On AI, Small Presses, and the Hypocrisy of Misplaced Anger

I received a DM from a concerned person who told me that a small indie press I support uses AI and had shut down comments after people started raising concerns.

I already knew this. And I was the one who suggested they close the comments — not because they had something to hide, but because sometimes silence is the only way to protect your work from a mob that isn’t listening. Once people decide they want a scandal, nothing you say will reach them. It stops being about dialogue and becomes performance — a feeding frenzy of moral superiority that leaves no room for nuance, humanity, or truth.

And, after being cancelled myself a couple of years ago for an opinion, I can tell you this: it’s not good for your mental health.

That’s one of the things that troubles me most — how easily the literary community turns on its own. How quick we are to attack small presses, poets, and artists — the very people still trying to create something meaningful in a system built to crush them — while the real culprits, the corporations who strip the world of meaning for profit, go untouched.

So the supposed crime here is using AI.

But AI is a tool, no more and no less. It is like dynamite: when Alfred Nobel invented it, his vision was not war but safety — a way for miners to survive their work, for stone to break without bodies breaking with it. The invention itself was never evil; it was the choices people made with it that turned it into a weapon of destruction.

Artists have been here before. When the camera was invented, painters feared their art form was finished. They saw a machine that could capture reality better, faster, and more “real” than they ever could, and they panicked. But painting wasn’t destroyed — it was set free. Freed from the burden of perfect likeness, painters explored colour, distortion, emotion, and abstraction, and in doing so opened up entire new worlds.

We are at the same turning point now with AI. The question is not whether the tool is good or evil — no tool ever is — but what choices we make with it, and who we hold accountable for those choices.

And yet, instead of aiming their anger where it belongs — at the corporations who patent language itself, who drain rivers to cool their endless data centres, who turn human creativity into data to be sold back to us — people lash out sideways. They gossip in DMs. They demand disclaimers from small presses. They insist on purity from poets.

Why? Because they do not believe the giants can be toppled. Because it is easier to attack a neighbour than to confront a system. Easier to perform outrage against a small press than to demand accountability from billionaires.

This is hypocrisy masquerading as principle, and it does nothing but harm those who are actually doing the work of keeping poetry alive.

Small presses do not owe anyone disclaimers. They do not need to watermark their integrity with apologies. They have been building community for years, nurturing poets, publishing voices that would otherwise go unheard. That is their work, and it matters.

I do not put disclaimers on my work either. I know who I am. I know what I stand for. I am a nurse. I am a social justice activist. I am a writer who has fought too hard to survive to spend my energy justifying myself to those who come looking for weakness.

Disclaimers are fear made visible. They are a plea: please don’t misinterpret me, please don’t cancel me, please don’t drag me in the comments. But fear is not the soil where art grows. Fear does not build community. Fear does not build resistance.

Yes — AI has an environmental cost. Yes, the data centres it relies on consume obscene amounts of water and energy. Yes, the systems that train it are fed by the uncredited labour of writers and artists. But the danger does not lie in a small press using it. The danger lies in the corporations who built the machine in the first place.

And for those who argue that if you know it has an environmental cost and you use it anyway, you are complicit — here is the truth: we are all already complicit. We live inside systems that poison rivers, burn fossil fuels, and exploit workers so we can hold these phones in our hands and scroll through these feeds. We stream films on servers that consume more electricity than some nations; we wear clothes sewn by children in sweatshops; we type on devices assembled in factories where workers faint from exhaustion.

Complicity is not optional under capitalism. It is built into every object we touch. The real question is not whether you are pure, because you never will be. The real question is: where do you aim your fire?

And here is something else that rarely gets said.

I am working class. My father was a factory worker. My mother a housewife. I grew up below the poverty line. Without Amazon, I would not have been able to make the books I am making today. Does that suck? Absolutely. Do I wish there were other models, other infrastructures? Every single day. But will I use that as an excuse not to put the work out into the world so that I can remain pure? Absofuckinglutely not.

Because my books are educating, agitating, resisting. They are fighting the very systems they are forced to pass through. That’s the paradox of being a writer, a small press, a working-class activist in a capitalist world: you use the tools available to you, even if those tools are compromised, because silence is not purity. Silence is surrender.

And the truth is: the demand for “purity” often comes from privilege. It is easier to insist on uncompromising ideals when your survival does not depend on navigating the very systems you critique. It is easy to sneer at a small press for using Amazon or AI when you have never had to choose between obscurity and access, between keeping your voice unheard or letting it travel through compromised channels.

Purity is a luxury. Working-class people don’t have that luxury. We have survival. We have resistance. We have art. And we are going to use every tool we can to keep those alive.

Small presses are not the enemy.

The enemy is systemic. The enemy is corporate greed. The enemy is the culture of suspicion that tears apart the vulnerable while billionaires dismantle entire industries without consequence.

So protect small presses. Protect each other. Stop confusing tools with choices. Stop mistaking fear for justice. And most of all: aim your fire where it belongs.

I welcome constructive dialogue — always. But I will not participate in gossip, bad-faith attacks, or purity contests that do nothing but weaken our communities. If we want a future for poetry, for art, for justice, then our conversations must be honest, rooted in reality, and directed at the powers that actually harm us.

So I’ll shut down comments here too. I always do when I know a mob might come, because I’ve been there. I’ve felt the pile-on. I’ve seen what it does to people.

And now, I’m off to Amsterdam — wearing my Amnesty International T-shirt — to direct my anger where it belongs: at a fucking genocide.

Meanwhile, you can keep telling your mates that Sunday Mornings at the River is an AI-enabling press.

Have a good day.