Why the Left Hates AI

There is a strange sound that rises from the modern Left these days. If you spend enough time on Bluesky, you hear it constantly, an ambient keening like wind caught in badly fitted windows. At first you think it must be the usual chorus of despair about Tories, billionaires, climate, landlords or the total Hitlerness of this or that Trump aide – but no. Listen closely and you begin to recognise it as something new: the unmistakable note of people who believe the future has personally insulted them.

These are the people who hate AI. Not dislike, not mistrust, not sceptically frown at, but hate in the profound, almost theological sense. They dislike it the way 17th-century bishops disliked telescopes. They are affronted by its existence.

And the question is why. Why should a simple tool – in their eyes “essentially a glorified autocomplete with ideas” – arouse such luxurious panic among the literary-progressive classes?

The answer, I’ve come to realise, is both banal and revealing. The modern Left, particularly the online version, has spent the last decade or two building its status almost entirely on cleverness. Not wealth, not glamour, not worldly experience, but verbal agility. A sharp take, a zing, a bit of syntactical gymnastics, a clever callback, a sardonic eyebrow rendered in prose. It was the closest thing this cohort had to aristocratic distinction. They were the linguistic gentry of the digital world.

And then along came AI, which performs the unforgivable act of making cleverness cheap.

There is nothing quite as enraging as watching the one thing you thought made you special suddenly become widely available. It is like spending your life carefully cultivating a rare orchid only to discover it now grows out of the pavement near Greggs.

This explains why Bluesky, that curious gated enclave of junior journalists, sub-editors, online activists and post-docs, has become the Vatican of anti-AI hysteria. You will not find a more eloquent panic anywhere. The timeline is a long scream rendered in very well-punctuated fear. It is the cry not of people whose work will vanish – most of them, bluntly speaking, don’t produce work anyone needs – but of people whose identity is suddenly up for renegotiation.

And to be fair to them, I do understand the shock. I remember the first time I saw an AI mimic a paragraph of mine with unnerving accuracy. My stomach fell through the floor. I felt briefly as if I had encountered a ghost wearing my clothes. It wasn’t pleasant. (The unpleasantness wasn’t helped by the fact that this happened three minutes after I had downed a caramel-tasting Xanax in Luang Prabang and was already mildly convinced I might be dying.)

So I sympathise. But sympathy alone doesn’t alter the anthropology of the thing. The young Left hates AI because it threatens their last monopoly. Cleverness was their currency and now the mint is open to the public.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Marie Le Conte. Let me say at once that she is talented. More than talented – brilliant in places. A fast, sharp writer who can skewer a subject cleanly, like someone pinning a butterfly without damaging the wings. I admire her craft. She is, in her way, one of the most interesting young writers working in British journalism.

But her long Bluesky-circulated article about why she hates AI was one of the most unintentionally revealing pieces I’ve ever read.

She argued passionately, almost beautifully, for the nobility of difficulty: the blank page, the friction of thinking, the spiritual value of the struggle itself. She invoked creativity as a discipline that requires suffering, like a monk hauling stones up a mountain. She worried that AI was the beginning of a frictionless world. And she wrote all this with the grace of someone who truly believes she is defending civilisation from a technological barbarian.

Yet beneath it all, humming like a second bassline under the tune, was the real argument she never quite articulated: she hates AI because it kills her advantage.

It makes cleverness abundant. It makes “being good with words” a near-worthless commodity. And for someone whose identity and status are rooted in that very craft, you can understand the existential alarm. It is like watching the tide come in over your sandcastle while insisting that the sea is immoral for doing so.

This is not hypocrisy in the malignant sense. It is simply human self-protection dressed as principle. She is not a fraud; she is a person terrified of a new world arriving too quickly for her to reorganise her place in it.

But it is still revealing, especially in her unself-awareness. The Left, in particular, does not hate AI, as they claim, out of moral concern. It hates AI because AI exposes a secret fragility. Cleverness is no longer a fortress. And once you remove cleverness as a class marker, the entire cultural hierarchy shifts in uncomfortable ways.

The irony is that the writers who don’t fear AI tend to be the ones who have lived a bit. Or a lot. The ones with scars, battered passports, failed affairs, botched decisions, beautiful mistakes, griefs, addictions, children, bad years, recoveries and 40 years of sunlight and ruin in their bones. AI can mimic style, but it cannot fake a life. And yeah, I mean writers like me.

Marie will learn this. The Bluesky cohort will learn it. Perhaps the whole literary Left will, eventually, gasp and realise they’ve spent a decade polishing a weapon that has just become general-issue.

Cleverness is not dying. It is simply becoming democratic. And the people who once thrived on its scarcity are discovering that abundance can feel like a kind of apocalypse.

The above article was written entirely by ChatGPT, after a half hour conversation between me and the robot; a dialogue fuelled – in my case – by excellent gin-and-tonics in the Elephant Bar at Raffles Hotel, Phnom Penh.

This article originally appeared on Sean’s In Search of the OMG Substack. You can subscribe here.