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I just wanted to buy a book of crossword puzzles.
I like doing crosswords while I listen to music and podcasts. It’s a nice diverting activity that prevents me from doomscrolling and keeps my brain somewhat sharp (although I’m still too dumb to commit to cryptic crosswords. I’m not a robot, guys.) I prefer to do them offline, with a pen and paper, to curb the urge to open another tab and lose track of the hours. So, after getting to the end of my fabulous A24 movies-themed puzzle book, I decided to buy another one with a similar theme. It wouldn’t be the task of the century to find another pop-culture themed book of crosswords, right? Ha.
Browsing sites like Amazon, Bookshop, and even Etsy, I was soon proven wrong. Search after search tried to push obvious AI-generated slop onto my screen. I spotted most of it instantly, thanks to that distinctive blend of wonky fonts and personality-free artwork we’re now all horribly familiar with. Others were less obvious, but negative reviews and product descriptions clearly written by ChatGPT gave the game away. The almighty algorithm kept recommending dreck, page after page. Eventually, I just gave up looking for that specific thing I desired and bought a book from Waterstones. The whole experience was disheartening but not unusual. I’ve found that the ability to enjoy many of my interests has become overwhelmed by the monstrous online force that is the glut of generative AI.
The internet is almost magical in its ability to spoil everything. That selfie where you felt great about yourself gets irritating and sexist comments from creeps who never shut up about ‘declining birth rates.’ Fan spaces where like-minded people can find community amid their shared passions are so quickly taken over by tinhatters, losers, and bullies. Everything quickly becomes engulfed by hate, regardless of its earnestness or inanity. And that’s just the stuff involving actual humans. AI, tech culture, and the algorithm has exacerbated all of these tensions and made the endless pursuit of mega-profit for a handful of CEOs a miserable experience for everyone else. Hobbies are meant to give us a break from that. So, of course it’s just spoiled them instead.
Generative AI and the slop-ifying of hobbies is the most obvious sign of this. My futile hunt for a real crossword book amid a sea of Midjourney fraud is not a unique issue. It’s happened so many times before with my other hobbies and interests. I couldn’t find a particular colouring book for my niece because of it. Authentic embroidery and crochet patterns are tougher than ever to find on sites like Etsy, where indie sellers and hobbyists used to thrive. Looking for a new book to read when you like to support independent authors shouldn’t be so tough and yet I have to put so much work into checking for the stench of ChatGPT. Even my beloved lo-fi music playlists, which used to bring me such pleasure and relaxation, have been overtaken by slop. I talked to some friends recently about this and they echoed my sentiments with their own hobbies, such as video games, podcasting, art, and even travel. Nothing is immune to this hijacking.
A recent article in The Cut called out how increasingly common it had become for people to turn to AI to ‘cheat’ at their hobbies, a notion they desceibed as an issue of ‘secondhand thinkers.’ Escape room participants, book club choices, phony crochet patterns: so many people seem utterly unbothered by the infestation. Are we already so dependent on the faulty plagiarism machines that we have to use them to enshittify the concept of fun? That’s the part that really galled me: why are you so effing allergic to using your brain for a few hours on something you’re ostensibly enjoying? Yeah, chilling out and not being overwhelmed by mile-a-minute doom thoughts is often essential, but why go to an escape room if you truly can’t be bothered to give it a go on its own terms? Using AI to bypass every aspect of your own development is the stuff of dystopias. It’s almost as if this system is designed to make people addicted to doomscrolling or something.
The laziness of it all is impossible to escape. A lot of people are obviously using these systems to make a quick buck, which is bad enough. But how is it that there’s now an accepted status quo where every participant is expected to care so little about their own pleasure and enrichment that we’re told to pay good money for clanker bullsh*t? You couldn’t be bothered to make the crossword puzzle but you want me to pay £6 to do it? Frankly, I’m exhausted with having to act as a part-time fact-checker for my own hobbies. It’s time consuming and aggravating to have to dig into product descriptions and company backgrounds like I’m Woodward and/or Bernstein. That it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference only further exhausts me, especially since search engines have also been made worse by their implementation of AI. Dammit, I feel demoralized by this descent into uncanny hell.
Whenever I’ve talked to people about AI and its enshittification of everything, I almost always hear the response, ‘Does anyone actually want this?’ I still don’t know anyone who is truly enthusiastic about generative AI taking over everything, largely because I don’t hang out with terminally smarmy tech bro fanboys who are still hoarding their NFTs in the hopes that some loser will one day pay $1m for an ugly cartoon of a melting ape. I don’t think most people love AI; but I do think many of them don’t mind it. They might not want to see an entire AI-generated movie but they’ve no qualms about using ChatGPT to make them a poster for their bake sale or asking it an inane question about what to cook for dinner. It’s been all too easy for many to use AI for the mundanities, for those things that they otherwise believe to be an unimportant use of their brains, but those are the details that keep us alive: the satisfaction of figuring out that complicated knitting pattern, the spontaneity of making up a story for your toddler, looking in the fridge and coming up with that oh-so-satisfying last-minute recipe with whatever’s left in the vegetable drawer. Generative AI wants you to expect nothing of yourself, and isn’t that sad?
As I get older and more cynical about the internet, I find myself more drawn to offline hobbies for all the obvious reasons. I wrote about the cozy hobby boom of Gen Z-ers a while back, and it reminded me of all the stuff I like to do when I can extract myself from the dopamine slot machine that is social media. So, it makes me feel immensely disheartened to see how those small pleasures in a dark world have been poisoned by generative AI. Nothing is safe from this rot. It’s another reminder that tech companies would rather you be zombified into nothingness than think for yourself. We’re not allowed anything to ourselves. Tech companies haven’t been able to make the business world dependent on their broken gadgets so they have to pollute our free time.
