Adam Conover sums up the state of AI.

I agree with him, mostly. What all the AI hype is about is finding a way to sneakily glean the products of human intelligence from their babbling on the internet, scrape it up into a goulash without paying any people for it, and use it as a marketing tool — a bad marketing tool. Tell me, does anyone seriously believe that claiming there’s “AI” in your search engine is a great selling point? People are starting to catch on that it’s all annoying nonsense. It’s “the algorithm,” that excuse marketers were using previously to justify unwanted behind-the-scenes rules on Twitter or Facebook that they claimed were there to increase the likelihood you would see stuff you wanted to see, but was actually an excuse to make sure you got served up lots of ads and spam.

The only advantage to AI is that it does cut out direct human intervention and gives the companies the means to circumvent paying authors and artists, so it might be cheaper. For now. Until the companies kill off their competition and starts gouging customers again, as they inevitably will.

Behind the AI facade, of course, is the real villain of the story, capitalism. Skynet isn’t going to kill us all, we’re instead going to be drowned in a glurge of computer-generated bullshit that will temporarily bring great profit to the techbros of silicon valley, all the Elon Musks of the world.