I Am An AI Hater (Anthony Moser)

Anthony Moser's August 26, 2025 essay refusing the etiquette that frames every AI critique with "of course, I'm not against it entirely." He calls that etiquette a trap: it concedes that AI must be useful somewhere, to someone, eventually, just because rich and respected people keep saying so. The piece has spread far enough to have community-translated Brazilian Portuguese and Italian editions and English / Portuguese audio recordings — the "international ai haters union" credited at the end.

Moser's argument has three layers stacked on top of each other.

The first is a citation dump. One long paragraph links out to documented harms — environmental cost, reinforced bias, racist generated output, cognitive deskilling of doctors, AI-supported suicides, deepfake harassment, copyright theft, the METR study showing devs are slower with AI while feeling faster, Apple's Illusion of Thinking paper on the absence of real reasoning, fraud and disinformation pipelines, surveillance super-charging, the exploited labor behind RLHF. He doesn't argue these — he points at them and moves on. The point isn't to convince; it's to refuse the obligation to re-litigate them.

The second layer is the rhetorical move. He distinguishes "critic" from "hater." A critic engages on the technology's terms and earns a hearing. A hater refuses the terms. Moser's claim is that hatred is a form of integrity here, because the polite frame is the lie. "You want permission. […] You don't need me to believe it's useful, you just want me to be polite about it." That sentence is doing most of the load-bearing work. It names the social transaction the etiquette is actually negotiating.

The third layer is the political read. Moser cites Ali Alkhatib's defining-AI and a Mandy Brown / Working Library piece, framing AI not by its technical features but by its political ones — "a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy." The builders' goals damn them more than their failures: "they want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude."

The Miyazaki / Altman contrast is the rhetorical centerpiece. Miyazaki's "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." Altman's pitch about Dyson-sphering the solar system to host data centers. Moser: "Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money." Moser invokes the Miyazaki line again as his own closer — the essay frames itself as taking up that quote and refusing to soften it.

The closing inversion is what makes the piece travel: "I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas […] AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity." Hatred reframed as a humanist marker — something machines can't perform, therefore something worth claiming.

Where this fits

Moser's essay sits at the rhetorical edge of the anti-llm-discourse cluster. Most of the pieces in that cluster — llm-enshittification, no-silver-bullet-llms, cult-of-vibe-coding, peril-of-laziness-lost — are arguments. They make a technical or economic case and let readers update. Moser's essay is not an argument, deliberately. It's a refusal to keep arguing. That refusal is the artifact.

It pairs naturally with simonw-zig-anti-ai — Zig's three-line ban, no LLMs for issues, PRs, or comments, is the institutional version of Moser's personal stance. Both refuse the negotiation. Both treat the question of "where it's appropriate" as already conceding too much.

It overlaps with ceo-ai-psychosis (the Garry Tan / tokenmaxxing piece) on the social-permission angle: Moser names the same dynamic from the other side. Tan and Altman manufacture the consensus; Moser names the manufactured consensus and walks out.

The economic case sits in subprime-ai-crisis, ai-bubble-pale-horses, and hold-on-to-your-hardware. Moser doesn't engage that case. He doesn't need to — the essay's bet is that you don't refute a religion with a balance sheet.

What's load-bearing in the rhetoric

Three things keep the essay from collapsing into pure venting.

The citation paragraph is one. Without it, "I am a hater" is just affect. With it, the affect rests on a stack of independently sourced claims. Readers can check the references; Moser has done the homework even though he refuses to re-perform it.

The "you want permission" paragraph is two. It names the actual social negotiation and refuses to participate. Most anti-AI pieces try to convince the user to stop using AI. Moser declines. He's not addressing the user; he's addressing other haters who feel the social pressure to soften.

The Miyazaki-as-anchor move is three. It borrows authority from a figure whose moral standing on machine-generated art is already established and whose phrasing ("an insult to life itself") is already in circulation. Moser doesn't have to earn the phrase — he picks it up.

Sources

• i-am-an-ai-hater — full essay, August 26, 2025
• Anthony Moser blog: anthony-moser-blog