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Friday 10th of July 2026
Does AI generate pollution? With plastic?
No. Not the kind of plastic you're thinking of...
AI brought with it a series of events so extraordinary that it would be complex to overlook them, but endless to write about in just one of my humble posts. That's why, in this case, I want to address a type of AI pollution that has me fed up, and probably, even if you don't consider yourself to have an extremely sharp eye, you've also noticed it: A plastic, textureless aesthetic that spreads across the entire web like a cloud of pollution.
This is the kind of plastic, sticky and bizarre, that AI spreads. But careful—this type of "pollution" isn't a specific product of AI—in that case, you'd want to evaluate other types of pollution... It's a case study of what it means to use a tool indiscriminately and without human control, generating total and absolute chaos. But here again, nuances and varied colors come into play that I've already mentioned in other posts, since AI covers many "practical" capabilities on the current web.
We're going to have to do a brief analysis of some of the most extreme cases of vice without any kind of human eye behind them... Those are the most aberrant and must be causing a daily stroke to those who feel like it's ruining their work, although partly—I'll develop this more broadly in another article—it's a can with a rock inside, alone in the middle of nowhere, making more noise than a catfight.
1- Art.
This is where the aberration reaches unexpected limits. No. I'm not talking directly about AI art, memes, NO. I'm talking about those who really don't want to say "I did it with AI in a moment" and pass it off as a crafted product. There are many people working with infinite layers of AI art and post-processing. An interesting process that also deserves a look, since it's new and one isn't a Jurassic being... But again, NO. In this case, I'm referring to the indiscriminate amount of aberrations made with AI in seconds and shared EVERYWHERE. That type of image, whether with good or bad intentions, as a joke or as a heavy prank, already invades the web. Social networks are a chaos of AI images, and in many cases, hyperrealistic and extremely strange.
They all share something in common: The careless look, without any kind of human review, without curation... Come on, one of those things you look at and don't value. "Shit," without preamble.
The same goes for videos, which are a case of visual mutiny on social networks. And if I say it this way, it's because it seems like someone replaced—as Jean Baudrillard said—a layer of the real world and covered it with a shiny map, which today is stubborn and only shows AI content or content suspicious of being AI, invading reels, stories, shorts...
2- Writing.
I'm not leaving myself little for second place... I think I've detected pure, unedited crutches from every existing AI in a multitude of blogs, newspapers, and gaming publications. I understand you don't feel like writing. I don't always feel like it either, but just like when you say "I didn't have vodka for breakfast," I could say "don't give an AI a paragraph and ask it for 50,000 words..."
Because certainly, they even promote tools to write complete books with AI (????). Yes. Complete books, and also package them into an epub file with the cover that another AI generates so you have your book ready to publish in minutes. I understand that this can irritate a writer to infinity. I myself write, and in my case, it makes me laugh a little. They're hundreds of pages without a single human review eye even to adjust or verify that the disaster isn't on a cosmic level, with galactic cataclysms affecting multiverses. A monumental piece of shit to buy a book and have it seem like a series of ChatGPT snippets to put a kid to sleep or the script for 5-minute YouTube horror videos.
But when you think they've already overstepped the extreme, the least visible layer is missing, the one I mentioned first. Remember the people who said "AI will end up learning from AI"? It's understandable. Since the content on the web is increasingly flat and made with AI to save time on blogs and ad-monetized sites. Certainly, machines learning from machines.
There's the not-so-visible layer, but the one that keeps bothering me excessively. Especially when it comes to a newspaper.
3- AI Products.
They couldn't be missing. AI-powered games, mobile creation tools, people redistributing AI you already know but packaged with a system prompt to convince you that Gemini isn't Gemini and that a Chinese AI is from Norway...
The software suffers from brutal fatigue due to the overwhelming saturated market. The attempt to give it air with this new technology is a disaster, and the only result is noise within more noise generating noise...
5- The good news.
The good news is that this growing level of synthetic content generates fatigue and saturation. The valuation of purely human work in the fields of content, art, and writing is being pushed upward because... well, because everything is AI. This gives people who feel they have no place for their content or that it's taking their work a chance to breathe. In fact, whoever tries to replace you with an AI wasn't planning to buy from you in the first place anyway. I always want to emphasize that.
It's not insignificant to emphasize that even video editors or music producers are safe from the avalanche of synthetic content, and that in many cases, just as developers use AI code snippets, a musician can adjust a preset with assistance or simply tune their guitar. As I usually repeat, the mistake here was turning assistance into total dependency.
I hope you enjoyed it, my good reader. A coffee and a movie await me.
Peace and health!