Avila Gets It: The Real Fight Isn’t About AI—It’s About Control
For years now, I’ve been talking about the backlash to generative AI—how the backlash isn’t really about the tech itself, but about deeper tensions around authorship, labor, and (most importantly) property under capitalism. My approach has been firmly rooted in historical materialism: AI isn’t the threat. The threat is the system it’s entering, and the people who already control it.
So when I watched Alex Avila’s video essay AI WARS: How Corporations Hijacked Anti-AI Backlash, I wasn’t expecting to be hyped. Avila’s framing draws heavily from post-structuralist theory—Derrida, Butler, Foucault. That’s not my camp. And yet, about six minutes in, I found myself saying “let’s fucking go” out loud—and I continued to do so throughout the whole 3-hour video.
Here’s the ironic part: Avila is one of the people Hbomberguy was “defending” in the very video I was arguing against, Plagiarism and YouTube, in Plato is a Bitch. And yet AI WARS is absolutely hammering many of the same points I’ve been making—often more sharply than I have.
We’re coming from different frameworks, but we’re clearly seeing the same machine. And we’re both pointing to the same thing: the cultural panic around AI is about power, class, and who gets to call themselves an artist—who gets to own the means of meaning-making.
What follows is a breakdown of ten major points of alignment, despite what many might consider very different philosophical lineage. The overlap is unmistakable—and it isn’t just coincidence. This is a coherent argument, grounded in material reality. The anti-AI backlash isn’t principled—it’s reactionary, and this chart shows exactly how and why.
The Backlash
Before we get into the overlap between my work and Alex Avila’s, it’s worth laying out the kind of heat I’ve taken for being outspoken on this topic.
Over the past several years, I’ve published a series of essays—including The Real Reason AI Art Feels Soulless, Blind Anti-AI Rage Is Fueling Dishonesty, Anti-AI and Fandom, and many others—that argue the AI backlash is less about ethics and more about class, control, and ownership. Unsurprisingly, these arguments have not gone over well with the cultural mainstream.
Across Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube comment sections, I’ve been accused of being “needlessly contrary,” “desperate for attention,” and “just trying to start fights.” This isn’t new, of course; I have been called a contrarian for opposing institutional dogma since I can remember. But the hostility here is specific. In one discussion about Plato is a Bitch, someone wrote that I was mad I “wasn't included in Hbomberguy’s charity stream”—as if the only reason to push back on four hours of pro-intellectual property moral panic is because of personal jealousy.
On Reddit, discussions have been particularly pointed. In the r/hbomberguy subreddit, one user remarked:
“I used to like Peter Coffin's stuff, or at least didn't find it so needlessly contrary. I'm not sure what happened to him.”
— Reddit user
Another user added:
“Coffin pivoted to brainless contrarianism years ago. I don’t give a shit about him and neither does anyone I know of.”
— Reddit user
In the r/BreadTube subreddit, critiques were similarly harsh:
“Holy shit, Peter Coffin has become even weirder since the last time I saw him. “Who's the philosopher king today” is such a stupid question, Plato is a theorist through and through, philosopher kings never existed outside the world of his ideas. The answer is eternally the same: the ideal ruler doesn't exist and this shouldn't stop rulers from trying. If you decide for thousands of people, you'd better make a well-informed decision. That's it, the entire depth of the concept of philosopher king. Good decisions require loads of information, good processing of information requires loads of education/training.
And then it goes straight into a "We Didn't Start The Fire" parody remix! Holy mother of cringe.”
— Reddit user, taking a single line from the intro and deciding what my argument is for me
These comments reflect a broader sentiment that my critiques are less about substance and more about seeking attention or being contrarian for its own sake. But ultimately, the fervency of reactions to my work on this suggest that many do not want to confront their own deeply entrenched beliefs about authorship, labor, and ownership.
Much of this backlash centers on the idea that AI art is “soulless,” a claim I’ve unpacked as more about displaced anxiety than actual aesthetic critique. In Soulless, I argue that people aren’t mad because AI creates “bad” art. They’re mad because it feels like proof that what we consider “good” art has always been shaped by access to tools, speed, and structural incentives.
But the backlash isn’t just passive-aggressive or dismissive—it is often explicitly cruel. In fact, part of Avila’s fantastic AI Wars video features him quoting some of the more extreme anti-AI rhetoric floating around online, including statements like:
“We need to redact AI artists with hammers.”
“Slice them in half and feast on their organs.”
“It should be legal to redact AI bros.”
This is the ambient tone of a discourse that claims to be defending “humanity” while openly calling for violence against people who use a design tool.
It’s clear the stakes here aren’t just about “what counts as art.” They’re about who gets to call themselves a “real” artist—and who gets to participate in culture. And these arguments aren’t being made in a vacuum; they’re happening in the shadow of collapsing job markets, shrinking job opportunities, and a cultural hierarchy that's desperately trying to preserve its status.
And that's why this matters. The critiques Alex Avila and I are both making exposes this backlash for what it really is: reactionary. This is not about protecting art but protecting the people who already have control over how art is defined, distributed, and rewarded. Further, it’s weaponizing small artists’ self-interest to protect massive concentrations of capital they’ll never touch.
1. Originality Is a Myth
If there’s one belief at the core of the anti-AI backlash, it’s the idea that art must be “original” to be legitimate—and that AI, by definition, can’t be original. But this idea doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
In my work, I argue that “originality” is not a sacred, internal force but a myth that props up class rule. All art is remix. All art is built on references, templates, and cultural memory.
More than that: creativity itself is not an act of divine conjuring—it’s subtractive. We don’t pull wholly new forms from the ether. We take the sum of everything we’ve ever consumed—finished works, stray images, offhand memories, aesthetic fragments—and chip away at it until something specific takes shape. Creativity is not the marble; it’s the chiseling. And what we’re chiseling is everything. The sculpture is what’s left when the noise is removed (which is coincidentally literally how generative image/video works (I’ll allow Alex Avila to explain that for me).
Creativity is editing. Creativity is the limiting of scope. Creativity is choice. We do not—and cannot—materialize something from nothing.
"What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
— Ecclesiastes 1:9
The fear of AI “copying” is really a fear of AI exposing how much human creativity is already a process of copying. It challenges the fantasy that artists produce from some sacred, individual wellspring—and that’s terrifying if your status depends on people believing that.
In AI WARS: How Corporations Hijacked Anti-AI Backlash, Alex Avila approaches this idea from a post-structuralist angle. Drawing on Derrida and Butler, he argues that meaning, language, and style are always relational. There’s no “pure” source of meaning—only systems of reference.
All art requires other people’s work. All art builds on traditions, cultural customs, and prior artistic languages. No art is made in a vacuum and no artist works completely alone. There is always some sort of inspiration or cultural context one is working in. All art requires other people's work—other people's labor.
Avila frames the LLM as a mirror that reflects our cultural structures of meaning. It doesn’t steal; it shows us that nothing was ever owned in the first place. Further, it exposes is how much of authorship was always retroactively assigned to people with power, not to some isolated creative spark.
Despite coming from different intellectual frameworks—mine rooted in materialist class analysis, Avila’s in post-structuralist theory—we both reject the premise that originality is a stable or useful metric. We both point out that:
All artistic meaning is intertextual and iterative.
The backlash against AI is deeply entangled with a reactionary desire to protect status through ownership and myth.
What’s really at stake is not creativity, but who gets credit, who gets paid, and who gets to belong.
This isn’t a fringe view. It’s what art actually is.
2. Editing Is the Core of Creativity
There’s a romantic idea that the creative act is a single, expressive gesture—a burst of inspiration from the soul/brain/whatever. But anyone who actually makes things knows that’s not how it works (either that or they have crippling imposter syndrome). The raw material might arrive in many ways, but the art happens in the edit.
In my view, this is where most of the AI discourse collapses. People talk about AI as though generation is authorship. But the work, whether using gen AI or any other tool, is in the choices: what to keep, what to cut, what to change, what to discard. Creativity is editing/
And that’s exactly why generative AI doesn’t “replace” artists—it becomes part of the iterative process. The same way digital audio workstations didn’t replace musicians, and nonlinear editing didn’t replace directors. These tools just made it easier to experiment, to chisel faster, to get to the meaningful decisions sooner.
What you’re seeing in a finished piece of art is not a spontaneous act. You’re seeing what someone decided to keep.
Alex Avila lands in a very similar place. In AI WARS, he critiques the idea of authorship as a moment of divine inscription (and indeed, an act of unique genius). Instead, he emphasizes that meaning is constructed in context, through framing and iteration. The LLM doesn’t author—it offers the material to be shaped. The human work is in positioning, not in conjuring.
Creativity isn’t about producing magic. It’s about making decisions within constraints. AI only threatens the myth of creation and its implications within the current system—not the very existence of it.
3. Aesthetic Property Reinforces Class
It’s one thing to debate whether AI can “create.” But the real battleground—the one people don’t want to name—is ownership. Not just of art, but of style. Of aesthetic decisions. Of taste. And the truth is, these things have always been owned. Just not by you.
In Making Style Copyrightable as Trade Dress is a Terrible Idea, I lay out what’s at stake: if style becomes property—if courts begin protecting “vibes” the way they already protect logos and mascots—then aesthetic control will be fully, legally locked behind class and capital.
People aren’t just mad that AI is derivative; they just think they own “the look.” But you can’t own style—not even if you believe wholeheartedly in intellectual property. Style is cultural and communal. It’s absorbed through time, context, repetition, and exposure. It doesn’t originate in you. It passes through you.
Alex Avila hits this point hard in AI WARS. He breaks down how copyright, aesthetic purity tests, and identity policing all serve the same function: they work to keep style enclosed. They preserve it as a commodity. And they allow those who got there first—often whoever has institutional support—to claim the role of gatekeeper and define “purity” in art (or “who is the ‘real’ artist”).
“The logic that says that speech is pure while writing is corrupt is the same logic that says that man is rational while woman is hysterical. That white is universal while black is other. Western thought doesn't describe these hierarchies. It creates them.”
This is where the AI moral panic becomes inseparable from class politics. When an artist says, “That looks like my work,” what they often mean is: “That looks too much like the thing I’ve staked my rent on.” But instead of interrogating why our survival depends on being the exclusive possessor of a reproducible aesthetic, we try to criminalize the tools that expose the absurdity of that setup.
This is about scarcity. Manufactured scarcity. If everyone can produce a thing which was once only the possession of the elite (or their toadies), the hierarchy collapses. So they move the goalposts. They say what matters is the soul, the intent, the name on the file.
But the truth is: aesthetic ownership was always a con. It’s just that AI made the con visible.
4. Ideology Masks Capitalism
When people say they’re defending “human art,” you have to ask: what exactly do they think they’re defending?
Because most of the time, what’s being invoked isn’t humanity—it’s ideology. A specific belief system that presents certain kinds of art, artists, and labor as natural, sacred, or beyond critique. It’s the ideology of the “lone genius.” Of expression as property. Of culture as something produced by individuals and then sold back to the collective.
In Blind Anti-AI Rage Is Fueling Dishonesty, I argue that this ideology isn’t neutral—it’s structural. It protects status, not labor. It turns aesthetic anxiety into moral panic. It replaces material questions—who gets paid, who gets access, who gets to build a career—with romantic abstractions about soul and humanity.
In the Marxist frame (the frame I utilize), ideology isn’t just a set of beliefs—it’s the invisible logic of the system. It’s the story the ruling class tells about how the world works, and why their place in it is natural. Ideology doesn’t just justify power; it makes power look like reality. In capitalism, it makes exploitation feel like order—and because exploitation is necessary to maintain the arrangement of power, that order must be protected.
Whether artists intend to or not, when they lash out at AI, they’re not defending their practice of art, but the their own place in a system that’s ultimately dehumanizing them. They’re defending a story.
Alex Avila, in AI WARS, makes a very similar argument—but he identifies the specific ideology at play as humanism. Drawing on Derrida, Butler, and Sylvia Wynter, he explores how “the human” is a constructed category—historically used to exclude, punish, and marginalize. His critique is perhaps even more destabilizing than mine: the figure of “the human” isn’t a fixed truth—it’s a site of enforcement.
Avila argues that when people say “AI isn’t human,” they’re relying on a category that’s already been used to exclude queer people, neurodivergent people, colonized people. The logic doesn’t change when it’s being used to exclude a tool, and in fact, if that is a means to naturalize the category itself—which to his leftist audience is a no-no and yet they blindly do so.
This is analysis of how power moves. If your idea of protecting art requires policing who counts as a valid creator—whether that’s an AI model or a human outside the institutional center—you’re not defending creativity. You’re defending institutionalized canon. And ideology—whether it dresses up as soul, genius, or humanity—is how that gets justified.
Humanism, in this context, functions as the ideological mask that makes capitalism look like moral principle.
5. Intellectual Property Protects Power
It was ideology which ensured that I have repeatedly been told off for “making this about intellectual property.” The ideology claims that this is about small artists getting paid for their labor, when it is in fact about preserving property right to thought.
Let’s be clear: intellectual property is at the heart of this, and intellectual property law was never designed to protect labor. It was designed to protect ownership. Not the person who made something—but the person who holds the rights to it. That’s true for patents, for trademarks, and especially for copyright. And now, there are lawsuits attempting to stretch IP to cover “style”—a move that serves the same purpose: locking power in place.
In Making Style Copyrightable as Trade Dress is a Terrible Idea, I lay out how dangerous this is. If style becomes proprietary, then aesthetics become real estate. Not just the output, but the process—the brushstroke, the rhythm, the vibe. This is enclosure. It turns shared cultural language into fenced-off property. When you try to copyright a style, you’re not protecting yourself. You’re criminalizing everyone else.
And like all enclosure movements, this one disproportionately benefits the already-established. Sometimes, that’s artists with name recognition. The ones with lawyers. Most of the times, it’s rights-holders. These groups are whose interests gets formalized in case law while everyone else gets boxed out.
Alex Avila dedicates the largest chunk of AI Wars to absolutely eviscerating intellectual property. He frames copyright not as a shield but a fence—one that decides who gets to participate in meaning-making. It’s about regulating legitimacy.
The moral panic around AI often becomes a legal panic because the aesthetic arguments inevitably collapse, and the fallback is force. Contracts. Lawsuits. DMCA strikes. All deployed to preserve the idea of authorship as something clean, bounded, and ownable—even if no one can define what was actually stolen.
IP law doesn’t protect creators—it protects the conditions under which few creators are allowed to create. And those conditions are rapidly unraveling.
6. Main Character Syndrome
A lot of the outrage about AI is framed as principled concern—about labor, about ethics, about “real” art. But scratch the surface and what you often find isn’t material critique—it’s ego panic. Not necessarily conscious, and not always malicious—but unmistakable. It’s the panic of losing the spotlight. Of no longer being the protagonist in a story about creative genius.
In Blind Anti-AI Rage Is Fueling Dishonesty, I argue that much of the discomfort around AI isn’t really about machines at all. It’s about the fear of replacement, not just as a worker, but as an identity. The fear that whatever makes you “special” isn’t scarce. The fear that your voice—your eye, your aesthetic intuition—might be more reproducible than you thought.
And it’s sometimes not just the anxiety of a fragile ego but narcissistic injury, as I discuss in The Faux Humility of The Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire Left. AI creates a rupture in how people see themselves and their place in the world. When AI produces something that resembles your work, it doesn’t just challenge your output. It challenges your self-concept.
The anger isn’t that AI produces mediocre work. The anger is that it produces familiar work—and forces people to confront just how much of their process isn’t sacred at all.
Alex Avila makes a parallel point in AI WARS, describing AI’s outputs as a reflection of human cultural patterns. When the reflection gets too clear, people flinch. Because it doesn’t just expose the patterns—it exposes how dependent we are on them. It’s not that AI imitates too little. It’s that it imitates too well. And in doing so, it makes us question where meaning really comes from.
This is what makes the AI discourse feel so volatile. It’s not a technical debate—it’s a crisis of identity. Artists—who’ve been trained to think of themselves as vessels of rare, authentic expression—see AI not as a tool, but as an existential threat. Not to the art itself, but to their role in the narrative.
But AI didn’t invent this anxiety; capitalism did. It’s capitalism that made survival dependent on personal branding. It’s capitalism that told you your value was tied to how unique your output was. AI just turns the volume up on contradictions in a system that was already making people feel disposable.
The backlash isn’t just about job loss. It’s about status loss. It’s about “main characters” realizing they might just be part of the ensemble.
7. Meme Culture Models Post-Capitalist Creativity
There’s already a space where art is collaborative, iterative, and constantly evolving—where authorship is fluid, intent is ambiguous, and value is determined by impact rather than origin. It’s not the future. It’s the internet. More specifically, it’s meme culture.
In Plato is a Bitch and The Real Reason AI Art Feels Soulless, I’ve argued that memes are the clearest, most successful example of creativity without scarcity or ownership. They thrive on remix. They’re funny, tragic, chaotic, beautiful—sometimes all at once. And no one cares who “made” them. What matters is whether they hit. Whether they travel. Whether they land.
Meme culture has already solved the problem the art world pretends is unsolvable: how to make work that spreads, matters, and evolves—without locking it behind authorship myths.
This is why the panic over AI feels so hollow. We already have a thriving, living demonstration of what post-individualist, post-proprietary creativity looks like. And it’s working. Memes aren’t less meaningful because they’re anonymous. They’re more meaningful because they’re shared. They’re part of a cultural metabolism.
Alex Avila sees this too. In AI Wars, he frames memes as a kind of parallel model to AI—not because they’re made by machines, but because they function through iteration and relation rather than originality and ownership. In meme culture, the idea of authorship as the basis for value is laughable. And that’s exactly what makes it powerful.
Meme logic undermines the very foundations of the elite creative economy. If the best art is communal, iterative, and half-serious, then what happens to the gallery system? The publishing advance? The auteur myth?
The answer is: it breaks. Or at least bends. And that’s the fear.
8. Plagiarism Accusations Are Class Warfare
Few words have more cultural charge than “plagiarism.” It’s treated as the cardinal sin of creativity—a violation so severe it overrides intent, context, even result. But the way plagiarism is invoked generally has almost nothing to do with theft and everything to do with protecting class position (or potential class position).
In Plato is a Bitch, I argue that plagiarism accusations are rarely about labor. They’re about proximity. The closer something that takes less time and resources gets to resembling the work of someone with status, the more violently it’s policed. What’s being defended isn’t the work. It’s the hierarchy.
I connect this to Plato’s vision of “justice” as everyone staying in their assigned role—the naturalized hierarchy of philosopher-kings and bronze-souled laborers (the “real” artists vs. consumers). I argue that this is the ideological ancestor of the current creative economy: a world where the powerful maintain their grip by controlling access to cultural legitimacy. The point isn’t that AI or plagiarism breaks the rules—it’s that it breaks the illusion that the rules were ever fair.
“Plagiarism” becomes the alarm bell—not because something valuable was stolen, but because someone unapproved is now capable of producing something “valuable.” It threatens the scarcity model. It suggests that skill isn’t a divine gift or years of costly training—it’s a pattern, a reproducible technique, or worse: an aesthetic sensibility that was never truly ownable to begin with.
Alex Avila, in AI WARS, arrives at the same conclusion (though from a post-structuralist angle). He describes plagiarism panic as the point where style becomes a form of property—cultural capital that the already-legitimized use to gatekeep. Once people without credentials, without degrees, or without elite networks gain access to approximate the look and feel of prestige, the response isn’t adaptation—it’s suppression.
And just like Plato’s “justice” depended on everyone knowing and keeping their place, the modern creative economy depends on tight borders around who gets to be called an artist—and who gets to be punished for getting too close. Plagiarism accusations aren’t about ethics. They’re about enforcing a class boundary through the language of fairness.
The irony is that in a truly just system, plagiarism wouldn’t be threatening in the least. If art were about meaning, not marketability—about communication, not career—then uncredited similarity wouldn’t provoke a crisis (further, if labor were rewarded rather than ownership of the winning property…). But in this system, where your livelihood is tied to being the one and only, a pattern match is a direct economic threat.
This isn’t an ethical argument. It’s a class argument in disguise.
9. AI Simulates Us Too Well
The common critique is that AI “isn’t really creative.” But what if the more unsettling truth is that it is—not because it’s autonomous, sentient, or soulful, but because it’s kinda doing the same thing we do, just without the mythology?
In my work, I’ve described generative AI as a kind of externalized version of memory. It observes vast amounts of completed works, patterns them statistically, and produces something new from what’s already known. That’s not alien—it’s eerily familiar. Because that’s how we create too: through exposure, absorption, and subtraction. We recombine the things we've seen and experienced. AI just does it without real-time sensory input and a lifetime of human experience.
This is why people react so strongly. Not because AI is replacing human creativity, but because it's making creativity look replicable.
Alex Avila makes a very similar argument in AI Wars. He shows that language and meaning have always been produced relationally—through citation, repetition, and cultural scaffolding.
Avila’s point, like mine, is that what we call “creativity” has always been bound to structures of influence, memory, and recombination.
So when people say AI isn’t necessarily “really creative,” what they often mean is: “it’s creative enough to make me uncomfortable.” It erodes the idea that creativity is mystical. That it's something only certain people can do. That it can’t be modeled.
But if a simulation can produce something that at least looks meaningful, what does that say about meaning? If an unconscious system can generate something that moves us, what does that say about what we’re moved by?
The answer is, of course, that AI is more of a paintbrush than a painter.
10. Cultural Production Is Already Automated
The idea that art must be made by hand to be authentic is laughable to anyone who’s ever worked inside a creative industry. For decades now, culture has been shaped by templates, presets, filters, plug-ins, and commercial expectations. Automation is baked in—not just into the tools, but into the process itself.
In Blind Anti-AI Rage Is Fueling Dishonesty, I argue that the rage at AI feels dishonest because it pretends we were operating in a sacred space before this. We weren’t. We were already working inside systems optimized for speed, quantity, and market fit.
AI is not introducing mechanical logic to art. It’s just nakedly creative labor as modular assembly. The things AI does very well are the more labor-intensive (and actually less creative) aspects of art; it can produce the block for the artist to chisel—except the block is already pretty statue-shaped (as per the artist’s specification) and there is now a lot less work to do.
AI compresses the distance between idea and execution. It removes the friction—and that’s what scares people. AI demystifies how much of the process wasn’t all that creative in the first place.
Alex Avila draws a parallel argument in AI WARS, showing how culture has long relied on structure, repetition, and efficiency—often passed off as “style” or “intuition.” Genres are rule-bound. Editing software automates rhythm and pacing. Pop songs use the same four chords. None of this is new.
But if I don’t need a crew of 120 people to make a film… what’s stopping me? And that doesn’t mean those crews will disappear, it means people like me will make films.
Conclusion
Look, I’ve been saying most of this for years—loudly, and often to the dismay of people who thought I was just picking fights. Seeing Alex Avila hit similar notes, from a slightly different angle, reminds me it’s not about being uniquely clever. It’s that the reality is breaking through.
I could be bitter that some of these arguments, coming from him, land better with people who have outright mocked me for making them. I could distort his hard work and pretend he plagiarized me(!!!) and maybe even whip up a drama that gets me a bunch of attention. But I’m not. I am also not the first person to make these arguments.
But Avila, myself, and everyone who came before are all different people with different backgrounds who are all clearly seeing the same thing.
What Avila’s work makes clear—and what I’ve been trying to say—is that the panic over AI is not about creativity. It’s about control. It’s about power being threatened by tools that make participation easier.
The way I say it: it’s always about class. Always.
Once you see how much of this was always about ownership, exclusion, and managed scarcity, it becomes a lot harder to go back to “protecting art.” And if we can keep pushing—keep pointing to the structure, not just the spectacle—we might get somewhere.
Started watching AI Wars over the weekend and I agree! Side note - the endless grumbling and moralizing on Substack about AI is insufferable 🫠.