The AI Police Are Out in Force. Can We Talk About That?

I opened LinkedIn this afternoon and within thirty seconds I'd seen three separate posts telling people to stop using AI.

Stop using it to write. Stop using it to comment. Stop using it full stop. Accompanied by the usual language - "boring," "formulaic," "inauthentic" - and the unmistakable tone of someone who has appointed themselves the guardian of how the rest of us should show up online.

I have a lot of thoughts about this. And I'm going to try to be fair.

The frustration is real

Let's start there. Because I do understand where it comes from.

LinkedIn before mass AI adoption was a different place. Posts had more variation. Comments felt more considered. When someone reached out it was easier to tell whether a human being had actually thought about what they wanted to say. That texture has changed, and not always for the better.

There are genuinely lazy uses of AI on social media. The comment that says "Great insights! This really resonates with my journey as a [insert profession]." The post that reads like it was generated by someone who typed "write me a LinkedIn post about leadership" and hit publish without reading it. The recycled listicle that could have been written by anyone, about anything, for anyone.

If you've been using these platforms for years and built something real there, watching that happen is frustrating. I get it.

But here's where I lose the thread

The leap from "some AI content is lazy" to "you should stop using AI" is enormous. And the leap from "I find this boring" to posting a public rant about it is one I genuinely don't follow.

What someone else chooses to do with their content is not your business. If you scroll past ten AI-assisted posts and one of them makes you stop and think, that's a win. If none of them do, you have a perfectly functioning scroll button. Use it.

The judgment isn't neutral either. It lands differently on people who are still finding their voice, who find writing difficult, who use AI as an accessibility tool, who are building a business in a second language or who are simply at an earlier stage of figuring out how to communicate publicly. "Your content sounds AI-generated" is not a piece of constructive feedback. It's a put-down dressed up as a public service.

The irony that nobody seems to notice

Some of the loudest "stop using AI" posts are themselves a content strategy. They're designed for engagement. Outrage travels further than nuance on every platform - the algorithms reward it and the people writing these posts know that. The righteous rant about authenticity is, in its own way, just as calculated as the thing it's criticising.

And it isn't just LinkedIn. The same pattern plays out on X, in Facebook groups, in community forums. Wherever AI tools have become widely accessible, a counter-movement emerges to police how they're used. It's not a coincidence. It's a feature of how social media works.

What I actually think

I use AI every day. I use it to research, to draft, to pressure-test ideas and to do things I simply couldn't do alone. I'm transparent about that. The Vibed exists in part because AI made it possible for me to produce the volume and quality of content that a publication requires without a team behind me.

Does that make my writing less mine? I don't think so. The ideas are mine. The perspective is mine. The editorial decisions are mine. AI is the tool, not the author.

But I also think there's a genuinely interesting conversation to be had about how AI changes the texture of online spaces - what gets lost, what gets gained and what it means for trust and connection when you can't tell whether a human being is actually behind the words. That conversation is worth having.

What isn't worth having is the performative rant. The public finger-wagging. The implication that people who use AI are somehow cheating at a game where the rules were written by people who got there first.

The time spent policing other people's tools is time not spent building anything. And building something is, in the end, the whole point.

Thinking about how to use AI in a way that actually sounds like you? Come and join the conversation at Vibe Coding Lab - a free community of founders figuring this out together.