Are Small Businesses Evil For Using Evil AI?

We’ve heard a lot about how new AI products are being foisted upon virtually every workplace. Doesn’t seem like it’s providing that promised bump to productivity, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the AI people to blow up the economy before we actually see any meaningful course corrections, and until that time, it’s all-in on AI (yawn– I’m so tired). After all, some Silicon Valley MBA nerd thought it was a good idea, so we have to do it! What’s also been interesting to see is the backlash against, well, really anything generated by AI, or anyone using it. I am wondering if this extends to small businesses.

After all, small businesses aren’t run by Evil Big Tech Oligarch or Resource Extraction Megacorp. But they are, we know, still beholden to some of those same businesses (and therefore their associated oligarchs) by way of the bigger picture of supply chains. Examples are how many small businesses rely on Amazon (run by a fascist) or ULINE (run by fascists).

The Backlash Comes For… Main Street?

Notable that the most visible anti-AI backlash is in the form of local opposition to data centers for obvious reasons— the plethora of destructive, negative externalities these projects create, that are only rarely (and slowly) being corrected by market mechanisms like data center-specific utility rates (this is happening in Ohio, Virginia, and even, kinda sorta, in Michigan!).

But I’ve also seen a lot of commentary declaring that the user “will instantly block someone” if they are using AI– ranging from accounts like InternetRandoEightNumbers or what have you, to, well, famous people. I’ve also seen a lot of responses to small businesses posting what is most likely AI-generated content declaring various iterations of “fuck this business for posting this.” I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to 

People are understandably angry– perhaps not because of the AI-generated image itself, but arguably because of how AI is increasingly used in the development of various technofascist regimes that replace factual reality with vibes, meaningful opportunities for exchange with engagement farming, critical engagement with algorithmically-driven ragebaiting, and more. Why? So the operators can make more money, of course.

But my people have a saying: don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Let’s differentiate “Sam Altman Making Another Billion Dollars” from “The Eastside Fish Fry Trying To Compete In An Overwhelmed Media Market.”

Backlash

We know that we live in a society that is pretty hostile to small business, what with how federal tax policy is increasingly slanted toward half a dozen giant corporations that pay no taxes and whose market capitalization accounts for more than 100% of domestic GDP, or whatever. Indeed, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 88 corporations paid no tax at all in 2025.

Given the uphill battle that small businesses have to fight, competing against much larger companies with marketing budgets (and no tax liability), is it not perhaps a little bit judgmental when the backlash comes for mom and pop, lumping them in with Facebook, Adobe, Apple, Coca Cola, or whatever giant awful company?

I think so– but then again, I’m also biased.

I use AI for work to assist with research. No, I don’t rely on it. But it does make parts of my job much easier, especially in a context in which I sometimes have to interrogate abstract or technical assumptions that it’s impossible to, say, just look up in a book that doesn’t exist. (Many colleagues have given me a lot of grief for taking this position).

And, most relevant here, I have used AI-generated imagery on this very blog. Why? It’s easier to get traffic with imagery attached, because of how the all-powerful algorithms work. I cannot afford to pay a full-time artist (the blog nets me a modest four-figure sum per year). In the files of “everybody’s a critic,” I first followed a suggestion that I should add ads to my blog. I did that for awhile until Elon Musk broke the algorithm on Twitter and most my referral traffic evaporated (but the Daily Stormer has presumably done quite well, in comparison!). I then followed a suggestion to add images– and I originally sourced these as originals from artists, but that quickly became very expensive, so, after a few years, I eventually started using an AI diffusion platform.

I have since canceled my subscription to that platform. (DALL-E 3.0 uses a combination of diffusion image generation and Something Else that they’re not really able to publicly describe, but suffice to to say that some of these AI tools work more like an automated Canva than anything else).

Am I a bad person for trying to compete in a fractured media landscape? Is a small business bad for trying to compete in a highly competitive local or regional economy? I would suggest that perhaps we should focus less on the technology itself and more on the folks who are getting rich off it– by externalizing the extensive set of problems created by it. This is why I’ve spent so much time working on advocacy and research around utility policy, ratemaking, and local land use regulation, rather than simply “AI = bad”.