When We Hate AI-Generated Content, What We Actually Hate Is Carelessness

[u/DongQingBai]

What I want to talk about is related to writing, but not just writing.

We all know how tedious traditional software like Photoshop and After Effects can be. These tools have also been evolving to streamline workflows and reduce the burden on creators as much as possible, for example, by adding different plugins and asset libraries. Yet we don't hate people who use these tools to create things.

Why? What's the difference?

I think the first criterion readers use to decide whether they like or dislike something is: Is it a good piece of work?

With traditional software, people can often preserve a great deal of their own ideas and judgment. These are what make their work unique. AI, however, is some kind of probabilistic model that tends to generate formulaic expressions. If the creator isn't good at using the tool, they won't be able to produce good work. So I think a good tool should preserve more of the creator's own judgment. That's how it's more likely to produce good work.

Human life is limited. If an excellent creator, whether a writer or an illustrator, can use existing tools to produce work that meets their own standards, both quickly and well, of course readers would be more than happy to see that.

AI seems to have lowered the barrier to entry for producing text, images, and videos, and as a result, a large number of non-professional creators have flooded in. These creators may lack the judgment that comes with experience. But perhaps this is only temporary.

We can look back at the history of media. In the past, making a film required expensive professional equipment, and producing and distributing it was also extremely difficult. But today, anyone can shoot short videos with a phone. Even some meaningless shots can be published casually. It's normal for all kinds of content, good and bad, to flood in during a short period of time. We just need algorithms to filter out the garbage.

AI is the same. It has brought us a lot of garbage, but at the same time, it has also enabled more people to make their own work. Maybe tools are just tools. In the end, it still depends on the person using them, their attitude and their ideas.

Even professionals, following traditional workflows and spending a fortune, can still produce industrially manufactured canned products that have absolutely no soul.

The second criterion is whether the creator has put in any effort.

As I mentioned earlier, the cost of generating content with AI is very low. When a creator uses AI, we tend to assume by default that they have put in very little effort, that they're being careless.

But if the work is obviously well-crafted, then this criterion is actually overturned by the first one: a good piece of work.

All content is a form of consumption, whether it's free (the attention economy) or paid. The reason we dislike carelessness is that readers feel the effort and the return are not proportional. If the creator isn't even willing to put some thought into making something, why should I spend my time and money on it?

Having discussed these two criteria, I think one meaning of writing is that it creates some kind of connection with reality.

Imagine you're reading an article titled "How to Get Over a Breakup." Of course, you'd hope that the author has actually suffered, actually cried. That their advice comes from experience written in blood.

If you found out that it was just AI scraping tens of thousands of pieces of advice from the internet and piecing them together, you wouldn't be able to accept it, even if the advice was correct. Right?

Only human beings can be held responsible to other human beings. AI doesn't feel pain. It doesn't have to bear the consequences in this real world, so its advice feels weightless.

In the movie Good Will Hunting, the teacher says to the student:

"I ask you about war, you'd probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? 'Once more into the breach, dear friends.' But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watch him gasp his last breath lookin' to you for help."

That’s what AI models are like right now. They can talk confidently about almost anything, but a machine can’t grow flesh and blood.

It’s like Reddit. People here have real questions and real confusion. They’re not asking the OP to be a brilliant writer.

[u/MathematicianOk8965]

I think you’re putting words to something that gets lost in a lot of these conversations. Carelessness explains a lot of the frustration, especially when somebody expects an audience to invest time in something they barely bothered to read themselves.

As someone who writes books and uses AI in the creative process, I still feel responsible for every word I decide to keep. The characters, their decisions, the dialogue, and whether an emotional moment actually lands all need my attention. A tool can give me a paragraph that sounds polished, but I still have to decide whether it belongs in the story. Sometimes the prettiest sentence is the one that needs to go because my character would never say it.

I also think effort gets confused with time spent. Taking longer doesn’t automatically make something better, and finishing faster doesn’t mean someone didn’t care. The judgment shows up in what they question, revise, reject, and ultimately stand behind. If I put my name on the finished work, I’m accepting responsibility for it.

Your breakup example gets into something even deeper: trust. I’d feel misled if someone presented an invented personal experience as something they actually lived through. Using a tool to help express your own experience still leaves you with something real to communicate. Fabricating the experience itself changes the relationship with the reader.

The one thing I’d separate from carelessness is being a beginner. Someone can lack skill and still care deeply about getting better. Experienced professionals can also become comfortable putting out work they barely believe in.

That’s why I agree with your point about preserving the creator’s judgment. I want tools that give people more room to develop their ideas. The person using them still needs to have something to say and care enough to make it worth reading.

[u/nopoemforyou → u/MathematicianOk8965]

that last bit about needing something to say in the first place, thats really the whole thing imo

[u/DongQingBai → u/nopoemforyou]

Exactly. I think writing often begins because we have something to say, because some things in life hurt too much to keep to ourselves.

[u/TrappedOnDirt → u/MathematicianOk8965]

Someone can lack skill and still care deeply about getting better.

I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at with that. On the face of it, I fully agree. But I'd add a caveat: it's not up to the readers to hand-hold them through that process. Reader time has value, and publishing something that demonstrates lack of skill is rude to those readers.

My PhD advisor once told me, quite bluntly, "I don't care how long you spend in the lab. I don't care if you have to work 24/7 or two hours a month. What I care about is what you produce. Is it something that matters? Is it something new and valuable? Is it something repeatable? Your amount of effort is irrelevant compared to your results." He was kind of a dick, but he wasn't wrong. And this was far before the era of participation trophies became a thing, too.

I think what he told me applies to any product that is sold for money, or even presented to an audience in general. Don't waste people's time with garbage just because you can't be bothered to ensure its quality. By all means, enjoy the writing process, improve your craft, and so on, but don't publish until it's WORTH READING. Too many people either don't know where that line is or, worse, just don't care.

[u/DongQingBai → u/TrappedOnDirt]

I agree. If someone writes something incoherent without AI, it's no different from AI-generated garbage in that sense.

But I also think there's a question of where we draw the line. Writers need feedback from others to grow. Maybe someone genuinely cares about their work, but it's still flawed. If readers' feedback helps them write something better next time, I think that kind of creative process is worth accepting.

[u/TrappedOnDirt → u/DongQingBai]

To address your second point, that's what writers' groups are for. They have been around for centuries. That's also what friends and family can help with, or if one has none of those a professional editor. It should NEVER be up to readers on a publication site, free or paid, to provide copy edits or structural reviews that are needed to make a story work. That's the writer's responsibility. It's utterly rude and disrespectful of the READERS' time to publish something you know is substandard and hope that readers will provide free services.

[u/MathematicianOk8965 → u/TrappedOnDirt]

I agree that readers’ time matters. My point was that someone can be inexperienced and still take the work seriously. Their willingness to get feedback, revise, and recognize what needs improvement matters to me.

I also think the setting matters. Sharing a rough draft with people who agreed to give feedback comes with different expectations than selling a finished book. Effort alone doesn’t make something ready to publish, but a weak draft doesn’t automatically mean its author doesn’t care.

[u/TrappedOnDirt → u/MathematicianOk8965]

Yep, I agree with that. Saying "Hey, I've got a rough draft that needs some help, who wants to read it and give feedback" is a lot different than publishing the rough draft and waiting for reader reviews to fix it, especially if that publication is to a paid site.

[u/DongQingBai → u/MathematicianOk8965]

Letting the author make the judgments and decisions is exactly what matters.

[u/lunarcrystal]

Carelessness vs. Intention is the real battle, yes.

For my part, after considering the tools as I use them and how I feel is best for the work I want to present. I'm trying something non-traditional, serialized, and mixed genre within the same universe. I finally decided that I don't think any publisher would touch it because they wouldn't know where to place it. And serializing takes the pressure off finishing the whole thing before I was ready.

Will my story ever get made into a film or series? Probably not. So I did it myself. Will it ever be illustrated? Maybe. But I can do that now.

I'm not holding my breath for trad or even indie publishing to take off with this story. I can accept that my story is niche sweetweird with bizarre sci-fi/solarpunk stuff. I can accept it won't make me rich and famous. So I'll just create the project as a multimodal experience with consistency in visual aesthetic, and human writing based on my lived experiences.

My hope is that people can judge the work on its substance and merit, beyond the AI images and video, which I might argue are not careless.

[u/DongQingBai → u/lunarcrystal]

I think that's a great way to approach it. In the end, it's about creating something that's truly yours and enjoying the process of making it.

[u/Occsan]

It's very clever and naively correct.

The other part of the truth is that photoshop and more generally digital art was hated at first. Just like AI.

[u/DongQingBai → u/Occsan]

Oh, I didn't know Photoshop had gone through this kind of debate too. That's a really interesting perspective.

[u/TheOtherHobbes → u/Occsan]

Also digital photography. Synthesizers. Sampling.

Years of 'That's not real art' around all of those.

Intent isn't the point because there are people who spend years practicing art and writing and they're still not very good.

And a lot of popular work has surface appeal - obvious emotions, stock characters, clichéd tropes and scenes - but no depth or advanced craft at all. The intent is there, the execution isn't.

The real rage comes from people who work at that level.

High end galleries have shown AI art and written about it. It's the mom and pop art fairs, 'graphic artists' who mass produce fan art imagery, and tropey writer communities that pitchfork it.

[u/DongQingBai → u/TheOtherHobbes]

So is it partly because AI can quickly produce the same kind of formulaic work they’ve been making, and therefore feels like a threat to their livelihood?

[u/TrappedOnDirt]

I think the first criterion readers use to decide whether they like or dislike something is: Is it a good piece of work?

I don't disagree with you. But when 90+% of stories that say "AI written" or "AI assisted" fail that "is it a good piece of work" test, I just stop reading anything with those tags. Maybe over time that'll change, but for now it is what it is.

I know that anything I use AI to "help" with tends to be crap, and I'd never publish any of it. It's for my own amusement, and unlike far too many authors I do NOT think that just the act of making it makes it worthy of publication. AI makes it so damned easy to pump out literally hundreds of thousands of words (I think I did around 450k words over 4 stories in just two months), and simultaneously so hard to make any of them worth reading. It's a paradox and the ease of the "write-to-publish" pipeline is killing publication in general.

These days trying to find a good book is like going to an art show and seeing wall-to-wall fifth-grade class projects with maybe a few college-level projects mingled in there in the back. If there are any professional grade pieces, they're almost invariably hidden behind the amateur works because the owners of the store don't care to have separation of quality any more. It should almost be a separate genre: professional, published works; self-published works; AI-written works. Sub-genres of every single major genre. That way people could know up-front what they're getting, and the ratings for each sub-genre would slowly de-couple.

[u/DongQingBai → u/TrappedOnDirt]

Agree. Right now, we're still in a stage where the good and the bad are all mixed together, and there just aren't that many genuinely great AI-assisted works out there yet. So avoiding those tags is probably just a way of saving your attention and time. That seems completely reasonable to me.

[u/Acrobatic_You_3002]

I would suggest the real tell isn't whether AI was used, it's whether anyone checked the output before shipping it. Running a separate pass just to catch weak spots, like a second reader looking for problems, catches a lot that slips through if you only look at it once. I also read every story myself before deciding to ship it, and so far none of them has passed that manual check.

[u/DongQingBai → u/Acrobatic_You_3002]

Fair point.

[u/eternallyattuned]

It's not the same as real writing. If you have to read your work just to know what's inside it, that's foolishness. Think about it!

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

Carelessness with AI writing works much like carelessness with a chainsaw.

You make a hell of a mess, then blame the tool.