Are We About To See The ‘Cancel Culturification’ Of AI Criticism?

The ‘Are critics going TOO FAR?’ articles are coming. We don’t need to go along with it.

The AI menu at issue. Image: Instagram

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a pattern. People see something bad in the world, take steps to address it, and most people more or less agree that the thing they are fighting against is bad. Then we suddenly see a slew of articles, social media posts, etc., about how opposition to that thing has “gone too far” and hurt sympathetic-seeming people in some capacity. It happened with #MeToo; with holding people accountable for racism, transphobia and other bigoted attitudes; with police brutality; with COVID safety protocols; and with people in the service industry demanding higher wages. And it may be starting again, with opposition to using AI.

It’s starting the way it so often starts, with a sympathetic character committing what might seem like a relatively minor offense, not realizing they were doing anything wrong, and subsequently facing an onslaught of “bullying” from people who have unreasonably raised their pitchforks.

That’s the story, more or less, being told in a recent Business Insider article about the owner of a coffee shop in Buffalo, New York, who found herself the target of “angry artists” after using AI to make her most recent menu.

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Now, one thing you might want to know about Buffalo before we head into this is that it was the birthplace of the barista unionization movement. Back in 2020, the baristas at the Buffalo-headquartered SpOt Coffee (which has very good sandwiches, FYI, even if, when in Rochester, I prefer Java’s) decided to unionize, which then inspired workers at the local Starbucks to unionize, resulting in a total of 721 stores (so far) following suit. They also came pretty damned close to electing a socialist mayor years before Zohran Mamdani was elected in New York City. Like a lot of Rust Belt cities still bearing the scars of NAFTA, a whole lot of people there are not fucking around when it comes to worker protections. And no one at all is fucking around when it comes to coffee.

Here’s the story: Megi Endeladze, the owner of Penny’s Coffee Shop, traditionally utilized her own photography and the artistic talents of her staff in order to make the seasonal coffee menus at her café, but this season, that just wasn’t possible. The barista who usually made them was out of town, and while she’d previously used Canva to make the posters herself, she’d just recently given birth and just didn’t have it in her.

So she turned to AI.

Via Business Insider:

“I felt like a genius, and made posters using AI and frame them,” she told me. ‘Not knowing how much damage it would cause my coffee shop.”

She used ChatGPT to make an image of the menu, and got the poster professionally printed up for around $150. She also bought a plastic poster holder that cost around $200.

Then, she posted a photo of the new menu sign to Instagram. Very soon, the negative comments started rolling in:

“AI Slop.”

“Really a shame honestly.”

“Yikes.”

“SHAME SHAME SHAME.”

Now, the way they put this, you would think there were hundreds of comments. There were 11 when we started writing this. Eleven total comments on the post, and only seven of them were even negative. (There are more now.)

Granted, there’s no way to know how many DMs she got, but the examples they selected were not especially pitchfork-y.

"Penny's customer — or I guess ex-customer now," started one DM. "I'm sorry it came to this, but AI is a hard no for me."

"I didn't do it on purpose to upset anybody, especially customers," Endeladze told me. "In Buffalo, where we are, it's a lot of artistic community and all that. I didn't even think of that like that."

Really? So she knew enough about generative AI to use it to make a poster but not enough to be aware of the discourse surrounding it? I happen to find this incredibly hard to believe, but I guess it’s possible. Either way, she knows now and should perhaps consider thanking the people who made her aware of it rather than making herself out to be the tragic victim of online bullying. Businesses should know that if they use AI instead of real workers (or even instead doing the work themselves), many people are not going to be happy about it.

Hell, it’s not like she’s alone here. Singer Kelis recently learned that her AI ads don’t bring all of the girls to the yard, after she released a sunscreen for Black women that used a bunch of AI imagery in its ads (along with claiming, without any demonstration, that there was no white cast on Black skin despite the fact that it contains zinc, which is basically impossible without a tint). She was heavily criticized for not hiring a graphic designer or hiring “a real Black woman to sell sunscreen to millions of other real Black women” in her posts for it on social media, and rightly so.

But I digress. Back to Endeladze’s story:

She was up during the night pumping for her three-month-old baby and was scrolling through the comments and DMs, horrified.

There might have been many DMs — we don’t know — but again, there were seven public negative comments. How much scrolling was involved?

“At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it that way,’” she told me. “I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping down my legs because I overflowed the pump.”

She noticed she had lost about 100 followers — some of whom told her as much before they unfollowed.

We can all understand and have sympathy for new parents who are going through it, but the idea that no one should gently (for the internet) criticize someone’s choices because maybe they are pumping milk at the time of reading is a tad silly.

Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM’d her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.

They gave her a day to “think about it.”

Oh no, look at this terrifying “threat.”

There’s actually only one person being harsh here, and it’s not the person who offered to help her find an artist or graphic designer to do it for her. In fact, had she taken them up on their offer, she likely would have gotten some really good press out of the deal. People tend to like it when people learn and grow and change instead of digging their heels in and being weird about it.

The article notes that she put up another post apologizing for having used AI and promising not to use it again, but it leaves out the fact that she then went and “liked” all of the comments telling her that she did nothing wrong and that artists “better get used to it” and that “AI is here to stay.” Even then, none of the comments criticizing her were especially rude or unkind. Most just made fair points.

“It’s not the end of the world. However, I would suggest this: people would probably be happier to see a TERRIBLY hand drawn menu. As long as you can read it, it’s fine. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just handmade. Stick figures. Circle pumpkins. Lumpy cats,” read one.

“Thank you for acknowledging this but let’s not forget that Graphic Designers run small businesses too,” read another. “I see a lot of people in the comments here saying not to complain or ‘there are bigger issues’, but what if everyone ditched small coffee shops for Starbucks instead? Your business would cease to exist, suddenly not such a small issue. Supporting small businesses means supporting live Graphic Designers, PERIOD. This is just the cost of running a business.”

Several people in the comments who were supportive of Endeladze wanted to know why people would “go after” a small business owner instead of a large corporation for using AI. First of all, anyone who has worked for small businesses knows that they are not always super great labor-wise (not Wonkette, Wonkette is great). Second, it’s more likely to have an actual impact, and that actual impact, even if small, is likely to make larger companies realize that people are not going to put up with it.

People are always more comfortable with social actions that are less likely to have an impact. It’s the “Why don’t you protest things OTHER countries do that are bad, instead of focusing on the US or situations in which the US doing or not doing something could affect things? We could all get behind you if you did that!” of it all.

I get that it seems like this should be a nothingburger, but the whole “People with an actual point are ‘bullying’ this sweet, innocent person who didn’t mean no harm” rubric keeps getting used to tamp down legitimate criticism of shitty things. It’s the first step before “Has ______ gone TOO FAR?” and that’s not an arc that tends to bend towards justice.

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The fact is, everyone is a pedant on the internet. You can find this level of “bullying” from every angle, on just about every topic, but you only really see it being leveled as a charge against people who are actually in the right. No one would suggest that the people “standing up” for this woman and sneering at the graphic designers and artists who are, godforbid, saying, “Hey, we’re not going to support how you make a living if you refuse to respect how we make a living,” are “bullying” them. That’s not how it works. We are more afraid, as a society, of people who are in the right going “too far” than we are of people who are in the wrong of going “too far.” In fact, when people who are in the wrong act much worse, what we actually see is that people start harping on about “free speech” and “Oh, do they need a safe space? Or a trigger warning?” And that’s fucking weird.

I get that this woman was probably going through some shit. I’ve been there! I’m a feminist woman who writes on the internet, so I’ve certainly had my share of angry emails and DMs. It can be unpleasant and even scary at times. But that’s public life now. And if all the angry DMs and comments I ever got were as polite as some of those, I don’t even think they would register at this point.

The AI Slopocalypse is absolutely a reason to grab our pitchforks. It’s detrimental to the value of people’s labor, it requires stealing from artists, it’s fugly as all hell, and it fucks with the environment. We also don’t need it, because humans exist and do it better anyway. So, fuck AI, and hopefully small business owners who use it will start considering the fact that it could cost them a whole lot more in the end than it would have to have hired a graphic designer, copywriter or whatever else in the first place.

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