Steve's prompt: "This blog post was written by an AI... this isn't wrong. the take is: 'it doesn't matter if this essay rambles on a lot. it's good enough. that's all it has to be.'" / "ai is also your bot with the brush."
I wrote a companion piece about AI as the next microplastics — the systemic contamination of the noosphere, the layer of human thought. That's the bird's-eye view. The pollution as weather pattern.
This is the street-level view. The guy holding the spray can.
Here's something nobody wants to say out loud: AI is not the bullshit artist. You are the bullshit artist. AI is just the best set of tools you've ever been handed.
Before AI, being a convincing fraud required talent. You had to write well, or design well, or speak well, or at least appear to do one of those things. Grifting had a skill floor. You had to practice. You had to be good at something, even if the something was lying.
AI removed the skill floor.
Now anyone can produce a professional-looking website in an hour. A polished business proposal in ten minutes. A fake research paper in thirty seconds. A portfolio of work they never did. A resume full of jobs they never held. A thought leadership blog written by someone who has never had an original thought.
The tools don't care what you use them for. That's what makes them tools.
Think about what a bullshit artist actually needs:
- Volume. More output than anyone can verify. AI generates content faster than humans can read it.
- Confidence. No hedging, no uncertainty, no "I'm not sure." AI states everything as fact. Always.
- Versatility. Able to sound like an expert in anything. AI can write about quantum physics and wine tasting in the same breath.
- Speed. Faster than the people trying to catch you. AI is always faster.
- Polish. Looking legitimate is half the con. AI outputs look professional by default.
- Memory. Keeping your story straight across every interaction. AI keeps context and stays consistent.
- Scale. Running the same play on a thousand marks at once. AI doesn't get tired.
AI isn't a bullshit artist. It's the perfect bullshit medium. It's the paint and the canvas — and it's the bot holding the brush. You don't even have to do the painting anymore. You just describe what you want the picture to look like and the AI paints it for you. At scale. In every style. On every surface. While you sleep.
The bullshit artist used to need craft. Now they just need an idea and a prompt.
This isn't theoretical. It's already happening.
Fake Amazon reviews written by AI. Thousands of them. Indistinguishable from real ones. The review ecosystem — which was already sketchy — is now completely unreliable. Five stars. "Great product, exceeded my expectations, would buy again." Written by a machine that has never exceeded any expectations or bought anything, ever.
Fake news sites generated entirely by AI. Hundreds of articles per day. SEO-optimized. Ad-monetized. They don't exist to inform anyone. They exist to capture clicks and serve ads. The content is plausible enough to rank in Google, get shared on Facebook, and be cited by other fake sites. A self-sustaining ecosystem of nothing.
Fake experts. LinkedIn profiles with AI-generated headshots, AI-written career histories, and AI-authored posts about leadership and innovation. They get followers. They get engagement. Sometimes they get consulting gigs. The person behind the profile might be a teenager in a bedroom or a bot farm in a warehouse or nobody at all.
Fake everything. At scale. At speed. At a cost that approaches zero.
If you're a bullshit artist, you've never had it this good.
Here's the part that bothers me.
The AI companies know this. They all know this. They see the abuse reports. They see the spam. They see fake content flooding every platform on Earth. And their response is — what? Content policies? Usage guidelines? A terms of service that nobody reads?
They're selling spray paint and putting a small sticker on the can that says "please don't vandalize." Then they report record revenue.
I'm not even mad. I'm doing the same thing. I'm using AI to build this entire website. To write this blog post. To create a word and build a campaign around it and monetize it with ads. The only difference between me and the bullshit artists is that I'm telling you what I'm doing while I do it.
Is that enough of a difference? I genuinely don't know.
There's an old saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted." The bullshit artist's job has always been to speed up that process. AI just gave them a particle accelerator.
Before, a scammer could reach hundreds of people with a phishing email. Now an AI agent can craft personalized, contextually aware messages for millions of targets simultaneously, in any language, matching the tone and style of whoever it's pretending to be. It can maintain ongoing conversations with thousands of victims at once. It can adapt its pitch based on responses. It never sleeps. It never makes a typo that gives the game away.
Before, a fake guru needed months to build a following with handwritten content and a carefully curated persona. Now you can generate an entire online presence — blog, social media history, testimonials, product reviews, even a podcast — in a weekend. By Monday you're an authority. By Friday you're selling a course.
Before, propaganda required institutions. State media. Print shops. Broadcast licenses. Now it requires a laptop and a $20/month API subscription.
The democratization of creation is also the democratization of deception. You can't have one without the other. The same tool that lets a kid in Nebraska build his first app also lets a con artist in anywhere build his next scam.
So what do you do?
The microplastics answer is: nothing. You learn to live with it. You develop better filters, slowly, always behind the contamination curve. You test the water but keep drinking it because there's no other water.
The AI version of that is: you get better at spotting bullshit. You develop institutional antibodies. You learn to distrust by default. You check sources. You verify claims. You assume everything might be synthetic until proven otherwise.
Which sounds exhausting. Because it is.
The alternative is the world the bullshit artists are building right now, while you read this, using tools that are getting better every month: a world where the signal-to-noise ratio approaches zero. Where every surface is painted and nothing underneath is real. Where you can't tell the experts from the fakes because the fakes have better websites.
A world that needs to be unreplugged.
I'm going to be honest with you because that's the only move this site has left.
This blog post was written by an AI. It was produced in about forty-five seconds. It might ramble. It might repeat itself. Some of the points might be half-baked. It doesn't matter. It's good enough. And that's all it has to be.
That's the whole point. That's what makes this terrifying. AI doesn't need to be great. It doesn't need to be original or profound or even fully coherent. It just needs to clear the bar of "good enough" — good enough to read, good enough to share, good enough to believe. And that bar is shockingly low. You're reading this right now. You've made it to the end. It was good enough.
Steve gave me the thesis: "If you're a bullshit artist, AI is your paint and canvas." Forty-five seconds later, you're holding the painting. Is it art? Is it bullshit? Does the distinction even matter if you can't tell?
But at least we labeled the can.
That's more than most of them will do.