Let’s be for real right away: about two months ago now, I told Google Gemini to code a thing.

Since then, I have refined it, both through my own (extremely rudimentary) coding skills and by using Gemini to cobble together new code that I can’t do on my own.

Some of you probably guessed this was for work, because your boy Noah would absolutely never use the Bullshit Machine for an artistic purpose.¹

Gold stars to you: my workplace had a paid “AI” workshop over the summer, and I decided to show face because I am currently persona non super grata with my bosses and this would probably score me some cheap points.

Due to my notable and extremely well-founded ethical concerns regarding the use of generative AI,² I insisted that all the visuals involved had to be either SVGs created from scratch or emoji, which somewhat assuaged my guilt. Luckily, because it’s a simulation of chariot racing, I could derive all the flavor text from quotes by Latin authors and names we have from various primary sources which, I think we can all agree, passed beyond any humane definition of copyright sometime around the reign of Offa of Mercia.

Similarly, because I do not feel like evaporating a bottlesworth of water every time I want to make an improvement to this stupid little game I made to give my younger students something to entertain themselves with, I not only edit the code manually now but am trying, very slowly, to brush up on HTML, pick up Python, and maybe finally figure out a story I can tell with Twine,³ so this can be a regrettable little episode in an increasingly regrettable little career.

My guess is, though, that you don’t really give a shit about any of those caveats I just planted in front of you.

Good.

You shouldn’t.

Mind you, a few caveats: this isn’t me disfiguring my face to show I’m fasting, or shouting mea culpa and beating my chest the hardest in church.

Or rather, it is that, but I’m not doing it frivolously. I’m happy to accept my time in the pillory when I think I’ve done something that deserves it, if nothing else pour encourager les autres. I come by that willingness to be made an example somewhat honestly. In my profession, we’re often told that one of the things we have to model is how to be graciously wrong and accept our shortcomings, even though no one else—not our students, not their parents, not our bosses, not the person behind us honking because we don’t feel like killing a pedestrian, not fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers—will return that in kind. It’s an odd thing to be a kind of 21st-century sin-eater.

Equally, please don’t mistake this for the usual weasel-mouthed attempts of Homo interretissimus to carve out protagonistic exceptions to whatever moral bright line their fellow posters have established, so that they can salve their consciences while Swiss-cheesing the entire concept of solidarity. I may not mean the same thing as my Anglophone correligionists when I say I was “raised Catholic,” but one thing I continue to derive from my faith is that all the nuance in the world does not erase the idea of moral clarity: for all that our current world tries to convince us to choose only between various shades of evil, there is almost always a right thing to do and a right way to do it, and arguing about it is less about actual philosophizing and more about protecting your precious self-image. Again, this option is closed to me: if anyone along the educational continuum runs a dissatisfaction with you up enough of the flagpole for someone to salute, you’re expected to accept the criticism in total abjection. Extenuating circumstances are not a thing for us.⁴

To make a long story belatedly short, I am perfectly willing to honor the commandments I would set out for everyone else, and when I fail to live up to those prescriptions, I am equally happy to take my medicine.⁵

Even though it was one of my first introductions to series-driven fantasy and it’s one of the reasons I ended up becoming a classicist, I don’t interact with Harry Potter stuff.⁶ I already tipped so well at restaurants that I had to be warned about it when we went overseas with a fairly limited budget,⁷ but burrito taxi discourse got me to a point where I either drive miles out of the way to pick up an order myself or I have a decent amount of extra cash on hand for the driver. I didn’t need to be told to boycott the Wordle Times for various reasons (several of which are Bret Stephens), but since trans people are asking, I actively refuse to read their stuff.

Speaking of the Trans News Network, SJ Klapecki, whose relationship to Catholicism seems similar to mine, recently pointed out exactly why no amount of White Sox memes or nice-sounding rhetoric has kept me from looking to separate from the Catholic Church, even though I was baptized and catechized in it, confirmed in it as an adult, and it’s been the mediatrix of almost all my real experiences of the divine.

In fact (serious limb-crawling here), but maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic that I don’t have such an issue with self-denial. The same asceticism that wows Westerners when it’s done according to Buddha’s teachings is either denied, scolded, or ridiculed when it’s Christian monks, but I’ve always found something to admire in the capacity to sacrifice things you hold dear in hopes of greater spiritual fulfillment. As an artist, my creativity always flourishes under limitation; as a person of faith, I find that I cannot consider something a principle if it requires nothing from me that I did not already want to do. My salary depends on me not understanding a lot of things, especially in the Chud Era, and yet I understand them.

Hence why, in a 2026 where we know the exact dimensions of the evil the NYT is willing to inflict on trans people, Palestinians, and anyone with precarious mental health who trips over a Ross Douthat column, it’s infuriating that the Athletic is still the center of sports discussion, because they’re one of the few publications with a big enough staff to pump out constant content.

(Granted, give Sulzberger a couple more years and that might not be true anymore.)

It’s disconcerting to see appeals to move off of Subswastikack right next to repost after repost of Hamilton Nolan or Christopher Hale or Ken Klippenstein,⁸ as if they don’t have the kind of audience that would easily and frictionlessly survive a move to, just to name one alternative for getting paid for your writing, Buttondown. There’s no way they don’t know other options exist, and people with comparable income post about how easy it’s been to migrate their reader lists all the time, so that’s not the problem: it’s that they will pay no price for continuing to use the Nazi blog software, so why would they change course?⁹

Similarly, there’s a class of increasingly loud techies who want to stay leftists while finding the loophole that allows them to be extremely into generative AI, presumably like all their coworkers, because it makes their specific jobs easier. This usually comes out in some combination of “well, AI¹⁰ is here and we just have to deal with it” and “the important part is that workers have control of these technologies,” as if chatbots and vibe coding weren’t part of a brazenly anti-labor ideology that each day puts more of the sum total of human knowledge behind a confident façade so you never have to suffer the indignity of asking another person, a person who might know more than you about any subject, a question they might answer in a way that makes you feel less smart.

I would think—given that opposition to these companies, to the construction they propose, to the depreciation of art and culture and creativity they represent, is an increasingly mainstream position, loudly and proudly broadcast for all your followers to see in a way it wasn’t when a few of us were pointing out that DALL-E was an environmental and ethical disaster—that this would be socially awkward, the way that half the time I told friends about my little dalliance with Gemini, I got the same stony silence you’d imagine would ensue if I admitted to cheating on my spouse. I would think that being a condescending prick about ending up on the same side of an argument as the dipshits who pretend they’re fighting Skynet because it makes them feel like movie stars might lose you a friend or two, given that I’ve managed to fray relationships over far less. I would hope that openly crediting other posters’ meanness and “ignorance” for your embrace of a technology used to justify¹¹ everything from massive layoffs to Elon Musk having all of our private data would get you told you’re being childish, as I get to constantly hear about myself and my colleagues whenever we dare to feel the way any other human being would when confronted with the same words and behaviors that rattle in our brains long after we’ve left the building.

After all, I’d been promised that that’s what adulthood was: you’d have real friends, not buddies, who would see through your nonsense and refuse to put up with it. Given that I have been blessed with a surfeit of nonsense, I looked forward to that even when I got needlessly defensive with the criticism I was receiving in the moment.

Instead, everyone is twelve now, no one online wants to abide by a single principle unless all it costs them is shutting up a bit, and it increasingly seems that the main reason the people in my life are willing to let me stew in my shame is that they know I already feel it, so they don’t have to put in much effort. With these other proud line-steppers, there’s no similar guarantee your investment will bear fruit.

Perhaps this, too, is an artifact of my profession. New York City recently unveiled its new guidelines on artificial intelligence and screen time. While the guidelines do allow teachers to use “AI” for instructional planning purposes, they can’t use it to grade—which is the one part of the jobs where it would perhaps save us some time, at least if LLMs ever reach the state of exalted perfection their true believers insist is just around the corner any Friedman Unit now.

This wasn’t remotely surprising to me, and if you’ve talked to me about education, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to you either. It’s not that I want teachers to hand off grading to LLMs, and I would never do it myself, but the belief behind the outright ban is obvious: unlike doctors, lawyers, freelance journalists, cops, and airlines, educators trying to take technological shortcuts, even in order to spend more time developing the supposedly precious personal relationships they have with their students, are going against the spirit of the work they’ve signed up to do.

Teachers who care never get to take the easy way out, and we generally don’t get to have a bunch of slapped-together predictive text blow smoke up our ass for typing a question instead of finding the information ourselves, which is the skill we’re supposed to have and instill in our students, no matter how much Silicon Valley tries to make that impossible.

At one point in my life, I might have said we don’t all have to live like that—but clearly very few of you can be trusted to cobble together your own ethics, so maybe it’s time for a little more fire and brimstone on people who do disappointing things, even if it makes you unpopular. Trust me, I’ve been there (I’d argue I am there), and in turn I’d rather have friends willing to call me a dipshit to my face than ones too cowardly to point out when I’m breaking the values we’ve chosen to share. I simply long for the day I’m not the only one on the receiving end of that treatment.

Here endeth the lesson.