Emotionally Charged Words & Phrases Used in the AI War
This is a list of emotionally-charged words and phrases AI haters use to convince you their opinion is the only correct one, followed by some insults hurled in both directions. There is some fascinating writing here. As you can see it is heated invective, designed to invoke the disgust response, equating AI usage to unpleasant excretions and discharges or offal, in the hopes that will get people to stop using it and expunge it from the world, thus cleansing it.
These terms were not searched for, they just appeared in various posts on Threads during dialectic and arguments.
No research was done to see when some of the more colorful terms were first used, to see if they were themselves original phrases or quoted without permission from someone else. All I did was notice a new one, stop and added it to this list starting at the end of 2024 and added to it until October 2025.
stealing, theft, plagiarism, slop, scrape, churn/spit/pump/spews/vomits out, vomiting machine, Frankenstein mash up, garbage, random digital garbage, hellgarbage, popping out, smush, mush, corrupted, betray, scab, filches, recycle, only typing a bunch of words, regurgitated, recycled, parasitic, screen saver, schlock, low quality dreck, soulless [this one has become quite popular and is catching up to “slop” at a rapid pace it seems —Ed.], mangle, slapped together, effortless, lazy, minimal human input, tweaking a prompt, munched by an algorithm, punching in words, lifeless, piracy, derivative, vomit of a stochastic parrot, bullshit machine, shit done by the machine, content blender, manipulation, pilfered, greasy looking, crime, doesn’t take much effort, talent or technique, bastardised blob, bin juice, digital patchwork, harvesting the completed work, cheating, no effort or skill, incel toy, pre-chewed […] cultural shit, piling things together, pablum, word salad machine, simply rubs the magic lamp and makes wishes to the genie, patch together pixels, loser language model, using a crutch, hallucination engine, randomized kitsch mill…
next is a killer combo:
plagiarism-powered probabilistic vomit machine
lastly we have…
gibberish generator, pastiche, art barf bots, slaps words together, AI-arrhea, copyright infringement factory, hoovered up artistic labor, cobbled together, digital parasite, bullshit mechanical Turks.
That last one is amusing because it’s a complete reversal of the actual mechanical Turk which was a human pretending to be a machine.
To balance the AI-generated image on the right, I searched Flickr for something human-made. This isn’t exactly what I wanted but it’s still relevant.
Possibly the swiftest rise in popularity, this image was made by someone using AI software to show how everyone just copies each other. It may be inspired by the seagull scene in Finding Nemo with them all saying “mine!”
At some point making this list I decided to capture some of the tasty insults being hurled as well.
Robootlickers, lazy losers, subhuman, cyber terrorists, a bot, dense, naïve, obtuse, troll, gagger, deepthroater, sad shell of a human (leading an impoverished existence), entitled scrounging assholes, dumb nerds, tech cultist, obnoxious boot licking windbags, dependent maggots, promptsitute, passionless shitknuckles, AI cocksuckers [I’m not sure how that would work —Ed.], dumb fuçk, AI slopiér, prompt jockey, fraudsters, the much gentler 50s-style insults “dork” and “bozos”, and last but not least “clanker” which in my opinion is the most awkward and least catchy of all the insults.
It occasionally goes the other direction, for example:
“the militant anti AI crowd is just a bunch of insufferable basement dwelling neckbeard discord mods.” Chronically online pathetic shitbags, inbred fuçkwits.
Regardless of whether these are from a vocal minority or not, I thought it was an insight into the minds and writing talent of various Threads users.
While I’ve got your attention here are the last 8 images I have uploaded to Flickr, all made with either photography and/or non-AI digital art tools.
