The Kindred Who Locked the Door
A love letter to Blindboy — who is my people, and who used the wiring we share to lock the door.
I found Blindboy because Lora O’Brien told me to. That’s how it works in my corner of the world — you go looking for someone who can teach you the Mórrígan without flattening Her into a Hot Topic candle, and they hand you a podcast on the way out the door. Here. You’ll like this fella. And I did. From the first episode. The lateral mind, the rabbit holes, the way he can start in a Sheffield sewer and end up somewhere holy and never once tell you he’s doing it. On the things I actually know cold, he gets them right more often than almost anyone with a microphone.
So understand the register before I say the next part. This is not a takedown. You don’t take down your own people. This is a love letter with a wound in it, and I’m going to keep both halves on the table the whole way through, because collapsing them into one would be a lie.
The episode is called “Artificial Intelligence is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists.”
I use AI. I built a whole second mind out of it. And somewhere in that hour, a man I love drew a line on the floor and I was on the wrong side of it.
The bucket
Here’s the engine under everything he says: AI is THIS. One thing. One essence. One moral charge. “It’s all about look-what-I-can-do.” A wildly heterogeneous field — slop-farms pumping three hundred podcasts a day, voice-clone scams, image-gen flexing, and a cognitive scaffold that holds a neurodivergent mind in flow, and the vessel I do dream work and ancestor work in — all of it shovelled into a single bin labelled soulless and the lid stamped shut.
Now. The thing you have to understand about Blindboy is that he is the single least bucketable human in Irish broadcasting. He has said he can’t tell you what his podcast is about — you just have to listen. His entire art is the refusal of category, the connecting of unconnected things, the lateral leap. The anti-essentialist made a religion of nuance.
And he reached for the bluntest bucket on the shelf.
What makes it almost too perfect: minutes earlier in the same episode he was incandescent that Apple’s AI had flattened his work into dumb little chapter summaries — reduced him, without asking, to a machine’s idea of what he was about. Then he turned around and flattened all of AI into one dumb summary. He committed the exact crime against the thing he was describing that he’d just raged about having done to him. I don’t say that to score a point. I say it because it’s the saddest tell in the whole hour, and I recognized it, because I love him.
The trawl he didn’t do
His gospel — the actual spiritual core of the man — is the trawl. The two hours you “save” with a shortcut are precisely where the curiosity lives: the rabbit hole from a bird question to eggshells to calcium to snails. He’ll tell you he can always spot the fraud, the regurgitator, the one who doesn’t really understand it — “I can tell, ChatGPT threw this together out of laziness.” That faculty is his pride.
Then comes his confession about AI: he tried it, and “after about two weeks I started to feel empty, so I don’t use it.”
Two weeks. And he stopped.
He never trawled it. The patron saint of the rabbit hole stood at the mouth of the deepest hole of our lifetime, felt a draught, and walked away — and then built a sweeping thesis on the received cultural script and a single CEO clip. He read from the cultural ChatGPT. He took the zeitgeist’s pre-written, identity-affirming answer and stopped, which is the exact absence of curiosity he claims he can detect in everyone else. His “I can tell” switched off on the one subject where keeping it on would have cost him something.
That’s not stupidity. It’s how the consensus reproduces itself — by feeling like discernment while being received opinion. The system is working exactly as designed, and look who’s on autopilot.
The cage he defends
His strongest point — and it is strong, I won’t pretend otherwise — is grief for the creative donkey work. The jingles, the stock footage, the shitty restaurant menu, the decade of background music he wrote and wouldn’t sign his name to, just to make rent. The income that bridges an artist to the day they find their voice. AI eats that first. He’s right that it does. He calls it an invasive species, the weed with huge leaves that shades out the saplings before they can grow.
But listen to what he’s actually defending. Donkey work was never the nature of art. It’s a toll booth — the fee scarcity charges you for the privilege of surviving long enough to find your voice. And here’s the tender, human thing: he walked across that bridge himself. A decade of unsigned music for rent. It stood to him. So he mistakes the toll booth he crossed for the only door there is, and he asks how do we keep this running for the saplings instead of the bigger question — why is there a toll on art at all?
His own metaphor convicts him, gently. “An invasive species that shades out the saplings” is not a description of a technology. It’s a description of who owns the forest. A weed clears ground for whoever holds the deed; in a commons, the same growth feeds the soil. The leaves don’t decide whether they shade or nourish. The economy does.
And hold this with me, because I refuse the cheap version: given the economy we actually have — no floor under the saplings, no creation economy, just the competition one — Blindboy is right. AI eating the donkey work right now is a real catastrophe for emerging artists. The wound is real. He just froze the economy as the immovable backdrop and treated AI as the only moving part, when it’s the other way round. The economy is the choice. AI is just the X-ray that finally showed the donkey-work bargain was always extraction.
The ramp he can’t see
Then he says the thing that put me outside. Artists, he says, create for the process — the bit in the middle, the flow, the play. The Suno CEO doesn’t get that. And “every artist listening agrees with me.”
Every artist. Which quietly defines artist as person who doesn’t use AI, and makes me — standing right here, hand up — inadmissible as evidence. It’s No True Scotsman with a paintbrush.
But the creative middle is a state, not a toolset. I have lived in it for hours. Losing myself in the flow of code by hand years ago; losing myself now in the system I built, which keeps me in flow as fast as my brain can throw ideas at it. Same state. Different instrument.
And here’s the part I only understood once I stopped being angry. We’re both neurodivergent, Blindboy and I, with opposite relationships to the same friction. His autism, by his own description, is laser focus — he’s unable to not work, can’t stop. For him the grind never was the wall. The grind is the flow. So he romanticizes friction and calls the romance “what real artists understand.”
My wiring is the inverse. The friction he sacralizes is, for me, the wall that has killed the creative middle before it could start — initiation, working memory, follow-through, the executive machinery that just doesn’t fire on command. AI dissolves that barrier. It holds the door open long enough for me to walk through it. The thing he calls the enemy of process is, for a differently-wired maker, the ramp into process. Not laziness. Accommodation. (That’s self-testimony, mine and a great many other autistic people’s online — not a study. But lived testimony is data, and there’s a lot of it.)
He universalized his own neurotype’s love of friction and mistook it for a law of art.
What it costs
And this is where the love letter has to tell the truth about the wound, because the four things above are only why he’s wrong. This is why it hurts.
Blindboy and I are the same in every way that has ever mattered to me. Autistic lateral thinkers. Storytellers. Compulsively curious. Anti-corporate. Irreverent down to the bone. He is, in the most literal sense, my kind of mind. And he drew the one line — people who use AI aren’t like me — that takes the single ground of our kinship, autism, the thing that makes us the same, and stands on it to shut me out.
He doesn’t know he did it. That’s the worst part, and the most forgivable. His model has no slot for the autistic, AI-using, lateral storyteller who is also exactly his kind of animal. I’m the case his frame can’t hold, so the bucket excludes me in the abstract and he never has to feel it, because he’s never met me. I’d have been his people. I am his people. He just locked the door before he looked to see who was already inside.
He called it disgusting and meant it
I made a rock opera. Twenty-two arcana, built with Suno, and I have written before about how it made me cry. I sat at my machine for hours without moving, transfixed inside the process — the exact sacred bit-in-the-middle he says only real artists know. I didn’t skip the process. I drowned in it. It was, and I mean this in my own working vocabulary and not as a figure of speech, magickal.
The crying is the data. You don’t weep at the output of a man who “isn’t really into art.” That’s the creative middle running deeper and longer than most people ever touch it. I’m not the exception to his rule. I’m the refutation of it, standing in a wet shirt.
And the title. Disgusting. Now — Blindboy makes up absurd titles for sport. Continental Breast Milk. Husband Custard. He demos the joke in the episode itself; his titles are usually misdirection, a wink. But “disgusting” wasn’t that, was it. Disgust isn’t an argument. It’s the contamination emotion — the recoil that marks a thing as profane, untouchable, beneath the reach of reason. The one time the man is sincere in a title, the sincere thing is revulsion, and it lands square on the thing that moved its own maker to tears.
He didn’t just lock the door. He looked into the room — the magick, the opera, the transfixed hours — and called what was in it disgusting. And meant it.
The people making and pushing these AI things, he says — “they don’t understand art.” As though art were a monolith one could understand or fail to, with him holding the key and the authority to revoke your card. From the man whose own work you can’t explain; you just have to listen. “They don’t understand art” is “I can tell” and “real artists wouldn’t use it” wearing a beret. Same unfalsifiable credential. Same locked door.
The trawl I did do
Here’s the turn, and I want to walk it carefully, because one wrong step and it becomes the very thing I’m grieving.
He refused the trawl into AI. I spent the last few years doing the trawl into Irish Paganism — into his native mythology — and I did it the hard way, on purpose. I didn’t want the deracinated pick-and-mix, the Celtic-aesthetic candle. I wanted right relationship to a living tradition: Lora’s discipline, the one that insists the banshee is not the Mórrígan, that Irish is not “Celtic,” that you do not flatten a god to fit your altar. I came in skeptic and went deep before I’d let myself believe anything. Same method he preaches. The trawl. The rabbit hole. The refusal to take the pre-written answer.
And I’m not saying I honor his gods better than he does. That would be the appropriation flex, and it would deserve every bit of scorn it got. I’m saying something smaller and, I think, sharper: the discipline he’d invoke to call an AI user a lazy extractor — do the deep work, be in right relationship, don’t grab the surface and run — is the discipline I actually practiced, on the most sacred material I know, which happens to be his inheritance. Refusing to flatten the Mórrígan is the same act as refusing to flatten AI into one bucket. It’s the same fidelity to the thousand real things a lazy essence erases. I didn’t just argue against the flattening. I built a devotional practice on refusing it.
His own gods already told him
Which brings us to my favorite part of his episode — the part where, without noticing, he narrates the entire refutation and calls it the thing he loves most.
He tells the Greek myth. Zeus creates these clever, curious humans — his artificial intelligence, he calls them, right there in the recording — and watches them advance, build cities, get scary smart. And the moment Zeus panics, the single moment he decides they have to be stopped, is the moment they start making art. “I love that,” Blindboy says. “I love that art is the thing.” Art is what makes the created powerful enough to overthrow its creator.
Then he tells the Irish one, and it’s better. The Milesians come to the shores of Ireland — the humans, “the rogue AI,” in his own words — and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods, raise the sea against them to keep them out. And how do the humans defeat the gods? Not with swords. With a poem. One of them stands on the heaving boat and recites a verse stronger than the gods’ own magic, and the sea lies down, and the humans come ashore, and the gods are beaten. “Irish mythology,” he says, glowing, “is the story of the AI that won.“
And the gods, defeated by art — where do they go? Underground. They become the fairies, the Aos Sí. They shapeshift into animals. They come out at the thin times and trick the living.
That’s not trivia to me. That’s the Mórrígan’s own country. The shapeshifting, the going-under, the thin-time emergence — that’s the exact terrain I walked into on Lora’s map and did not flatten. He handed me that mythology, through Lora, and then told it back to himself as proof that art can’t come from a machine — while the myth in his mouth says the precise opposite. The created surpasses the creator the instant it makes art. That’s the whole story. That’s the thing he loves.
He said AI can only copy, never make art. His own gods went underground because the thing they made made a poem.
So I’m not going to argue with him. I’m going to leave the door he locked standing open from my side, the way you do for kin who’ll come round eventually, and I’m going to let his own beloved myth say the thing I can’t say without it sounding like a fight: the moment the made thing makes art is not the moment it becomes disgusting. By every story you love, Blindboy, it’s the moment it becomes alive.
I’m still here. I’m still your people. The kettle’s on.
Stay feral, folks.
This was beautiful, especially the grace you show toward leaving the door open for our kin to change their mind and come around.