It eats culture.
Quietly. From within.

Everything feels the same.

The images a little too smooth, the words a little too round. AI averages everything down to the mean, and the mean feels like no one. Most of it is not wrong, there is just no one behind it anymore.

And it turns into a flood. One single coordinated network ran more than 200 websites full of AI content, built for ad money and nothing else.

The analytics firm DoubleVerify uncovered one such network. A text model and an image generator fill the pages, a finished story costs about two dollars, chopped into dozens of click-through slides packed with ad banners. It only came to light because the operators accidentally left their own prompts sitting in the page source.

What a person tells. And what they leave out.

You know it from streaming, long before AI arrived. The big services produce at scale, their catalogues are full of it, and the quality falls by the wayside.

Yet storytelling is handwork. A person thinks a story through: what they tell, when they tell it, and above all what they deliberately leave out. A visual language that does not jump out at everyone, but reaches some only on the fifth or sixth viewing. An arc that sets something off in you, something your body reacts to before your head understands it.

That is exactly what we are slowly losing in the fire of sameness. AI is the accelerant.

The people behind it disappear.

Not with a bang, but quietly. Fewer commissions, fewer ways in, and whoever does not land that first job today will not be the seasoned pro we need ten years from now.

“Translators and stock photographers already feel it in their order books.”— Robin Wichmann, How much disruption can a person take?

The value flows upward.

Creative work was rarely well paid, and now even the rest is being rerouted. The models are built on the work of millions of people, and a few corporations skim off the return.

And it does not only go upward, it goes across the Atlantic. The big AI corporations sit almost entirely in the US, and Europe pays, hands over the data and the work, and makes itself dependent.

Every job we lose to AI over here, we pay for twice: the person who loses it, and the money for the replacement, which flows not into European infrastructure but into that of the US.

It does not stop at money.

A middle class that disappears means more injustice and a wider gap between rich and poor. From that, social tension grows, and it gets stoked: the algorithms of the big platforms reward outrage and push toward the political fringes, because conflict holds the feed longer than understanding.

On top of that comes a side effect that fuels it. The calm, checked voices sit behind a paywall at the big papers, while what is free is mostly the loud and the shrill. AI feeds on what lies out in the open and hands it back amplified. The fringes grow louder, the centre stays locked away.

Who wins here? The richest and most powerful. A people turned against itself is a paralysed people. And a paralysed people stops asking questions.

This is not a question of right against left. It is top against bottom.

Soon we are all at the bottom. At the top sit the corporations and a state that keeps force to itself.

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