sense to realize I should probably keep this to myself? Yes, obviously.

Also, no, because I'm clearly writing about it.

Still… Please, if you will allow me some grace, I will explain myself. Just put down the pitchforks for one second.

For context: in my upcoming sequel, Take Back the Deep Estate, there’s a character named Li-Fang. She’s a Yeren, a Chinese sasquatch that basically looks like a ten-foot-tall, luxurious golden langur monkey.

Sidenote: Just look at these guys. I friggin love these guys! They totally give off "Oh God, it's only Tuesday" vibes.

One of the jokes I make is that somehow this cryptid has an OF page, and it gave me an idea. Not a good idea. But an idea that made me giggle, which unfortunately translates, in my brain, to a good idea.

You know those spam accounts trying to con guys into subscribing to an AI girl’s fake 0nlyF𝐚ns page? I could make one of those. But instead of an AI Barbie of a dubious age claiming to be an Epstein victim, it’d be for a sexy Bigfoot.

That’d be hilarious.

So I started messing around with AI to create a photorealistic version of Li-Fang.

Immediately, I hit a snag. AIs aren’t actually creative. What they’re good at is predicting pixels and taking known concepts and squishing them together into a neural network collage.

They struggle to create anything truly novel. If the AI has no concept of a Furby, you have to describe it, and what you’ll probably end up with is a deformed cat, because it knows cats.

In my first attempt, it understood what a golden langur looked like. It knew how to create a sasquatch. But telling it to blend the two together? It gave me Guy Fieri and the Hendersons. A Bigfoot with bleached fur.

So I nixed any reference to sasquatch and went with “golden langur with humanoid features,” emphasizing a more slender, feminine body so it wouldn’t default to a stocky Bigfoot.

…𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭.

The AI, in its infinite laziness, interpreted my prompt as: “So you want a monkey with a human face pasted over it. Got you.” Then it looked at the darker skin tones of a golden langur and went, “Well, she’s obviously Black,” and started filling in the rest.

I immediately started slamming the delete button, then took a hammer to my hard drive just to be safe.

So when I saw Paul’s cringey cover, I actually chuckled, because I knew exactly what happened. The AI did the inverse for him, lazily slapping a chimpanzee face onto a woman, and because she had dark skin, it coded her as Black and started making assumptions about her features, like her hair texture.

Ultimately, I think the AI was the racist in the cover design. Paul Smith’s contribution was just being painfully oblivious and awkwardly, glaringly white.

So goddamn white.

Canadian white.

Which is the Vantablack of whiteness.

It didn’t help that he kept doubling down when people pointed it out with, “Nah-uh, it can’t be racist because I’m not racist.”

When that didn’t work, he tried to play the victim. That went as well as Kevin Spacey coming out to avoid #MeToo.

Then, like a Republican congressman caught having sex in a LaGuardia men’s bathroom, he pivoted to, “I’ve talked it over with my family and now understand what I did was maybe wrong.”

Which naturally led to everyone asking, “Oh, NOW you understand? You’ll listen to your white family, but not the countless women of color who told you this was racist?”

And here I am, quietly oofing in the background.

I’m totally not gooning to a ’squatch thot.

Nosirree.

Oh, and Take Back The Deep Estate is coming out June 2nd. You can pre-order it now.

Welcome to the Deep Estate (Book One) Is also free this week on Kindle.

Spirit Airlines has officially shut down, beginning what it called an “orderly wind-down” of operations on May 2, and comedians all around America are mourning the loss of their favorite punching bag.

They want you to believe the airline’s collapse follows failed rescue talks and a second bankruptcy filing in under a year. They blame rising fuel costs and decreased air travel for overpowering their razor-thin margins. But you know what I say? It’s all a cover-up for the truth.

I have a theory. Not a good theory. Not a theory I would share under oath or near someone wearing a blazer. But I know it in my gut to be true:

Spirit Airlines was never really an airline. It was a marketing scheme cooked up by the airline cabal. From the very beginning, it was meant to be a joke. Think about it. What company chooses the same color scheme as a caution sign? Every time one taxied past the window, your brain didn’t say, “Vacation.” It said, “This cheap motel room smells like bleach for a reason.” But the true punchline of every lazy late-night joke about Spirit Airlines wasn’t Spirit Airlines—it’s that we were actually falling for their PsyOp.

Spirit’s purpose was simple: Their flights weren’t actually designed to be flown. They were only meant to be considered. You would open Google Flights, see a Spirit ticket for $79, and briefly experience the thrill of maybe, just maybe, finally finding something reasonably priced for once.

But from the jump, their flights are almost certainly algorithmically designed not to work with your schedule, offering Wednesday flights for your weekend trip, or a departure so early you’d have to stay up all night just to make it to the airport. Sometimes, they’ll just give you three connecting flights, turning a four-hour flight into a day-long marathon, and you’re stuck trying to make sense of how three flights bundled together are somehow cheaper, or why one of them has to take you halfway across the country in the opposite direction.

All the while, you see a direct Delta flight for $286 with a leisurely 10:00 AM boarding time on the exact day you want. Tempting, but far more than you wanted to pay.

So you start trying to make the Spirit flight work. But there’s a bait and switch to their à la carte pricing. Spirit is like a Chinese restaurant tempting you with $1 chicken fried rice, but when you pick it up, you find out the container isn’t included. That’s $4 extra. What are you going to do, walk home with two fistfuls of hot, greasy rice?

If you want to choose your seat, that’s extra. If you want a vague promise of even having a seat, that’s also extra. A carry-on bag? Extra. Leg room? Extra. Oh, and did I mention this is all per-flight, for both departures and returns, and each individual connecting flight involved? By the time you’ve finished adding what amounts to the bare minimum on any other airline, you’re sitting at around $220.

Now you’re staring at that direct Delta ticket for $286. Suddenly, it seems almost reasonable. Which is the entire point.

That was Spirit Airlines’ true function in the ecosystem. They were a front secretly propped up by the rest of the airline industry to make every other carrier look like a premium experience by comparison. Not because Delta, United, American, or Southwest are especially good — let’s not get hysterical — but because they weren’t Spirit.

Spirit also strategically lowered the bar, shifting the Overton window on what counts as an acceptable flying experience, so the other airlines could profit off being their worst selves. Every time some insane, stingy airline scheme made headlines, it was either Spirit piloting a new way to make your life miserable, or a major carrier adopting a lighter version of what Spirit had already normalized.

You know how airlines now vary the price of each seat so you’re forced to pay more if you want to sit together as a family, or not have your face jammed against the bathroom wall? Would you actually be surprised if an exposé revealed that it was a coordinated industry effort, and they sent Spirit, the resident clown, to test consumer reaction first?

I wouldn’t be. And not because I’m the one who just completely made up this hypothetical.

But here’s where the grand conspiracy broke down: For this scheme to work, people have to be able to afford the alternative, and the alternative has to have enough perks to justify the higher price tag.

Spirit was useful to the airline industry as long as it stayed a big yellow warning sign, frightening customers back toward the legacy carriers. But in this economy? When the rent went up, and the local crack house started to have curb appeal, Spirit Airlines became Max Bialystock in The Producers, foiled by its own success. The math got ugly enough, and flying got so miserable and expensive, that its signature brand of stingy misery actually became competitive.

And now, in a time when we need a cheap option the most, Spirit is conveniently gone.

…Almost as if by design.

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.

Silicon Valley built these fantastic machines that can seemingly pull any image, song, or film out of thin air, and corporate media has been eyeing that golden goose ever since. At this point, it isn’t a question of if they’ll try to sell those eggs. It’s when. They’ve already started easing them into the diet, with a Marvel Secret Invasion title sequence here, a Fallout recap there, and after-the-fact disclosures about AI accent tweaks and set extensions in The Brutalist. The public reaction has generally been... not great. Every move gets met with scrutiny, shrieking, and a fresh wave of think pieces.

Right now, monetizing AI content mostly happens at the individual level, and it often relies on a quiet kind of deception, convincing people that the work was created by hand with care, not generated via prompt. Take The Velvet Sundown, a Southern rock band that reached one million Spotify listeners before it was revealed they don’t actually exist. People were so focused on the scale of the bamboozle that they missed the real story: Spotify’s response.

They could’ve stood by artists and banned AI-generated music because it’s sucking up potential revenue from real, starving musicians. Instead, they added a checkbox for uploaders who would like to voluntarily identify their songs as machine-generated. That’s it. A voluntary checkbox seems to be the default concession for most platforms. As long as the slop doesn’t desecrate some sacred IP, they’re dead set on keeping AI content on the same playing field as regular content. They’ve sunk too much money into this venture not to try to normalize it.

The major platforms and studios are not investing billions into generative AI because they want to foster creativity. They’re investing because AI promises an infinitely cheap content supply. Skilled labor is expensive. Actors have unions. Writers strike. Artists act like, well, artists.

AI does none of that.

For Disney’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI to make sense, they eventually have to get something back from the deal that they can actually sell, and from a media corporation’s perspective, the dream scenario is obvious: generate the next Black Keys instead of paying the real Black Keys. Generate prestige drama for pennies on the dollar and skip the expensive, unpredictable chaos of human production.

Then sell it to audiences at the same price.

There’s only one problem: it’s unclear whether consumers will agree to that proposition. I’ve yet to see AI-generated content openly advertised as such come with a price tag.

Look, I’m not one of those “AI is the great Satan” types. I love AI. I’m fascinated by how fast it’s evolving. I firmly believe the problem has always been how people use technology, not the technology itself.

But when it comes to AI-generated creative work, that stuff is worthless.

And I know that’s easy to say right now because we’re drowning in the toxic runoff of the Uncanny Valley. Today’s AI content is weird and hollow, but the improvement curve is insane. Just look at what people now call the “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti Test.” In only three years, we went from surreal nightmare fuel to merely off-putting. It won’t be long before it’s indistinguishable from commercial filmmaking.

But even if tomorrow’s models could generate Oscar-worthy cinematography that gives Emmanuel Lubezki a run for his money, audiences still won’t value that output the same way they value human work.

But What is “Real” Anyway?

It’s a morning ritual of mine to use ElevenLabs text-to-speech to listen to my manuscripts. It helps me step out of a writer’s mindset and just hear the story. Also, having Robo Michael Caine read Bobo the Garden Gnome is objectively hilarious:

The other day, my brother overheard me listening to the sequel to Welcome to the Deep Estate. He said, “It’s going to sound so much funnier with the real narrator.” He was right. Christopher Harbour is genuinely talented. But the phrasing stuck with me.

People instinctively frame the opposite of AI as real, and I don’t think that’s just because “Artificial” is in the name. Something deeper is happening. AI will always feel not real, no matter how real it gets.

If a machine can generate something in seconds that would take a human weeks, using skills that normally take a decade to master, our instinct isn’t to marvel at the machine’s superiority. We immediately discount what it made. It’s not real. It’s AI. It’s slop.

On some level, AI content sounds like a Zen riddle. How do you take a photo without ever touching a camera? What is the sound of a song recorded without a band? AI art has no existence before its generation. The model has no intention beyond following a prompt. It feels like everything is being conjured out of thin air.

Human creative work comes with a life outside of a digital file. You will never see Velvet Sundown in concert. You can’t point to a scene and say, “Tilly Noorwood actually broke her foot when she kicked that orc helmet.” Even if the AI actress could somehow give an Oscar-winning performance, who would accept her award?

The video model? The billionaire who funded it? Or the guy who hit generate?

Certainly not Tilly Noorwood. She’s just a JPEG with a PR team.

AI Will Never Have Its R. Mutt Moment

AI may be incredibly skilled, but skill and creativity are not the same thing. Generative models are trained to follow prompts, optimize outputs, and converge toward what pleases the user. They’re phenomenal at generating variations of things that already exist.

Humans tend to create by doing the opposite. They deviate and often follow the least optimal path. They take risks that might ruin their careers. So much of their end product is flawed, confusing, or unnecessary, until eventually something clicks. Suddenly, Duchamp’s poorly placed urinal with “R. Mutt” on the side becomes the mic-drop moment of the Dada movement.

People crave that kind of novelty. AI, fairly or unfairly, arrives with the stigma of offering only more of the same. That works in small, disposable bites on social media, and maybe for genre readers whose search histories already read like a prompt: “High quality, best-selling, steamy enemies-to-lovers romance between an elf and a centaur.”

The Slot Machine Problem

Suno, the AI music platform, is extraordinary. I love writing lyrics, prompting the style, hitting generate, and getting two fully produced songs thirty seconds later. If I don’t like them, I tweak the prompt and hit generate again. Two more songs appear. Do that twenty-five times, and suddenly you have fifty songs with fifty different melodies, performed by fifty different imaginary bands.

And I end up deleting forty-nine of them.

That disposable, whole-cloth generation undercuts the value of the finished product. Generative AI doesn’t really sketch out ideas. It’s more like a printer powered by a slot machine, and the human labor mostly comes down to pulling the lever and waiting for a jackpot.

At best, anyone trying to take credit for the output starts to look like a stage mom saying, “They wouldn’t even be famous if it weren’t for my guidance.”

It doesn’t matter how much cleanup or editing happens afterward. The default assumption is always that the machine did the heavy lifting. So when someone tries to sell generative media, the first reaction is simple: Why are we paying you for something the machine made?

The second reaction is worse. Why pay at all? I could make this at home.

The Generative Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Imagine having access to today’s MidJourney a decade ago. You could have built an enormously profitable career as an artist with minimal effort. You could have amassed huge followings, sold prints, landed commissions, and had studios lining up for concept work.

Now? Nobody cares. There is no meaningful skill barrier to high-quality work from AI, and that carries an inherent “I could make that” quality.

Things could’ve been very different if Silicon Valley had kept the genie in the bottle and only doled out wishes to the highest corporate bidders. Instead, they handed it out to anyone with a subscription. Even if they hadn’t, open-source models are only about six months behind in capability. And when everyone has a golden goose, that doesn’t mean everyone profits. It just means the gold market is about to collapse.

Studios like Disney and Netflix are clearly salivating over the idea that a ten-cent generation can replace a ten-million-dollar VFX shot. On paper, the math looks irresistible. Spend pennies, save millions. Somewhere on Buena Vista Blvd, an executive is absolutely convincing themselves that this translates directly into $9,999,999.90 more in profit, but it won’t math out that way in reality. Their logic assumes the two shots exist in the same marketplace. They don’t.

A ten-million-dollar spectacle shot is finite precisely because it costs ten million dollars to produce. That limitation creates scarcity. Scarcity creates anticipation. No one went to see Avatar 3 for the story. They went to watch James Cameron burn through half a billion dollars in the most visually stunning way possible.

The ten-cent imitation exists in a separate AI-saturated marketplace of its own making, where jaw-dropping visuals are no longer rare achievements but disposable spectacle that anyone with a subscription can generate. Its content that never quite transcends the suspension of disbelief because AI is still hard-coded in our minds as not real.

And when talent and skill are industrialized, value doesn’t disappear. It migrates. When nothing feels real, people begin to value authenticity. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Lars von Trier’s stripped-down Dogme 95 ethos came back around.1

If anything, the limitations of traditional filmmaking may only add to its appeal. People were drawn to Mad Max: Fury Road because it featured real cars, real stunts, and real explosions. I’m sure that same yearning for authentic spectacle will only intensify over time.

The real power of generative tools, at least right now, lies in personalization rather than monetization. I don’t listen to other people’s AI-generated music on Suno unless I’m hunting for prompt ideas, and they don’t listen to mine. The value lies in creating something for yourself, not in consuming strangers’ machine output.

The moment the technology allows it, I’ll absolutely try to generate long-form video just to see my own stories come to life. I’ve already experimented with a version of that through my AI radio play Some Stick Around, a feature-length ghost story designed to feel cinematic without turning on a screen.

And I give it away for free.

Not because I think it’s worthless, but because I don’t want to profit from the displacement of real voice actors like Christopher Harbour, or my father, Tom Kane, who spent decades building a career in that industry. I grew up watching countless faces light up with the realization that my dad voiced some of their favorite cartoons. You don’t get that when ElevenLabs is the norm.

Which brings me to the real cost of AI content. The one that actually matters.

The Human Cost

A viral tweet recently told a horror story about Amazon forcing thousands of engineers to document their jobs before replacing them with AI.

Is the post true? No. Corporations rarely gut departments in one dramatic event. They do it quietly. Positions go unfilled. Contracts aren’t renewed. Vendors lose clients. Layoffs happen at the edges.

But the story feels true. And that’s enough to fuel outrage.

We’re already seeing a justified social backlash against AI as everyone who isn’t a plumber begins to see the outline of an AI-fueled jobpocalypse. We can’t help but feel on edge every time yet another company rolls out an AI-forward PR release.

Sit through the credits of a Marvel film, and you’re confronted with thousands of names. Infinity War alone listed more than five thousand. Buying a ticket feels, however abstractly, like supporting that vast creative ecosystem. For that same reason, paying for AI media starts to feel like a tacit endorsement of all the people they didn’t hire, and audiences are becoming increasingly conscious of where that money is going.

And this is where reality begins to matter less than the vibes. Behind the Mickey Mouse mask is a faceless multinational corporation, and it’s naive to believe they won’t choose the most sociopathic option. Corporate efficiency and the almighty bottom line dictate that the Disney of the future will keep inching toward a Marvel movie where the credits are shorter than the post-credit scene.

Based on characters by
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Executive Producer
Kevin Feige

Prompted by
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Written by
ChatGPT

Filmed, performed, directed, and rendered by
SeedDance 5.0

Post-FX cleanup by
The one guy still working at ILM

No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.

Whether or not that ends up being their actual intention is almost beside the point. It’s galling to imagine someone at Disney looking at the credits of Infinity War and wondering whether all those names could eventually be copy-pasted into a war memorial for the fallen VFX industry. As things stand now, every time a corporation releases AI-generated content, it feels like another step toward that future, and you can practically hear a barking laugh coming from some boardroom on a top floor.

That idea alone is enough to push people toward boycotting anything tainted by AI, and that rancor will quickly extend to anyone working on it. Imagine becoming the symbolic face of why so many people lost their livelihoods. Social media’s maximalist rhetoric will turn you into a scab crossing the picket line and betraying all of humanity. A quick paycheck won’t cover the cost of permanently damaging your career.

The pushback is going to come from a very big tent encompassing everyone who currently feels a bit of AI-based job insecurity, which is basically anyone using a computer. It will make your usual toxic fanbase look quaint by comparison.

My hope.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution, where factories turned artisans into factory workers, AI is both the factory and the factory worker. It doesn’t just mechanize labor. It mechanizes the labor force as well. That risks leaving the metaphorical artisans out in the cold, not because they stopped mattering, but because the system suddenly stopped needing them.

On the plus side, that also means the artisans will still exist, shivering and disgruntled as all hell.

Creators are stubborn. They don’t create because it’s efficient. They create because that’s what they do. Literature was arguably hit first by the AI blitzkrieg, and most writers didn’t pivot into prompt engineering or quietly pack it in. They did what writers have always done. They kept writing, neurotically rubbing at the fresh chip on their already chipped shoulders.

If anything, generative AI may end up doing something deeply ironic. By flooding the world with frictionless media, it could restore our appreciation for messy human things. Work with smeared eraser marks and fingerprints dried into the paint. Work that feels like someone risked embarrassment, failure, or obscurity just to make it exist.

Perhaps human-made art becomes the next luxury label. Fresh. Organic. Handcrafted. Human. Something people are willing to pay for, not necessarily because it is better, and not even because it is rarer, but because it feels real in a world increasingly filled with simulacra.

That may be the quiet future of creativity. Not total replacement. Not a clean victory for machines or humans. Just a bifurcation: infinite content on one side, finite intention on the other.

Maybe audiences will still consume AI media. Maybe they’ll enjoy it, and maybe they’ll even learn to pay for it. But when it comes time to spend real money, to signal real taste, to support something they believe actually came from another mind, they will reach for the human work.

If only to escape the slop.

A while back, I had a full-blown existential crisis inside a Shell station. Under the hum of fluorescents, a tiny TV behind the counter cut to a 4Patriots commercial, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen an AI-made ad in the wild.

Let me repeat that, because the absurdity of it is insane: A company selling doomsday prepper chow ran a spot built by one of the robots currently taking over the world.

In it, Noah gives a TikTok-style tour of his uncanny-valley ark. Everything’s a little too saturated. Noah’s forehead looks airbrushed, and his face drifts between shots like the model can’t decide whether he’s Boromir or The Dude.

And the final shot is a veritable eye-spy of AI hallucination. Noah only has four fingers. The 4Patriots boxes contain “Mærgęr0nie & CheiDRS.” One bird is floating in thin air, and the creature on the right looks like an evolutionary ancestor you’d see at the Smithsonian that would inevitably become donkeys, pigs, and raccoons.

I did the reflexive “wow,” then it hit me: That all-too-common panic of being the ox meeting the farmer’s brand-new tractor.

AI commercials might be hawking buckets of survival beans at 1 a.m. now, but it’ll become the industry standard in a few years.

AI video may never win at long-form filmmaking. Every time I see some flashy action-packed slop showing that Hollywood is “Cooked”, my first question is: Okay, now can you make the AI show those same characters having a simple back-and-forth conversation? Don’t worry, it’s the first thing they teach you how to shoot in film school. It should be easy, right?

Almost immediately, Hollywood becomes less “cooked” and more “cooked Al Dente.”

The Ad industry, though? Oh, they’re cooked.

Let’s start by stating a painfully obvious truth for anyone outside of the Ad Industry, but is complete heresy even to hear if you’re on the inside: No one likes ads. I know you have to believe you’re Andy Warhol, not some guy shilling Campbell’s soup to avoid a full-blown existential crisis, but I’m sorry, it’s true. No one likes ads.

No one is paying to watch your commercial. In fact, many are willing to pay extra just to skip your ad entirely. Watching a commercial is traditionally the price you pay to watch something else.

When it comes to our eyeballs, ads carry all the consent of a park flasher. Marketers know the best kind of audience for a commercial is a captive audience. I’m pretty sure the only thing stopping Charmin from grabbing people off the street and keeping them in a dark basement pit where the Charmin Bears tell them, “It watches the Ad, or it gets the hose again,” is that an agency has yet to it pitch to them as ‘viral guerrilla marketing.’

All this is to say that the bar for commercials is already abysmally low. Nobody likes being sold something, and for those within the Industry, the only palatable quality of an ad campaign is that it at least tries to be memorable.

It also doesn’t hurt that working in the Ad Industry pays well. It’s a solid place to find a middle to upper-middle-class job.

Or at least, it was. The moment that an AI’s pennies-on-the-dollar and speed become a viable and noncontroversial option, the entire independent Ad industry will fall, taking with it all those middle to upper-middle-class jobs.

In terms of a medium, you cannot find a better opportunity for AI video to take over than a commercial. A commercial, at its core, is just a few seconds of screen time that hopefully lingers in your consciousness long enough that you decide to buy something when the opportunity arises, and AI is already capable of creating videos that run only for a few seconds. They only have to be “good enough” to erase an entire production crew’s call sheet.

And that’s what people mean when they say AI is about to “Cook” some industry.

A perfectly normal 30-second spot is expensive to shoot, and that cost climbs fast the second you ask for anything beyond “people talking in a kitchen.” If you shot a Noah’s ark commercial the old way—even the scrappy version—you’re wrangling wardrobe pulls and prop builds, day players and animal elements, a director, DP, AD, a small grip-and-electric crew, script sup, sound, makeup, then off to editorial, color, mix, and FX. Run it on duct tape and favors, and it’ll still coast past five figures.

Now the AI version? It’s one person at a laptop with a stack of prompts, rolling the dice, hitting ‘generate’ until they get the shots they need. That’s it. Maybe you keep some post-production people to edit it together and clean it up, but the prompt monkey could probably handle that, too. With CapCut. On their phone.

Put those two productions side by side and tell me which one is left standing. And how long do you think the old Ad Industry is going to last with all their former clients leaving them on read?

The scariest part is how indirect it all is. Maybe you could argue that basic human decency will stop your local Mom & Pop multinational from axing entire departments outright. But what about the third-party vendors? People get canned every time an ad agency loses a client. The corporation doesn’t have to fire anyone for hundreds of jobs to disappear. They just “go in another direction,” and the bodies pile up somewhere else. Not to mention that many of those same agencies are scrambling to stay relevant by rolling out their own job-cutting AI tools.

Is that depressing? Yes. Is it stoppable? No.

It’s not just doomsday-prepper-chow making AI commercials. We’re already seeing Coca-Cola and Super Bowl commercials bite the AI-generated bullet.

The brutal truth is that the spreadsheet is a wrathful God and it’s already made up its mind. Noah’s ark has already set sail, and the Great Flood of AI Slop is upon us. So what can you do about it?

Maybe you can join the growing social backlash to anything related to AI. That might work at first, at least while you can still single out companies that give in to temptation, not so much when those offending are the majority of the S&P.

You also have to keep in mind that the greatest enemy of any protest movement isn’t the entity being protested; it’s normality, inevitability, and time.

I think back to all the backlash EA received for its early attempts at DLC and loot boxes for Star Wars Battlefront 2. Did the protests work? Yeah, we “won” that fight. And now we all pay for season passes to play the game we already bought. Hell, most modern games make Battlefront 2’s ambitions to print money look quaint.

Maybe you can stand by your principles. Ask “What Would Don Draper Do?” Then argue about taste, craft, and the soul of advertising. I give it about 30 seconds before people start snickering because you’re unironically defending the integrity of a commercial. And that’s just for a room full of people who work in the ad industry.

When consumers draw the line, it won’t be for the sanctity of ads they already don’t like to watch. As long as AI doesn’t taint their viewing experience, it’ll be fine. Which is to say, it won’t be fine. AI is almost certainly coming for their TV time as well, but that only means they’ll have to choose their battles.

Ultimately, the studios are putting all their money on AI reaching a point of normality where the term becomes as interchangeable as CGI (with the unspoken added benefit of completely replacing the thousands who create CGI for a living)

As a copywriter, I was hit by that initial wave of AI innovation. After all, why go through the effort of emailing a copywriter, setting up a call to walk them through the brief, then waiting several days to receive a packet, when you can just copy-paste that brief into ChatGPT and hit Generate? The human is single-use, takes forever, and costs lots of money. The AI only requires a monthly subscription.

Well, I would argue that the LLM lacks quality and originality, but I can already hear the snickering. Again, we’re talking about commercials. Instead, I’ll just focus on the one thought that kept me from having a complete doom spiral:

I eventually pulled myself together, realizing that I could’ve made that dumb Noah’s Ark video myself.

I’m a creative copywriter. My job isn’t just to write words gud, but craft entire concepts. I already have a decade’s worth of experience writing prompts to describe action, tone, blocking, framing, wardrobe, props, and performance, only I called them scripts.

That kind of job doesn’t have to disappear if it learns to mutate. The “Copywriter” just needs to swallow their pride, grow a new organ capable of digesting toxic AI slop, and start answering to “Promptwriter.”

Then, all I have to do is fight off the refugees of an entire fallen industry to be that one prompt monkey sitting at a computer, hitting generate.

At the very least, it’ll give me a few more years before AI comes for that job as well.