The generative AI con
Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t.
Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble. People like Marc Benioff claiming that “today’s CEOs are the last to manage all-human workforces” are doing so to pump up their stocks rather than build anything approaching a real product. These men are constantly lying as a means of sustaining hype, never actually discussing the products they sell in the year 2025, because then they’d have to say “what if a chatbot, a thing you already have, was more expensive?”
↫ Edward Zitron
Looking at the data and numbers, as Zitron did for this article, the conclusions are sobering and harsh for anyone still pushing the “AI” bubble. Products aren’t really getting any better, they’re not making any money because very few people are paying for them, conversion rates are abysmal, the reported user numbers don’t add up, the projections from “AI” companies are batshit insane, new products they’re releasing are shit, and the media are eating it up because they stand to benefit from the empty promises.
Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it’s fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we’re all fucking morons.
This entire bubble has been inflated by hype, and by outright lies by people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their lies perpetuated by a tech media that’s incapable of writing down what’s happening in front of their faces. Altman and Amodei are raising billions and burning our planet based on the idea that their mediocre cloud software products will somehow wake up and automate our entire lives.
↫ Edward Zitron
In a just world, these 21st century snake oil salesmen would be in prison.