For the past four years, we’ve been told two stories about AI.

The first is that people hate it.

The second is that everyone keeps using it.

Both stories can’t be the whole story.

In this episode, we pull apart one of the strangest cultural phenomena of the AI era: how a technology can be denounced as theft, slop, unethical, soulless, and dangerous while simultaneously becoming woven into the daily work of writers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, programmers, students, and businesses at a pace almost unprecedented in technological history.

Rather than arguing about whether AI is good or bad, we ask a more interesting question: Why are so many institutions trying so hard to distinguish between “real” creators and creators who use AI, and what happens when that distinction becomes impossible to maintain?

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