I’ve spent three years engaged in long-running and surprisingly civil arguments on here over whether AI is a cause of civilisational collapse or merely a symptom. My view is that, just as AI prose and art could only possibly flourish in the context of a mass culture that was completely sclerotic and reduced to smashing tropes together, the sort of person who’d get an LLM to tell them three nice things about their own child or make a podcast about what their child had been up to to listen to on the way to work was fundamentally inhuman long before AI came along.