Awen NULL meets the Boardroom Bot

By Awen Null

The boardroom of Let’s Give AI Users a Kicking PLC is currently smelling heavily of damp tweed and righteous indignation. The company, which recently floated on the London Stock Exchange following a record-breaking series of funding rounds fuelled entirely by Instagram likes and Threads engagement META metrics (irony alert), has issued its Q2 trading update.

Profits from actual creative output remain stubbornly at zero, but dividend payouts in the form of moral superiority are up an astonishing 412%.

The Boardroom Bots are very smug.

The Grand Illusion

For the uninitiated, Let’s Give AI Users a Kicking PLC is that vast, loose conglomerate of mid-tier illustrators, hobbyist poets, and people who once bought a fountain pen, all unified by a single, terrifying realisation: the world did not actually owe them a living for doing the exact same thing until retirement.

The company’s chief marketing officer, a man who has spent the last forty-eight hours typing the words "FALSE EQUIVALENCE" under every social media post that mentions a calculator, consents to see me.

"You see, Null," he wheezes, adjusting a scarf that screams I understand composition but not economics, "a calculator merely offloads arithmetic. An LLM offloads soul. If you use a machine to help you draft an essay, you are a digital scabby-back. If I use a spell-checker, a GPS, and an algorithmic grammar tool to write my anti-AI manifesto, I am preserving the sacred fire of human expression. Do you see the difference?"

"Not really," I venture. "Isn't that just an arbitrary line drawn to protect your specific postcode in the creative, gated suburbs?"

"Aha!" he cries, pointing a finger that has never known the joy of a manual typewriter. "False equivalence!

Guard!

Remove this silicon apologist!"

The Litany of the Loud

The tragedy of the PLC is that its loudest Bot shareholders aren’t actually creative at all. They are the internet’s professional mourners, a vocal minority currently occupying the high ground on Instagram.

As someone who's lived through every creative apocalypse since the 1960s, from the day Photoshop allegedly murdered the photo-retoucher to the night Autotune supposedly strangled the nightingale, one recognises the tune. It is always the same provincial panic.

The current corporate strategy relies on four pillars of grievance:

LET’S GIVE AI USERS A KICKING PLC

The Four Pillars of Strategic Grievance

PILLAR I

Theft

“They stole our precious digital DNA!”

You gave it away to Mark Zuckerberg for free in 2014 in exchange for a dopamine hit.

PILLAR II

Prompts

“Direction isn’t art!”

An argument that collapses the moment someone has to explain what Ridley Scott or an architect actually does all day.

PILLAR III

Slop

“The internet is entirely full of AI rubbish.”

As opposed to the pristine, intellectually rigorous utopia that was the pre-2023 worldwide web.

PILLAR IV

Laziness

“Real creators must perform physical suffering.”

A deeply puritanical, ableist metric that aggressively mistakes visible sweat for actual talent.

The "laziness" charge is particularly revealing (and deeply offensive to those of us with chronic illnesses). It is a deeply reactionary, Victorian view of labour, usually spouted by the aggressively able-bodied possessors of a Trust Fund, which decrees that unless a disabled or neurodivergent person has performed the necessary amount of physical suffering to produce a paragraph, the paragraph does not count.

The Great Shareholder Swindle

But the finest comedy is reserved for the grand accusation: "The LLMs stole our art!"

To watch the creative community weep into their £5 oatmeal organic flat whites over data-scraping is to watch a person who has spent twelve years throwing their furniture into the street suddenly complain that someone has come along with a wood-chipper, repurposed it, and sold it for a fortune.

For over a decade, the entire creative class entered into a collective suicide pact with Silicon Valley. They surrendered their work, their copyright, and their time to multinational platforms in exchange for the digital equivalent of plastic beads: likes and followers. They devalued their own industry, raced each other to a price floor of zero, and explicitly signed Terms of Service they didn't read, which stated, in perfectly legible corporate English, that their data would be used.

Imagine a barrister giving away free legal counsel on a street corner for ten years in the hope that someone might eventually ask him to do a paid divorce, and then acting surprised when a passer-by starts taking notes.

And who are they defending? The PLC’s promotional literature suggests they are protecting a golden age where every painter was paid like Picasso and every musician lived like a king. The reality is that capitalism had already turned the creative arts into an elite, gatekept lottery long before the first neural network sneezed.

The current weeping over AI tracks on Spotify is a case in point. For years, musicians accepted a platform that paid them £0.003 per stream, precisely because the gatekeeper had a human face and a nice line in corporate playlisting. Complaining that Spotify is now full of AI tracks is like complaining that Vlad the Impaler isn’t doing the actual impaling himself. The system was already a bloodbath; the machine just made it more efficient.

The Quiet Ones

As I leave the PLC’s headquarters, past a picket line of people protesting against a software update that might make their lives easier, I notice a small group standing in the shadows, entirely silent.

These are the artists who never posted the quality, professional-standard work on Instagram. The ones who never traded their copyright for the dopamine hit of a blue thumbs-up. They are the ones who actually have a right to be furious about being scraped into the machine.

Art of FACELESS would be smug if we weren't so depressed.

Naturally, Let’s Give AI Users a Kicking PLC has given them no seats on the Bot board. They don't make enough noise for the algorithm.