The Machine Is Not the Only Thing We Should Be Afraid Of

A few days ago, I was scrolling through Instagram, as we do, when I came across a reel that looked like a clip from a strange, artsy film made in the 1970s.

The colors were hazy and otherworldly. The faces were made up in that wonderfully unsettling way old science fiction sometimes imagined beings from another universe. Almost immediately, I suspected it was AI-generated.

But that wasn’t what held me there.

The dialogue did.

I work in the realms of archetype, mythology, magic, spiritual excavation, and the feminine as divine, so when something brushes against those worlds, I pay attention. This clip grabbed me. It made my brain itch. I understood what was being said, but I could also feel other layers moving beneath it—layers I couldn’t quite grasp yet.

I watched it several times. Then I reposted it to my personal Instagram account because I knew my feminist-spirituality-priestess-witchy girlies would feel something too, even if they couldn’t immediately name what they were feeling.

I went to the creator’s profile, trying to find out whether this was an actual film I could watch. The account belonged to a filmmaker and artist using AI to make their work.

Okay.

What I wanted to know was: Where is the rest of this story?

The next day, I opened Instagram and found no fewer than seven DMs waiting for me. Most were from people I didn’t know. Every message said some version of:

You do know this is AI, right?

This is an AI account.

Don’t you know this was made with AI?

And honestly, it bummed me out.

Because what I wanted was connection over the actual message. I wanted That was deep. I wanted My eggs. MY EGGS. If you watched it, you know. I wanted to talk about what the filmmaker had made, what it stirred, and the extraordinary way this particular idea had been given form.

And some women did respond that way. They watched it, paid attention, and engaged with what was being said.

The other messages weren’t really questions. These people didn’t genuinely want to know whether I’d recognized the use of AI. The question was a socially acceptable wrapper for the judgment underneath it:

This is AI. You shouldn’t be sharing it. You got something wrong, and I’m here to correct you.

It’s a strange, passive-aggressive form of policing—one that allows a person to posture as both righteous and kind while making sure you understand that you’ve violated the group’s moral code.

That distresses me far more than someone simply disagreeing with what I shared.

This isn’t an argument for or against AI. We’re already inside a massive and rapidly accelerating cultural shift that demands serious examination. AI can be extraordinarily useful. It can also be exploitative, destructive, dehumanizing, and environmentally costly. It raises urgent questions about labor, consent, intellectual property, power, truth, and who gets discarded in the name of progress.

All of that deserves our full intelligence.

Reactionism isn’t our full intelligence.

I keep thinking about the authoritarian impulse hiding inside this kind of social policing, especially when it comes from people who identify as liberal, progressive, and vehemently anti-fascist. And look… this isn’t an essay about fascism.

Fascism is a much larger and more specific political phenomenon than judgmental Instagram DMs. But this kind of behavior gives me pause. It makes me question whether the habits that allow authoritarian cultures to grow are confined to one political party at all.

Surveillance of one another. Ideological purity tests. Public correction. Treating disagreement as contamination. Pressuring people to demonstrate allegiance to the approved position. Punishing curiosity when it threatens the group’s certainty.

Sometimes it seems to me that everyone is helping move us in this direction, not just one side of the political aisle.

This same pattern appears in Substack’s new AI-detection feature. Readers can now ask an AI-powered tool to estimate how much of an essay was written by AI.

We’re apparently so opposed to AI that we need AI to tell us whether we should trust something.

Do you not see the absurdity?

People are accusing writers of using AI, denouncing books as fraudulent, and deciding whether a piece of work has human value based on the verdict of another machine. They’re outsourcing their discernment to the very technology they claim has rendered the work untrustworthy.

I came to Substack because I was tired of what social media was doing to us. I wanted a place where people still had the desire—and the attention span—to remain with an idea for longer than ten seconds. A place for essays, complexity, thought, contradiction, discovery, and a place where writers could develop an argument and readers could wrestle with it without being interrupted by an advertisement every four sentences.

The introduction of this feature feels like a capitulation to the very culture I hoped Substack might resist.

Reaction creates traffic. Outrage creates clicks. Suspicion keeps people compulsively checking, exposing, accusing, and refreshing. Platforms know this. Our nervous systems have been trained by it.

The danger is larger than whether any particular essay, image, or film was made with AI. We’re losing the ability to encounter something directly and discern its value for ourselves.

Did it move you?

Did it make you think?

Was there intelligence in it? Imagination? Specificity? A point of view?

Could you feel an artist making choices?

Those questions require attention. They require a relationship with your own mind, your own senses, and your own aesthetic and ethical judgment. Clicking a button and accepting its verdict requires none of that.

I can recognize a lazily generated sales email from a mile away. I can feel when someone has fed a machine a vague instruction and pasted whatever came back without adding thought, voice, intimacy, or care. The absence is palpable.

But I’ve also seen people use new tools in service of a genuine creative vision. The reel I watched had depth. Its dialogue carried something alive. The artist was present in what I saw.

A tool’s involvement doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to discern what’s actually been made.

Nor does an AI detector.

Maybe the machine is wrong. Maybe it’s right. Either way, it can’t decide what a piece of art means to you. It can’t determine whether an idea deserves your attention. It can’t do your ethical thinking on your behalf.

This is the part that disappoints me most. We keep handing away our capacity to perceive, question, and decide - and then calling the result moral clarity.

We’ve become so addicted to reacting that we mistake immediate judgment for consciousness. We mistake accusation for discernment and certainty for thought.

AI requires scrutiny. So do the corporations developing it, the institutions normalizing it, and the people deploying it without regard for the lives and livelihoods caught beneath it.

But we require self-scrutiny too.

Because what are we trying to preserve from the rise of artificial intelligence if we’re so willing to surrender our own? Our curiosity, discernment. our capacity to encounter something, remain present with it, and decide for ourselves what we think.

We say we’re afraid that machines will flatten human thought, replace human judgment, and strip creativity of its soul. Yet we’re already flattening our own thinking, outsourcing our judgment, and refusing to engage with art beyond the question of how it was made.

If we abandon those things in order to protect our humanity, we’ve already lost the plot.

By the way, the AI detector analyzed this and determined that only 24% of it was written by a me. Insert eye roll here.