I got laid off from Grindr a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing I reach for is contempt. Over the past year, I’d watched myself get slowly replaced by people (read: people using AI) who’d never written a sentence they cared about and had learned to make copy by feeding a microwave-brained half-thought to a chatbot.

What I want to say is that they have no taste. And taste was the only job left. The little magic box can write a thousand seemingly-but-not-actually competent sentences, but it does not know which one is good. That judgment was supposed to come from the person at the keyboard. That’s kind of the whole point of the job description. So when they take the first thing it spits out and ship it, it’s like they’re literally quitting and just keeping the job title.

Pressing buttons into a little magic box and mistaking its fluency for talent is confusing the slot machine for the jackpot. And no, all of this work that comes out won’t get worse, exactly. Worse would require someone keeping score—no one is, isn’t that cool? So there will just be more of it. More, more, more. Landfilled mountains upon landfilled mountains of more. Forever and ever until the heat death of the universe.

All of this has shown me that nothing ever needed to be good. It needed to be done, and done used to require a person who knew how. Good was just this…. cool little side effect. Now to get something done you don’t need the person. Done is free, good is extra, and nobody pays extra. Congratulations to done! Flawless victory!

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Actually, no — it is funny. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. A machine that can imitate everything except something actually good, operated by people who can’t tell the difference? That’s the cosmic joke of the fucking millennium.

And my god, is the copy bad. It’s recognizably, maddeningly bad, and it’s everywhere. By all metrics, the ability to recognize bad copy is now, I guess, a vestigial ear tuned to a sound that no one gives a fuck about anymore. The writer is the only one who can hear the note go flat, and the room just drunkenly dances around it.

I was vocally outspoken on the marketing team about AI, and a part of me thinks I was targeted since the CEO’s remit was “everyone needs to use AI.” But I digress; there’s no sense in getting conspiratorial. I saw people I respected and who had once demonstrated their strong moral compasses, bowing in the most disgusting of ways, sacrificing their morals for the blind worship of our new golden calf. And like the first one, this one is built from the sacrifices of the people who worshipped it. Only this one isn’t made from gold. It’s brains. Masticated, pasteurized human brains.

It isn’t really the being replaced that frightens me. It’s that I can no longer tell whether the difference I see matters at all anymore, and that the AI supplicants are all standing in front of the thing that replaces us, squinting for a second, and then shrugging.

These violent delights don’t have violent ends. There’s no violence on this much opium. We’re all turning into rows of gurgling blobs, a single arthritic hand sticking out of each one, pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing the button…

Honestly, I don’t even want to burn it. It’s a tool. The worship is the problem, and you can’t burn worship. Historically, that hasn’t been so successful! Maybe we do need religion after all, because this is what happens without one.

Scary scary scary times.