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We All Hate AI, but if You’re Poor, It Can Really Ruin Your Life

Debt collection. Parole decisions. Oversight of public services. It’s all being outsourced to AI, with terrible consequences for poor people.

Luxury brands have always advertised the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by the French artist Linda Merad, who said the designer label wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was made by a human.” The fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social-media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad that combined hand-drawn artwork with 3D animation—a choice that seemed pointed coming on the heels of the viciously mocked generative-AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This past February, Gucci became a cautionary tale when it drew the wrath of fashionistas after using AI in its ads. “Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider[ed] luxury anymore,” one viral post read. Another stated, “The whole point of luxury is that someone gave a damn.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good. In some ways, this might seem to be merely a continuation on a theme: The rich get white-glove customer service while the rest of us are trapped pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into automated phone-tree voids. It can seem like just another symptom of the broader enshittification of our age and plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm the widespread skepticism: A Pew survey from 2025 found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited by the rise of AI, and roughly 60 percent said they wish they had more control over AI’s use in their own lives.

And yet it’s the poor........

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