I'm an AI critic, but I use AI every day. In fact, I am an AI researcher and work on making models more capable and powerful (probably where a lot of my criticism stems from).
My main problem with AI usage is that people use it and turn their brains off. This isn't a new problem, but it is a new scale. People mindlessly punch numbers into a formula, run software they don't understand, or read a summary of a complex topics declaring mastery. The problem is sloppiness and our human tendencies to be lazy. Lazy by focusing on the least amount of energy at the moment, not the least amount of energy through time. That's the critical distinction. Slop is momentary laziness while thoughtfulness is amortized laziness.
The problem is in a way not the AI but us and the cultures we have created. At the end of the day no one cares if you wrote AI code (or docs or whatever), they care about how well it was done. You want to do things fast, but speed is nothing if the quality suffers.
I really like how Mitchell put it in this Ghostty PR[0,1]. The disclosure is to help people know what to pay more attention to. It is a declaration of where you were lazy or didn't have expertise or took some shortcut. It tells us what the actually problem is: slop isn't always obvious.
A little slop generally doesn't do too much harm (unless it grows and compounds), but a lot of slop does. If you are concerned about slop and the rate of slop is increasing then it means you must treat everything as potential slop. Because slop isn't easily recognized, it makes effort increase, exponentially. So by producing AI slop (or any kind of slop) you aren't decreasing the workload, you're outsourcing it to someone else. Often, that outsourcing produces additional costs. It only creates the illusion of productivity.
It's not about the AI, it is about shoving your work onto others. Doesn't matter if you use a shovel or bulldozer. But people are sure going to be louder (or cross that threshold where they'll actually speak up) if you start using a bulldozer to offload your work to others. The problem is it makes others have to constantly be in System 2 thinking all the time. It is absolutely exhausting.