Over the past few years, there’s been no shortage of folks breathlessly telling us that AI is our new tech to be worshiped, that it is a wonderful and amazing tool that we all must rush to use. It will make life better, and everything will be easier and more effortless. Besides, there is the whole inevitability thing, an argument which tech bros love to shove down our throats, the same way they do with every other technology on which their fortunes depend.

I’d like to offer a different view. AI is a soulless source of junk information, bad writing, and bad ideas. On a personal note, the creators of Meta’s AI program stole my novel, without asking, to ‘train’ their stupid tool. They’ve illegally done this with millions of works, but when called out on this lawless behavior, the companies merely shrug and inform us that there would be no way to train their tools if they had to deal with pesky copyright laws. Authors are powerless in the face of these tech forces, it seems. It’s all inevitable: the bright, shiny future.

Forgive me for a moment if I seem emotional here. My humble novel, The Osprey Man, was a labor of love. I spent years writing it, and years beyond that marketing it, and it finally found a home at a tiny, independent publisher. I made very little money from it, but of course, as any decent writer will tell you, that was never the point. I had a story I wanted and needed to get out there. It may not have sold many copies, but I didn’t care.

My story of publication isn’t unique. There are plenty of writers out there who have done and continue to do the same, despite the odds. Zuckerberg and his lackeys, no matter how rich and powerful, have no right to churn up our work like it’s fertilizer. Yet that’s exactly how Meta and every other purveyor of AI treat the copyrighted works of millions of writers. It’s revolting, undemocratic, downright vile behavior, yet it’s exactly the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from our tech overlords, and no one even bats an eye. In fact, the story barely seemed to make news and disappeared rather quickly.

Aside from the outrageous way Meta has treated authors, there is a much larger issue with AI, and how it’s bound to affect us all. In 1985, Neil Postman, in his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued convincingly about the death of our reading culture, and how television had dumbed us down so much that it had reduced our once coherent public debate to mere sound-byte and spectacle. In Postman’s view, things had gotten so bad that Americans elected a nincompoop in Ronald Reagan. I’m sure he’d not be the least bit surprised by America in 2025, where, after a generation of hyper-connectivity and bad information, there seem to be few who believe in facts at all anymore, and we elected a far more ignorant, dangerous man than Reagan as president.

Give AI some time, and we will no doubt have an even dumber public life, one in which no one is able to read or understand anything more complicated than a meme. Where no one knows what reality is, and no one really cares anyway, since it’s AI’s job to figure out the issues and tell us what to think.