On the last known location of a thought

Are you a robot ?

For years, websites asked us to tick a box saying, “I’m not a robot.” Now I think this box has moved into our heads, and we are ticking it for every image, caption, email and idea. Have we become the CAPTCHA?

And the strangest part is how quickly identification

has replaced criticism.

“This is AI!!.”


That is not a critique. That is barely an observation. But saying “AI” as though its a sin, as if you have uncovered corruption at the centre of the earth does not make one intelligent. Does not make one curious as well, It just means you recognised the medium, not just recognise but also judged it. Why?

It is like looking at me and saying, “You are human.”

Fine. What did that reveal about the quality of my thinking? of my existence? of my feelings? of my doubts??

Calling it AI tells me how it was made, not whether it was worth making. 

Tell me the composition is weak. The idea is lazy, inspired, copied, stolen and what not. Tell me its culturally skewed, the metaphor sucks, the image is vibrant but empty. Tell me I used the tool badly. Don’t tell me I used the tool.

“This is AI slop.”

Again. Fine. What is slop about it? The lack in thought, effort or is AI, the slop factor? Here is the thing though


It is AI now.
It was Photoshop before.

Photography much earlier.

The internet much, much earlier.

Printing before that.

And if we keep walking backwards, I’m sure somebody was furious about writing because memory had more soul.

Why is it that every new tool arrives as cultural sewage, then quietly becomes the floor the next generation stands on while condemning the tool after it.

And suddenly everyone is talking about water consumption??

Designers care about water now? Really? 


Where was this energy when we made endless versions of everything? When we exported some 23 final-final-v7.psd files? When we uploaded every meal, every reel, every half-thought, every duplicated screenshot and every video nobody will watch twice?  When our junk lived forever across platforms, backups, clouds and servers because deleting anything felt inconvenient?

I am not saying AI has no environmental cost. Every tech does, and it deserves serious scrutiny. But environmental concern cannot become a costume we wear only when we dislike the tool underneath it.

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Let it matter for streaming & scrolling.

Let it matter for cloud storage.

Let it matter for endless content production.

Let it matter for devices, upgrades, data centres, advertising systems and the entire digital appetite we happily fed before AI

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Otherwise it is not environmentalism.

It is just aesthetic dislike cosplaying moral concern.

I know what it means to spend years learning how to ‘see’, only to watch some algorithm reproduce the surface of competence and visual culture in seconds. It is unsettling. Sometimes insulting n frightening.


But at other times, it is fascinating. Ain’t it?  Liberating. Provocative even. It pushes the eye, the hand, the process, the very idea of what making can be.


And that contradiction matters. Because discomfort is not criticism. And difficulty, however noble it feels, is not proof of meaning.

A work does not and should not become profound merely because someone suffered over it in whatever terms. We had bad design before AI.  Empty films. Meaningless ads. We had slop made slowly. We had slop made expensively. We had also slop made excellently.

Human-made was never a quality guarantee and AI-made need not automatically be a quality failure. So critique “my way” of ai . But “its AI, so disappointed”?

Disappointed in what? The sentence you liked five seconds ago?

The image that moved you before you saw the label? Yourself, for responding before receiving permission? 

Because if the work became bad only after you learned how it was made, maybe the work was never the thing being judged.

“This is AI” often ends the conversation exactly where criticism should begin. Is it because the tool is easy to identify but the thought is harder to examine? Critique of creative thought is scarce, while blind critique of the tool is somehow abundant.

So now, What if I confess that this entire piece was written by AI? Will you feel cheated? What if I tell you every word was mine? Will you relax?

What if I tell you the truth is messier: I thought it, spoke it, prompted it, fought with it, cut it, rewrote it, made it worse, made it mine, then deliberately added a typo so you would trust me?

Are you still wondering who wrote this completely?

And giving that more importance than what happened to you while reading it?