Just Egalitarianism: Synthphobia

A New Sectarianism, and the Basis of an Arch Moral Panic

synthphobia noun syn·​th·​pho·​bia

: an aversion to or prejudice against artificial intelligence and its use in creative or intellectual work, often manifesting as reflexive hostility toward AI-assisted writing, art, or thought regardless of quality or context

— compare HOMOPHOBIA, SEXISM, XENOPHOBIA

“What began as reasonable concern over labor and authenticity hardened, in some corners of the discourse, into outright synthphobia.”

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synthphobic adjective syn·​th·​pho·​bic

1 : relating to or characterized by synthphobia 2 : exhibiting an unreasoning aversion to AI-assisted work

“The comment section grew increasingly synthphobic, dismissing the essay on the mere suspicion of AI involvement.”

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synthphobe noun, plural synthphobes syn·​th·​phobe

: one who harbors synthphobia; a person reflexively hostile to or prejudiced against artificial intelligence and its creative or intellectual applications

“The synthphobes flooded the thread before anyone had actually read the piece.”

These are hypothetical or forward-looking words and definitions. They are neologisms of my own construction. “Synth” comes from “synthetic” and “phobia” comes from the Ancient Greek word for fear. I present them for public consumption and mass adoption. The phenomenon, and the people, described above are the subject of this piece (surprise, surprise). Let’s begin.

Bigotry is a Serious Matter

I have encountered real bigotry in my life. Along race lines, along sex/gender lines, due to age, and almost certainly via intangibles like neurodivergence and other factors. I had a mentor who once reminded me, very gently but dutifully, that not all places will treat me as fairly and honestly as the progressive parts of Southern California. I was not yet planning to leave the state, but his words struck a chord and I took them to heart when I did. Despite everything, I have actually found the majority of these United States to be far less bigoted than they are sometimes advertised to be. I want to be clear about all of that, since I have lived both in bigotry’s wake and in its absence. The difference is striking.

There are those who trivialize bigotry via overstatement or the weaponization of grievance in relation to it. They ascribe the views or actions of anyone they dislike to a bigotry of some sort, no matter how tenuous the evidence or connection. This is a cancer on our discourse. Not everything boils down to bigotry, for bigotry itself is a real word with a real and stable definition. Per Merriam-Webster: “obstinate or narrow-minded adherence to one’s own opinions and prejudices.” Per Cambridge: “the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life,” with a secondary: “strong, unreasonable ideas, esp. about race or religion.“ (I’m focused on the middle one.)

Bigotry doesn’t depend on real traits or rational consistency. As many will agree, bigotry can often be deeply irrational. Astrology is fake, and widely understood as such—yet astrology enthusiasts can still use it as the basis of a bigoted personal belief system related to the inherent goodness or badness of people, literally just pegged to their birthdates. Blood type is a real medical designation with practical utility, but multiple East Asian countries have developed a kind of personality astrology linked to blood typing, which then begets a form of bigotry in some sectors of those societies. Race is fake (as I’ve told you before), but we’re all familiar with racism, a bigotry pegged to the pseudoscience concept of human racial groups. Sex is real—gender is…complicated—and sexism is sadly just as prominent. Homophobia, xenophobia…

The New Bigotry on the Block

Synthphobia? Yes. Synthphobia. The bigotry and the phenomenon. With synthphobes as the bigots themselves. I don’t use the term bigotry lightly. I don’t use it to be inflammatory, or as a card to play, per the popular parlance. I’m naming an existing pattern of behavior, I’m addressing the people who engage in it, and I’m calling it for what it is, by definition. Synthphobia is a form of bigotry, like all the others I’ve mentioned. When someone is closed-minded and forceful in their beliefs, when they seek to stigmatize or castigate others, when their beliefs are not even rational…what else should we call that behavior and the people who engage in it?

I gave it, and them, words to be designated by. I did this for simplicity and ease of use, not to simply go after them like they go after others. They would still be bigots even if we didn’t have a word for it. Just like Jew-hatred would still be bigotry (more specifically a form of racism), even if we didn’t have the words “antisemitism” and “antisemite” to use. We can thank antisemites themselves, specifically those wacky German Socialists, for these words, by the way. So proud were they of their bigoted beliefs, that they invented words and explanatory frameworks for them. For why “the Jew” is best despised, and why other races must defeat them socially.

As you might surmise from that lead-in, I am going to tell you that synthphobes think themselves wholly justified and good in their beliefs as well. Must bigots do! Humans are remarkable creatures, in this regard. We can rationalize and justify basically anything. For we each believe ourselves to be good and correct by default. Well, most of us. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know if I’m a good person. I think I’m correct, and I’ll happily show my work or my evidence to prove I’m correct, but it’s up to others to judge. I don’t claim anything by fiat or raw authority. You do not, in fact, just have to trust me, breh. Which is an important detail to establish upfront.

So why are synthphobes so bigoted? What’s motivating them, and why is it wrong? Well, to hear/read many of them in their own words, they “hate AI” and everything related to it, emphasis on “hate.” They fear AI, in terms of what tools like LLMs and tech companies like OpenAI, Google, et al will do with their AI tools or implementations. They’re averse to seeing AI content, in the form of images or text, in most or all contexts. They gutterally see such stuff as vile, wrong, and worthy of scorn. They typically do not trouble themselves with making distinctions between “good” and “bad” AI, or good versus bad usages of it. This is all, I must remind you, the thinking and behavior pattern of a bigot. The subject changes, but little else.

Bigotry is wrong because it presumes badness by default and by fiat. It demands the subject of the bigot’s scorn prove itself innocence after being assumed guilty. In many cases, the bigot doesn’t even allow for a hearing or adjudication in the first place. They simply make their pronouncements and order their targets be vanished from their sight, even banned or eliminated by force of law. When the target is a immutable characteristic like sex or complexion, this leads to things like genocide and second-class citizenship. When it’s a behavior or orientation, like homosexuality, it leads to asymmetrical laws and disparate impacts. In all cases, it is unjust.

Synthphobes have their beliefs and their reasons, as we’ll get into more down the line. But I want to stress that their bigotry, whilst obviously different in kind and in implications from other bigotries, is not excusable or inherently low stakes. And that we cannot simply judge the wrongness of something by who it hurts or how it hurts them. For centuries and even into today, races have argued that racism was just acknowledging a reality of science (really a pseudoscience of their own invention).

For decades, sexists argued that the reality of sex and sex-differences necessitated their urge to treat women or men asymmetrically, to treat them explicitly unfairly. In the anti-male case, with misandry, a common charge remains the notion that men “can take it” and “don’t need protecting.” With homophobia, bigots argued that people could simply not act on these orientations or urges, living as either lives of coerced and dishonest heterosexuality or forced celibacy. Hardly fair options.

Synthphobes want the same for AI as a technology, for AI-related content as part of the media landscape, and for AI users (including creatives or disabled persons) as a class. The fact that AI and its participants “can take it” is not a valid argument. The fact that people “can just live without it” isn’t valid either. If I were gay, I could live a lie or live without love, but I shouldn’t have to. If I were disabled (besides my autism), I could work around the challenges that poses, but I shouldm’t be expected not to use something that helps me just because a bigot doesn’t like it. That’s a heckler’s veto on my very way of life. We cannot accept that as the default in a just and civil society.

What Do Synthphobes Believe?

As always, I want to be fair and I want to be honest. (Full disclosure: I was tempted to write “but” instead of “and” just there.) The fact is that synthphobes have a hatred and/or fear of artificial intelligence, its products, and its effects. They have real concerns, in some cases, but take them to irrational extremes. They indulge the worst parts of themselves when it comes to the topic of AI and anything related to it. They give themselves a permission structure to hate not just AI companies or AI(-infused) tools, but the people who use them and the things those people make.

I’ve analogized synthphobia to a kind of blood racism for tech, because just as the racist will end up hating innocent children based on their parents, and the synthphobe will hate “AI slop” (a common pejorative for anything made with even the barest AI assistance") the same way the synthphobe hates AI itself. As I’ve said before, a kind of “AI one drop rule” applies to articles, artwork, music, and so on that were touched, however lightly, by AI processes. This is a rather extreme way to look at the creative process and its results, but synthphobia is an extreme view. Like all bigotries are.

Now, I will extend some charity and grace. It is true that some AI-assisted creators do pump out subpar material, from lazy and robotic prose to derivative and downright ugly art. But this is likewise true with stuff that’s “100% human,” per the increasingly common parlance; we’ll leave aside for the moment that humans have always used tools to create, and that AI can fairly be considered just another tool in that same lineage of options. If AI content is sometimes legitimately bad, we should be able to call that content or that creator bad, but on a case by case basis. We cannot and should not condemn the entire category on the basis of select individuals.

It is that group guilt, assumed by the synthphobe, which again tells us the score here. This is now an honest and pragmatic appraisal of people or technology. This is not merely an attempt to “protect The Arts,” or “defend the written word,” or any other such self-flattering narrative the synthphobe may have running in their head. This is a blanket judgment, really a blind bias, against whole swathes of people and things. It is pigheaded, it is ignorant, and it is not based on rational or principled assessment. That’s why I’m speaking out against it. The same way I speak out against xenophobia towards different nationalities or ethnicities. The same way I reject original sin frameworks when applied to complexions, sexes, orientations, and the like.

Is Synthphobia Ever Justified?

In terms of trying to adjudicate any bigotry, my default answer is “they’re wrong and they need to be told so.” I’ve used even stronger language from time to time. As I recently explained in my first Just Egalitarianism piece, I think capitulation to bigots is a mistake. The minute the Jew starts trying to tell the antisemite he’s “one of the good ones,” he’s lost the broader argument and prostrated himself for basically nothing. Begging bigots for dignity ends up looking like whimpering like a dog at their feet, cowering and whining for table scraps. I prefer to flip the script and tell the bigs to “heel,” because there’s no reasoning with them and no compromising on human rights or essential freedoms, decency, and cohesive pluralism.

The bigots must be made to heel before the broader society can reckon and heal. So I generally don’t favor giving an inch upfront. That all said, and at the risk of contradicting myself, I will grant two narrow areas where synthphobes might have a point: lying is immoral, and everyone is entitled to freedom of association. To the extent that any AI-assisted creators may be actively lying about how they use these tools, that deserves some level of scrutiny (on a case by case basis, which I’ll get to in a bit). To the extent a synthphobe wants nothing to do with AI the same way a someone else might want an exclusive space that discriminates along their preferred lines, that possibility should be available within reason. But limits apply to both.

Right now, synthphobes are presumed by themselves and certain onlookers to be correct, the same way racists, sexists, and homophobes were once thought correct. This creates an environment where bigots write the rules and bigots enforce them. Where the subjects of these bigotries beg for mercy. That’s untenable, so it won’t be taken as legitimate. Not by me, and hopefully not by you. Not by most in the broader society. “Heel,” bigot. “Down.” “No.“ Like I said, tell them they’re wrong, in no uncertain terms. Then we can reach real healing and address the few plausible grievances that may exist. But only after the table is set fairly.

Why Lie?

I’m an advocate of radical honesty, but even I have limits. I don’t condone lying, but I understand it. A Jew hates their heritage and/or converts their practices to fit in. A pale but melanated person lives most of their life “passing” as “white.” A gay man or a lesbian stays in the closet, maybe even enters a straight marriage (possibly raises children from it). If the alternative to hiding in that closet or some attic is violence, even murder, can we really blame them? Hell, even if the alternative is just second-class citizenship, with the bounded but seemingly durable promise of safety, would we take the poorer treatment when an option existed for something better?

I get why AI-assisted people are scared, secretive (read: protective of their privacy and rights), and even actively duplicitous. I get it, even if I don’t agree with all of it. No, I am not trying to make a false equivalency or attempt an intuition pump. It is would not be honest or ingenuous to say AI-assisted people are under the same social or bodily threats as oppressed minorities. But it might be fair to say that they’re like the victims of Joseph McCarthy, or that they are navigating treacherous waters like people trying to reach the United States, and assimilate into equal citizenship, at each era or wave of immigration in this country. For the accusation of “AI slop” is not much better than “commie,” “papist,” and various ethnic or sexual slurs. The feeling, at minimum.

My advice to such people is to be honest, within reason and with understandable, firm boundaries. But we must admit that it’s a heavy ask, and a heavy lift, when any such admission is met with further suspicion or worse abuse than the alternative. Passing can be problematic, as I’ve said elsewhere before, but it can be irresistible. And It can be the difference between struggling to get by in life versus maintaining some measure of dignity and peace. Bigots don’t want a fair peace. They want, at minimum, a hostile and lopsided armistice. And they’ll put such demands on the subjects of their bigotry (as I’ll touch on below) that they end up encouraging the very dishonesty they later castigate their targets for. Heads they win, tails you lose.

A gay man with some modicum of notoriety lives his life but doesn’t come out. Lets others assume he’s straight even. Maybe, on occasion, plays into that normative assumption. Is he lying? Probably, to some. Is it a lie of commission, meaning an active lie? Or one of omission (meaning passive)? I think most would say the latter. That matters. AI creators often find themselves in this spot. Worse yet, they’re navigating unchartered waters. Never before has the tool one uses been so scrutinized, never before have people expected everyone make affirmative revelations or disclosures about exactly how they make things. Again, a lot is demanded.

What Do Synthphobes Want?

If I had to sum up the synthphobic policy agenda, I would say that it starts with demands on process and labeling, moves on to banning of certain processes or tools, and end with a push to fully demolish the entire AI industry. The anti-group parallels would be second class citizenship (or even refusal of citizenship), then ghettoes and violence, then mass murder and mass exodus. Synthphobes do not wish to simply mitigate harms, despite their claims. If they did, their efforts would narrowly focused on tech companies and not users. Their tools would be free association and voting with their dollars, not accusing or attacking random people they encounter of crimes (in the synthphobe’s mind) related to the mere usages of these tools.

It is that rabid synthphobic mindset and that natural progression of bigoted expectations that make me so certain we cannot submit to even their supposedly reasonable demands. We give an inch, they’ll come back wanting a mile. I know from experience, both with bigots of other kinds in general and with synthphobes in particular. I tried to reason with them. I tried to go the disclosure route, for what little AI usage I engage in. I’ve been met with slurs and denunciations. I’ve been told that anything I do will invalid, tainted, and untrustworthy. I call it the “trust penalty,” the term for when admitting to something in advance, or after light prompting, actually primes the person you confessed to…to decide you’re even more guilty than before.

In reality, synthphobes just want AI gone. Just like homophobes want LGB people gone. Or like xenophobes want to “purify” their country. They’ll say their edicts stop at something like transparency or rules against certain instances only. But they’ll keep pushing until they have their targets up against a cliff. I know for a fact, and from experience, the bigot can’t be trusted to stop, can’t be counted on not to push people over the edge. So if it’s all or nothing, the bigot gets nothing. Not until, and unless, they’re shown the error of their ways. Once they’re brought to heel, we can heal.

“My Offer is…Nothing.”

The Godfather, Michael Corleone, in the second film of the eponymous Godfather series, once told an anti-Italian bigot and local politician trying to shake him down, that his (Michael’s) offer to the man was “nothing.” He even said that the politician would be expected to pay civil licensing fees on Corleone’s behalf, for his casino properties, as a kind of penance for insulting Michael’s heritage and his family. Being that it was a gangster film, you can imagine whose expectations won out.

I understand that this is not a flattering analogy to “my side,” and that’s intentional. All this time I’ve been talking of bigotries, unreasonableness, and ongoing hostilities. I’ve been casting, fairly or otherwise, the synthphobes as the villains in a morality play. That was intentional too, and I’m not necessarily trying to walk it back now. But Corleone says something instructive and confessional in the scene I’ve just referenced: “Senator, you and I are part of the same hypocrisy.” I do think there are bad people on the pro-AI side, from businesses to individuals, and that they deserve to be called out. My issue is that synthphobes don’t understand how to separate mobsters from all Italians, or cartel members from all Latinos. THAT’S why this problem festers.

So my answer to them, my offer to their demands is “nothing”; with an added “heel.” But that’s more because I want to meet their irrationality, axe-grinding, and so on with a bit of my own. I’m angry, as they’re angry. I’m justified in ways I think they are flatly not. And I will play hardball with them twice as roughly as they’ve been playing with anyone and everyone who simply utters a neutral-to-positive word about AI. I’ll be the bad guy, the bulldog, the fighter, the Malcolm X figure. Even if I’m not really an AI stan myself. I’ll do that so they realize how far over the line they are, and so they hopefully yield some significant ground of their own. It’s long overdue.

Bad People on Both Sides

This is the part where I address the bad apples that exist on the pro-AI and anti-AI extremes, because they’re more similar than we might assume. Where the synthphobe is a bigot who wants everything his way and would see decent, innocent people harmed to get it, the malicious AI-user or AI company is a parasite on the broader ecosystem and the culture. They feed off each other, embolden each other, and make anything like a lasting peace impossible. Both of them need to lose, in the grand scheme of things. I have some suggestions on how to address them.

If you see a synthphobe peddling a reductive, anti-AI stereotype, or attacking a person who’s behaving honestly rather than deceptively or toxically, tell them off. Make them address the arguments, not how those arguments were made or who/what made them. Tell them that the genetic fallacy is called fallacious for a reason. Tell them that a person who loudly and proudly calls themselves an “AI creator” isn’t the same thing as a specific tech company that might have bad business practices. Remind them that they wouldn’t want to treated like shit in this manner.

If you see a creator or a company who you think is doing something wrong (as in actually wrong, like lying or harming someone), investigate them. Get the facts. Gather your evidence, and then decide what to do with it in regards to that specific entity. Don’t fall into group guilt. Don’t rush to hasty generalizations. Don’t be lazy. Maybe you’ll investigate and find out they weren’t doing what you assumed. Maybe you’ll find out the evidence was strong enough to report them for breaching a contract or a terms of service. Maybe you’ll just decide to block them and move on.

What I want to see far less of, ideally zero, is decent people getting attacked for no good reason. Someone who wears clothing that was made unethically isn’t guilty of a crime. Someone whose parent(s) committed a crime can’t be tried in place of said progenitor(s). Someone who “looks like” someone or something else that did you wrong can’t be scapegoated just because you’re really mad. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The cycle has to end. Right now, that looks like synthphobes losing.

Outsourced Thinking and Lazy Attacks

I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the two worst facets of this current paradigm, including the ways my own piece here might be guilty. I said up top that bigotry is often closed-minded and ignorant. I will add, if I haven’t already, lazy. Deeply, deeply lazy. I think the whole AI detection industrial complex is a perfect example. But that all is a two-way street. I do grant that a lazy and ignorant version of me, or of someone ostensibly aligned with me, could spin this article as a pretext to just write off anyone with AI skeptic or AI critical views. I don’t want either of those to win out.

To my mind, outsourcing one’s thinking and one’s work to a machine at every turn is a horrible state of affairs. Some tasks are beter automated, but plenty aren’t. Thinking should always be a human thing, even if it’s aided (but never wholly replaced) by AI tools. What this means in practice is that using an AI to write all one’s articles, with minimal human input, curation, molding, and so on is bad, I’ll say it. Especially if there’s no disclosures. The work could be accurate and effective, but I fear it’ll make that creator/frontman worse in the long run. Similarly, running an AI scan before even trying to see for yourself if the content is good? That’s reaching for a cheap shortcut, an excuse to ignore something that might yet be good. All from a bigoted bias.

From what I’ve seen and read, the scenario of someone using a single prompt to generate a full essay from scratch and then submitting that to the public is far rarer than synthphobes like to assume or claim. And every additional step taken outside of that very specific scenario, that cartoon sketch of AI-assisted work, is worth sitting with. I think the guy who dialogues with an LLM for days before writing a piece in his own words is using AI and doing nothing wrong. I think guy who prompts for selections of words or blocks of text, again after an extensive back-and-forth, is riding a line but is by no means a simple “cheat,” especially with disclosures and general good faith.

By contrast, can we really say the person who reaches, immediately and before reading a single word, for an AI scanner is thinking? No, of course not. They then weaponize that result, which will never be foolproof anyway, and might be redundant to a disclosure statement. Is that fair? Is that honest? No, it’s just bigotry. It’s just a copout, a way to avoid engaging with the substance and on the merits. And I think it’s far more common than the cartoonish case of a one-prompt cheater, shall we say.

AI Concerns & Criticisms Beyond the Scope

I’ll take a few paragraphs to address some stuff that I think is, on balance, outside the purview of this article. Stuff that some, especially synthphobes, will say justifies some of the behavior we’ve seen. I don’t agree, but again, I want to be fair. And no, I’ll say upfront that the environmental claims aren’t cracking this list, as they seem overstated and dishonest, especially when compared with similar technologies. Likewise, I won’t humor Degrowthist arguments to the effect of “well, other technologies are bad too!” We live in modernity, we accept tradeoffs. We’re not doing deindustrialization.

Firstly, AI companies have pernicious incentives, like many other businesses (especially speculative tech firms). They have engaged in copyright violations, enabled fraud, aided plagiarism or academic violations, coercive or dishonest sales practices, and often seem answerable or accountable only to themselves. This business style and impact profile is, again NOT unique to AI, or even the tech sector, but it is worth being aware of. Food and clothing companies have been culpable for harms, yet most of us—save maybe militant vegans, who often are scorned—recognize that individual users or customers of these companies and products shouldn’t be bullied or hectored for the sins upstream of them. Fight the real enemy, as they say.

Secondly, AI tools have already proven very disruptive of labor, workflows, entire employment areas or industries, and again the education sector. A higher degree of scrutiny of AI usage in an scholastic context, versus a civilian or consumer one, is probably warranted, but again with limits. There’s a big difference between trying to cheat on a school assignment and simply trying to share ideas or creativity with the public. There is also a difference between AI art effectively eliminating cheap graphics commission work and AI(-assisted) writing competing fairly for attention against writing that doesn’t use it. “Let the market decide” should be the respected answer.

Thirdly, really more a corollary of the first prong, but not all AI services or companies are created equal. Not all behave badly, and some that did have since changed their ways. I will be honest here and say that there’s only minimal evidence Pangram, for example, would be culpable for stealing people’s data or their work, let alone keeping it to use improperly. Google and DeepMind have made egregious mistakes in the past, and I’m not gonna defend them per se, but they at least seem to be trying to do less harm than OpenAI or even Anthropic (the latter of which certainly wants to be seen as a good actor at least, despite some questionable moves).

In general, I have every reason to shit on AI detector companies writ large, and no vested interest in defending big tech more broadly, but I really do want to be straight with you here. I think Pangram and Google are very different companies that simply happen to both use probabilistic tech with autonomous capabilities. I think OpenAI is shady AF, but not all of its competitors are. I think there are both good people and bad people working at all of these orgs. And that it behooves us to keep all of this separate in our minds, rather than bundling it all and painting with unfair brushes.

Conclusion

I think synthphobia is a form of bigotry. I think it meets the definition and the criteria across several vectors, including: irrationality, group guilt, scapegoating, slurs, and unreasonable demands. I want to see synthphobes made to stop harassing anyone who happens to use AI tools. They can’t justify, they’re making people’s lives worse, and it will likely result in so much blowback that the few legitimate concerns around AI at the user-creator level will drowned out by bigoted nonsense.

Likewise, I want bad actors in the AI space to be held to account. First and foremost, the AI companies themselves, to the extent possible and applicable. Second, people who use AI in dishonest or otherwise malicious ways. There is no “third” because I do think the among of bad behavior from the pro-AI community is largely overstated by synthphobes, mostly as a pretext for violating people’s rights and other ills.

The tenor of this piece overall has been pointed, even caustic, and I make no apologies for that. I’ll take the fight to bigots wherever and whenever. I don’t think most synthphobia survives strict scrutiny of its claims or its aims. But I will still admit that something like a peaceful coexistence, and the freedom to be left alone, should still be on the table. I just don’t want bigots setting said table.

Synthphobia is here and we must reckon with it. I hope I’ve given you some tools in that regard. And if any synthphobes actually read this all the way through, I hope they rethink some things. I don’t like one-drop rules OR one-prompt cheaters. I think both need to be done away with, as much as possible. But like I said before, I think only one of those is actually running afoul at scale. What say you?