February 19, 2026
Originals vs Autocomplete
AI Makes You Boring
Internet split: Is AI turning us into bland copycats—or exposing gatekeepers
TLDR: A viral blog says AI makes creators boring and blames a flood of shallow project posts. The community claps back: some see personality getting flattened, others call that gatekeeping, while skeptics say good prompts and smart humans still produce interesting work—this shapes how we judge creativity now.
A fiery blog post claims AI is turning creators into boring, surface-level copycats, pointing to a surge of “Show HN” posts (a place where coders show off projects) that feel more like auto-complete than original ideas. The author argues real insight comes from long, messy thinking—not outsourcing your brain to a chatbot. They even dropped a gym meme: “You don’t get swole lifting weights with an excavator.” Read the ranty receipts here: the blog post.
The comments? Absolute chaos. One camp, led by nemomarx, says AI-polished writing flattens personality into generic “LinkedIn voice.” Another camp, with tptacek, fires back that this outrage smells like gatekeeping—that “Show HN” was about surviving a hazing ritual, not fresh ideas. Meanwhile, stuckinhell swears you can “prompt engineer” your way to interesting results, and wagwang waves the “bots can pass Turing tests” flag like it’s case closed. lasgawe drops the big brain question: does AI cause shallowness, or do shallow folks reach for AI first?
The memes are relentless: “GPU brain = TED Talk salad,” “Excavator gym membership,” and the newly minted label blandware for vibe-coded projects. Love it or hate it, the community’s split between fearing an AI-shaped beige future and cheering the end of old-school gatekeeping.
Key Points
- •The author argues that AI-assisted projects, especially in Show HN posts, have increased in volume but declined in depth and discussion value.
- •LLMs are characterized as poor at original thinking, leading to unoriginal outcomes when users offload cognitive work to them.
- •AI may help explore unfamiliar topics but is deemed counterproductive for original work such as writing or product design.
- •The “human-in-the-loop” approach is criticized as insufficient because originality stems from the work being delegated to AI.
- •Articulation through writing or teaching is presented as crucial to refining ideas, which prompting an AI does not replace.