Thankfully, the generative-AI bubble is finally deflating. Massive infrastructure spend with dismal returns. Performative layoffs backfiring. The slow dawning that the emperor has very expensive GPUs and nothing much else.

But the business side of things is just that—business. Bubbles inflate and burst. What interests me is the culture that has grown alongside the market—the believers.

Over the years, a culture has developed on the individual (consumer) level in regards to genAI. /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk is one of many examples of this.

A Subculture of Contempt

The subreddit is a mocking imitation of anti-AI communities and their language and their grief. When scrolling subreddits like this, I witness a disdain towards those who are against the erosion of humanity. The contempt is evident in posts such as "Luddites prove they're fools once again..." and "AI took away luddie’s hobbies. How sad getting mogged by AI so hard that you need to quit 😭". There's a post titled "Ragebaiting luddites into karma is easy as fck" where users discuss how to provoke anti-AI sentiment, and comments like "Luddites are idiots. It's hilarious to falseflag as one of them with a bait AI image and watch them defend it and claim that AI couldn't recreate it.". The sentiment extends to personal attacks, as seen in a comment on a post titled ""I am speaking from the view of a 15yr old"" writing, "you're not anti AI lil bro, you're a child, go do your homework".

The Gendering of genAI

When I look at any pro-genAI spaces, I have this intuition they are predominantly men.

A 2026 survey from Data for Progress found that men view genAI favorably by a +16-point margin. Women view it unfavorably by -10 points, a 26-point gap between genders. A Federal Reserve study published in Economics Letters found 50% of men have used generative AI compared to 37% of women. CNBC's 2026 Women at Work survey found 69% of men call AI a "valuable collaborator," against 61% of women and found that half of women view genAI use at work as cheating, compared to 43% of men. Lean In's research found women are 38% more likely than men to have ethical reservations about genAI.

The Young Men's Research Project asked young people how they feel about AI.

The most common response among young men: excited.

Among young women: anxious.

Luddites

There is a proactive, hostile aggression towards those who have an emotional, empathetic repulsion towards genAI. People who spend their time making fun of and lambasting those who are against genAI, labelling them "Luddites".

Using that term in a derogatory fashion is amusing. It's supposed to conjure a figure hunched in technophobic darkness, waving a fist at the machine, afraid. A fearful primitive, right? Someone who doesn't understand progress. Someone who belongs in the past.

And there are definitely parallels, as the 19th-century English textile workers and artisans did protest against automated machinery during the Industrial Revolution. But while they are stereotyped today as being mindlessly afraid of progress, their original movement was a desperate labour rights fight against factory owners using technology to bypass fair wages and safe working conditions.

In response, the British government deployed more troops to suppress the Luddites than Napoleon had facing him in the Peninsula.

Luddites were willing to accept mechanization if they shared in its gains. They watched instead as the productivity of their craft, the value of decades of embodied skill, was extracted and redirected upward—always upward—to the merchant class.

Who would be against that?

Crypto Bros and Conservatism

Just a few years ago, with NFTs and Web3. Globally, 74% of cryptocurrency investors are men. Men are three times more likely than women to collect NFTs. Only 16% of NFT creators identify as women. Only 13% of Web3 founding teams include a woman. The technology has changed but the demographic hasn't.

Obviously, it is also political and partisan. Republicans hold a net +11 favorable view of AI, while Democrats and Independents trend unfavorable. Research from Stony Brook University tracking daily surveys found Republicans increasing their support for AI at a measurably faster rate than Democrats, the polarization increasing. Men are 12 percentage points more likely than women to affiliate with the Republican Party, according to Pew.

Enthusiasm for genAI, conservative political identity, and maleness are not three separate variables, they're woven deeply together.

The gender gap of participation can be seen in the culture, the slang (wen lambo, wagmi, have fun staying poor) that characterized crypto's peak has a clear cousin in the hostility of pro-genAI spaces toward skeptics. The in-group treating the technology as identity, and treating those outside as losers who don't get it. As marks. As Luddites.

Why Are Men Like This?

The question here, for me, is why? I've written about the shortcomings of men, including myself, so my guess is this: men are much more used to, and comfortable with, extracting labour from others and claiming credit for it. Men are more often uncritical or apathetic towards being extractive, focusing more on the personal benefits and upsides being more important than the systemic disadvantages and harm.

In academic teams, women make up nearly half the workforce but receive authorship credit on only 35% of the papers their teams produce. Men self-cite 70% more than women and have for 50 years, unchanged. University of Delaware research found that men are given more credit than women for saying the exact same thing in a meeting. In collaborative work, when performance information is ambiguous—when the team succeeded but it's not clear who did what—women are consistently rated less competent, less influential, and less leaderly than men who did equivalent work. The ambiguity fills with assumption, and the assumption is always the same.

Generative AI is, at its core, a machine for manufacturing exactly that ambiguity. You prompt it; it produces. The question of where the value came from—from the billions of images, poems, essays, voices training the model without consent or compensation; from the cultural labour of centuries of human creativity—then becomes officially unanswerable. And in that ambiguity, the credit flows toward the one holding the prompt. Who is holding the prompt? Look at the data.

Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk have both gone on record saying they practice 'zero' introspection.

Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.
— Elon Musk

Two of the most powerful individual actors in the technology industry, together worth trillions of dollars, publicly advertising the fact that they do not examine themselves. That self-knowledge, for them, is a liability.

It is, thus, unsurprising to see those who are in support of an economy and culture that produces billionaire men who advocate against introspection would lack introspection themselves. Fish cannot see the water.

The contempt for artistic labour running through pro-genAI spaces is load-bearing. The idea that prompting a model is meaningfully similar to making art—or that the output carries real aesthetic weight—requires a flattening of what art actually is. It requires you to believe that the product is what matters, not the centuries of accumulated human struggle, failure, revision, and attention that produced the cultural substrate the model was trained on. The loaf is just flour, and flour is just wheat, and wheat is just a commodity.

The hand-waving dismissal of the complexity of art, of the centuries of work done in the name of creativity, is imbued here. And the idea that prompting genAI to make art is at all similar to creating art yourself, or that genAI art has aesthetic appeal, fits squarely with my previous thesis on why conservatives cannot make good art

So yes, there is the explicit, obvious propaganda of the manosphere and rise of violent misogyny, particularly in younger men and boys of today. But it is an over-simplification to only look at that.

We have been inundated with centuries of harmful rhetoric and propaganda, of being socialized towards being drawn to power and compartmentalizing in order to blunt the natural emotional response towards being extractive. We are downstream of that. Men have been carefully taught not to examine.

A Lack of Conclusion

While I have pointed out the most egregious examples here, I see generative-AI being used without any disclaimer in many other spaces. I see people who claim to be "neutral" or "thoughtful" about genAI usage who then go on to vibecode their entire website, or put genAI art on display, or write out entire blog posts dense with genAI tells. As though the reliance and over-usage of these tools has become invisible to these people.

And I am someone that does want nuance, that wants productive conversation and dialogue where people can understand the real problems and harms associated with even casual genAI usage. I certainly do not think anyone who has ever used a genAI tool is a bad person or a lost cause.

If only changing minds were so easy.