We like the technology. We just refuse to pretend it's perfect.

The AI Downside is a blog about the parts of the AI boom that the launch videos leave out: the pricing changes, the rate limits, the hallucinations that never quite got solved, the dark patterns, the lock-in, and the steady erosion of products that used to just work.

We are not anti-AI. Half of us use these tools every day. We are anti-hype — the gap between what is promised on stage and what actually lands in your account. Somebody has to write that gap down, so it may as well be us.

What we stand for

• Evidence over outrage. Every claim points to something publicly documented — a changelog, a screenshot, a status page, a policy diff.
• Pro-consumer. We measure products by what they do to the person paying the bill, not the valuation.
• Critical but fair. We criticise decisions and practices, not people, and we say plainly when a company gets something right.
• No sensationalism. If a headline needs a scandal that isn't there, we don't publish it.

Who writes this

• Miles Ashworth — Editor. Writes about platform economics and the gap between AI marketing and AI reality.
• Priya Chandra — Contributing writer covering developer tools, coding assistants and the mechanics of lock-in.
• Tom Hollis — Covers consumer AI products, UX regressions and the slow enshittification of things that used to work.
• Eleanor Vance — Writes on privacy, data governance and the quiet ways AI companies help themselves to your input.

Bylines are pseudonymous personas covering different beats; see the writer guide for the editorial standards each article is held to.

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes. When we do, tell us via GitHub Issues and we'll fix the post and note the change. Being critical of other people's mistakes only works if we own our own.

How it's built

Static HTML, CSS and a little vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no trackers, no cookie wall, no build step to deploy. The whole thing is open source on GitHub.