Why AI Captions Ruin Crafting

If you spend any time scrolling through the craft corner of Instagram right now, you have probably noticed a rather jarring shift in the air. People we have followed for years, makers whose hands and recurring spelling mistakes (nothing wrong with that) we know, and accounts we used to love chatting with have suddenly started sounding like corporate marketing seminars. It’s all getting very Linkedin up in here, and I think we can all agree that Linkedin is something we definitely need less of in all areas.

Have you seen how every other post on your feed opens with a painfully predictable hook? “And honestly?”. A gentle reminder to “romanticise” your stitching? Everything must be “gentle” or done “gently”. Gently and honestly. An urgent plea to work on a project “one stitch at a time”? The “and honestly?” grinds my gears like nothing else, and coming from a perimenopausal chick, that’s saying something. How about the amount of time you’ve read someone asking you to “delve into” the most mundane thing ever? What about people suddenly inviting you to, say, “harness the power” of your crochet hook? How’s about, when you call people out on this, they reply with “I have always used “harness the power” in my captions and regularly suggest that fellow knitters “navigate the complexities” of something ridiculous like garter stitch. Like, Janet, be so for real right now, because I love you and all, but your captions were barely legible before and now they’ve turned into some kind of cringeworthy, scripted Town Hall Meeting nightmare. Just stop it.

I write a lot of articles about AI, and I am aware of the fact that some of my followers might be getting tired of it, but I’d rather bore people shitless than ignore such a troubling and damaging thing. I have spoken before about how to fight against the rise of AI in knitting and crochet, as well as how yarn and crafting tool brands are using it more and more, but this is a slightly different angle – and an angle that very few of us are talking about or even noticing. The whole point of this article is very simple. If you – allegedly, more on that later – made/knitted/crocheted/dyed/painted the thing you’re posting about on Instagram, it’s not unreasonable for people to expect to hear your voice talking about it genuinely in the caption. Your words, your feelings, not the words generated by some water-wasting LLM just because you typed in a prompt.

So, without further ado, let’s “delve into” the double-standard ridden world of AI in crafts for the 400th time. Gently, though.

The Great Double Standard

Here is the bit that really boggles the mind. As a community, we are fiercely protective of our craft. We rightly call out artificial content when we spot fake sweater photos or digital knitting charts. We know that handmade is sacred, and we guard the integrity of our work with everything we have. We can notice straight off the bat those shoddy-looking, blurred stitches and nonsensical seams, but when it comes to text and copy? Barely anyone talks about the glaring problem with AI-generated text. It’s a wall of silence, or people thinking that it’s OK just because it isn’t an “image”.

People love to draw a line between fake images and generated captions, as if words do not carry the exact same weight of authenticity, but it is all cut from the same cloth. If a creator cannot be bothered to write their own thoughts, it makes it awfully hard to care about what they are making. Modern data shows just how damaging this shortcut is. A recent consumer trust study reveals that heavy AI use causes forty percent of people to trust a favourite brand less, while separate industry figures show that roughly one-third of buyers feel AI marketing actively erodes their confidence. When you swap your voice for a machine, people notice and step back, so why would the crafting and art community be any different?

Text Slop Is Still Slop

Trying to brush it off with “I only use AI for captions” simply does not wash and neither does calling people “ableist” for calling out those who do so.

It is an important conversation to open up, because critiques of AI tools can sometimes overlook how vital writing assistance is for disabled, neurodivergent, or chronically ill creators. However, there is a clear distinction between using technology as an accessibility aid and outsourcing your entire identity to an LLM. Assistive tools like dictation software or spell-checkers simply help an individual articulate their own lived thoughts and creative process, whereas corporate text generation replaces a person’s unique perspective with sterile, mass-produced marketing copy. True accessibility in our community means making space for real, human communication, typos and all, rather than replacing everyone’s natural voice with uniform machine output.

Claiming you only use a slop churner for text does not give you a free pass. It makes you just as guilty of spitting out digital sludge as anyone else on the timeline. Nearly half of all content creators and marketers openly admit that using AI makes their output faster, but it also makes it noticeably more average, feeding directly into the digital sludge cycle. If a creator is willing to outsource their actual voice to an algorithm, it is only natural for people to assume they are cutting corners elsewhere too. Personally, I have often wanted to follow a new designer or crafters because I genuinely adore their feed, but been totally put off doing so after reading their clearly AI-generated captions.

Text slop is still slop, even if it is just words on a screen.

The Tragic Loss of Natural Language

One of the worst parts of this algorithmic takeover is what it is doing to people who genuinely love to write. For language professionals and writers who adore descriptive language, phrases like “cosy” or “one stitch at a time” used to be natural, heartfelt ways to describe our craft. Personally, I overuse the term “cosy” as it describes perfectly the vibe I want in my life all the time, often to obsessive, weirdo levels. It describes my home, my family, my ideal evening, and, my work as a designer and the feeling I want to give to everyone who works from my patterns and tutorials.

Now? Well, those very words have been hijacked by text generators to the point where genuine writers feel forced to double-check their own articles and captions. We are constantly second-guessing words we have used for years just because we are terrified that people will assume a machine wrote them for us. It’s a really creepy, soul-destroying feeling. I often find myself scanning my writing and changing things, always thinking in the back of my mind that someone might call me out and say that my articles are AI-generated because I have used a couple of potentially slop-sounding phrases. Not a nice feeling.

Also, as someone who works as an English teacher and cares deeply about authentic expression, that is genuinely heartbreaking. We are letting algorithms rob us of our own vocabulary, even when our work is entirely human-made and we would never touch generative AI.

When Classic Crafting Vocabulary Gets Hijacked

It feels insulting that words built on decades of traditional crafting culture are now treated with suspicion. When a genuine maker talks about a winter project being cosy, they mean it. When they talk about working through a complex cable chart step by step, it reflects lived experience and problems they may have encountered during that process and how they can help you overcome it. When I write patterns and add the “Tips” section, those tips come from my brain, my memory of what might be tricky for people to manage during their project and a possible solution that worked for me so, of course, it can then help you. AI has no idea about that. It has no idea about anything.

Helping Our Community Identify the Dangers of Text Slop

If we want to protect the creative spaces we love, we have to start educating people about why automated text is genuinely dangerous. Research highlights that seventy-three percent of consumers are concerned about the prevalence of AI-generated content online, with twenty-seven percent stating they would actively block or unfollow an account upon discovering it.

To help shift the tide within our own community, we need to take a few practical steps:

Expose the Formula: Point out the recurring structural patterns, predictable hooks like “and honestly?”, and repetitive buzzwords that expose automated text. Show peers how algorithms flatten unique personal voices into identical templates.
Connect Text Integrity to Craft Integrity: Explain to fellow makers that outsourcing captions makes audiences question the authenticity of physical work. If a creator takes shortcuts with their writing, followers naturally wonder if they also shortcut pattern testing or design accuracy. It is the reddest of red flags.
Normalize Human Imperfection: Share unpolished notes, rough drafts, and authentic behind-the-scenes creative struggles. Demonstrating the reality of human writing encourages others to value their real voice over sterile perfection. And who wants sterile perfection?

I also want to be realistic, though. All that is very nice, but we also need to accept the uncomfortable fact that a lot of people actually don’t want to stop using AI. Humans – I believe – are inherently lazy creatures, and one of the main reasons why Generative AI is so popular is because it cuts corners for us. Most people grab any chance to make their lives quicker, easier, more streamlined and more “efficient”, even if that means losing their voice and even if it means a huge chunk of the stuff you’re generating being incorrect and actually fed back into that system. I have lost count of the amount of times I have – stupidly – tried to convince AI-slop-loving people on social media that what they’re doing is wrong, but to no avail.

At best you get “Yeah, but it helps me save time and gives me more time to crochet” (she got called out and blocked) and at worst you get spitefuless and people accusing you of getting “left behind”. Girl, leave me behind. If not feeding the sludge machine makes me old-fashioned and boring, I’m all for it. You go ahead and destroy the planet and your creative skills whilst the rest of us sit here.

Where Has the Human Connection Gone?

Crafting has always been built on real connection and honest chat. I have made so many beautiful friends and wonderful connections with fellow crafters over the years, and a lot of the time a DM session started because their post captions were funny, honest, real, bitchy, ridiculous, and our now close friendships began there. We follow makers for their personality, their process, and their genuine human perspective, warts and all.

When your authentic voice completely vanishes from your grid, replaced by robotic cringe that no human would ever say out loud, why on earth should anyone bother following you? We know how you actually speak. When that real voice goes missing, it makes us wonder why we stuck around in the first place. I know that this isn’t you. People pay attention and notice more than you think. It’s disrespectful, and I want to be frank here – you might devalue yourself and your work enough to want to outsource it to ChatGPT or whatever nasty LLM you use, but the people who follow you and have standards don’t want to devalue themselves by supporting makers who do that. Get to f**k, as they say in my homeland.

It boils down to this. I am fortunate to know so many brilliant designers and makers who refuse to touch generative AI in any part of their work, and their feeds are a breath of fresh air, but too often I spot AI-generated waffle a mile off on accounts I would otherwise love to support, and I simply cannot hit that follow button. I hope you’re the same.

Over to you!

How do you feel about AI captions in crafting? Is it as bad as images in your opinion, or should people who use it get given a free pass? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to check out my knitting and crochet pattern databases to check out some free, real, human-made content!

Happy crafting,