Been thinking a lot about the amount of hate around AI lately, and especially how dramatically more polarized everything has become over the last six months. I started exploring this space about five years ago and, back then, people mostly seemed curious or indifferent. You could disagree, debate what the technology meant, argue about where it might go, and then move on with your life. Somehow that feels increasingly impossible now. A lot of people compare what’s happening to the arrival of CGI, but I’m not convinced the comparison really works at this scale. Traditional artists were obviously worried about CGI, jobs changed, entire workflows disappeared or evolved, and there was plenty of resistance. But CGI artists weren’t being insulted daily by everyone from industry veterans to some random 17-year-old or your neighbor who happens to be a landscaper and has absolutely no stake in filmmaking whatsoever. Today it’s “AI slop” here, “fuck AI” there, and people will genuinely go out of their way to find work they dislike simply to tell the person who made it that they hate what they’re doing. The magnitude of the reaction is fascinating in itself. Social media obviously changes the equation enormously. We didn’t have millions of people algorithmically rewarded for having the hottest possible take when CGI was becoming mainstream, and outrage now travels at roughly the speed of culture having three espressos. But I think there’s more to it than that. AI touches several anxieties at once. Copyright, employment, authenticity, inequality, identity, even the very personal question of what makes someone’s skills valuable when a machine suddenly becomes capable of doing pieces of what took them years to learn. And unlike CGI, this technology landed directly in everybody’s hands almost immediately. You don’t need a workstation, a studio job, or years of technical training to encounter it. It’s on your phone, in your search engine, in your workplace, in your kid’s homework. So the debate stopped being primarily about technology and became cultural remarkably fast. There are legitimate reasons to question how these systems are built, how people are compensated, where consent belongs, and what happens to creative jobs. I don’t think dismissing those concerns helps anyone. But there’s also something deeply unhealthy about turning every person who experiments with the technology into a proxy for all of those problems. Someone making a film with AI isn’t personally responsible for solving copyright law, labor economics, OpenAI’s business model, the future of Hollywood and your existential crisis before they’re allowed to post a 30-second animation. You can dislike the technology. You can refuse to use it. You can fight for better rules around it. All of those positions are legitimate. But five years into this journey, the part I find increasingly difficult isn’t disagreement. It’s how quickly curiosity has been replaced by tribalism. And historically, tribalism has rarely been where humanity does its best thinking.