the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @dgerard@awful.systems):
Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don’t care if AI doesn’t work.
They really don’t. They’re pot-committed; these dudes aren’t tech pioneers, they’re money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it’s literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it’s not real and they don’t care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.
The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don’t know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it’s total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.
Particularly in the media, it’s all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.
the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism
100% on point. More people must remember that everything we know about large companies’ operations is still completely valid. Leadership doesn’t understand any of the technologies at play, even at a high level- they don’t think in terms of black boxes; they think in black, amorphous miasmas of supposed function or vibes, for short. They are concerned with a few metrics going up or down every quarter. As long as the number goes up, they get paid, the dopamine hits, and everyone stays happy.
The AI miasma (mAIasma? miasmAI?) in particular is near perfect. Other technologies only held a finite amount of potential to be hyped, meaning execs had to keep looking for their next stock price bump. AI is infinitely hypeable since you can promise anything with it, and people will believe you thanks to the smoke and mirrors it procedurally pumps out today.
I have friends who have worked in plenty of large corporations and have experience/understanding of the worthlessness of executive leadership, but they don’t connect that to AI investment and thus don’t see the grift. It’s sometimes exasperating.