The ruse is afoot.

If there is one lesson to be learned from reading between the lines—and sometimes literally reading the lines—of Cory Doctorow’s latest report and media tour on AI^[1] it is that we are being conned by a marketing machine meant to sell more AI.

That’s how I read it, anyhow.

The pitch: AI is big, scary and powerful—so buy a lot of it, give money to the zookeepers, and they will tame it and make it work for you.

Is it though?

Is it really all that dangerous? Is AI going to take over the world and do all our jobs and enslave all humans for the rest of time?

If there is one lesson I would like to convey from reading the words of this blog is that AI is almost certainly a gimmick.

We’ve given AI a scary name, a monicker that evokes science fiction movies about robots taking over the world, often literally, frequently violently, and never without human consequence… but our AI is actually little more than a resource hungry collection of predictive algorithms. 

We’ve listened to tales of nearly magical feats that AI can accomplish, seemingly acting like a puppet risen up without strings to take over from our jobs and artistic pursuits… but the magic often falls flat when put under scrutiny and the hidden mirrors and secret compartments are revealed.

We’ve given our news feeds over to tales of anthropomorphic experiences and bent out whimsy to the notion that AI is perhaps alive inside the machine… but we’ve failed to understand the gimmick of a machine churning our own humanity in a digital blender to slop it back out at us while our monkey brains see meaning and connection in the slurry of our carefully regurgitated selves.

It’s all a trick to sell more AI. It’s all a ruse to bend corporate boardrooms to spend. It’s the biggest advertising game played upon the world yet, and we’re queued up to believe every word.