AI is, and has never been anything but, a scam. If you don’t believe that yet, you will. The con is heading toward fruition.

The “con” in “con artist” is short for “confidence.” A con artist tries to win someone’s confidence, and if that’s achieved, the con artist closes the trap and steals from the person targeted.

A successful con job unfolds in stages as the con artist builds a false sense of credibility. But if that carefully constructed sense of credibility starts to break down, the con artist will bail out of the scam.

What we’ve been seeing in AI is the unfolding of a confidence game. The con has moved through several stages and toward a new stage. Let’s recap.

Stage 1

For a year or two, the message from the AI corporations was to hype up AI as transformative. “AI will replace you; AI will be smarter than you and will take your jobs.” The corporate media responded with a flurry of stories about how AI will transform work and life and “analysis” about who is most likely to be laid off and replaced by AI. The goal was to get people to believe that AI was inevitable and that everyone better start adopting AI or get left behind.

AI Propaganda

It’s silly season

Stage 2

The AI corporations then leveraged the media hype to raise gobs and gobs of money from venture capitalists and from each other. Significant amounts of the money were shell games of circular financing among the corporations involved in AI to inflate the corporations’ valuations. The corporate media added to the hype with stories about how valuable these AI corporations now were and how much value AI activity was adding to the economy, and, oh yeah, AI will take your jobs and you better start adopting AI or get left behind.

Stage 3

Armed with an air of inevitability and gobs of capital, the AI corporations claimed they needed to build data centers to house this inevitable transformative technology. Actually not just data centers, MEGA data centers bigger and more resource hungry than Amazon warehouses. State governments needed to give the AI corporations tax incentives to build the mega data centers they would build anyway. Local governments needed to step aside and allow the AI corporations to take whatever land, power, and water they wanted to build the mega data centers. The fates of people and communities near the mega data centers were irrelevant. They needed to not get in the way of the inevitable AI.

Stage 4

Then, there was a controlled leak to the corporate media that an OpenAI agent broke out of its development sandbox and hacked the Web site of Hugging Face. The corporate media eagerly jumped on the story (“good boys”) and spun it as “OMG, AI is so powerful! It lives, it thinks, it goes rogue” like a computer bot was a wild animal. The reality, as the computer experts tell us, was that OpenAI agent didn’t “break out of its sandbox.” It was programmed to leave through the door left open for it, it went where it was told to go, and it did what it was told to do. The agent then exploited the open door in Hugging Face that any human hacker could have easily exploited. The realities didn’t stop the AI corporations and the corporate media from hyping the story of the all-powerful AI that we must understand is inevitable and must adopt or get left behind.

Stage 5

After letting the anxiety over the Hugging Face incident marinate for a few weeks, the AI corporations’ message has shifted to “Um, we should agree to slow down AI development.” Sam Altman says the AI industry wants to slow down or “we could lose control.” The subtext is “only the AI corporations can protect us.” Never mind that the AI corporations are the actual threat.

AI is entering late-scam capitalism because the con is set up. Altman says he and his fellow confidence men don’t want to “lose control.” The corporate media assumes he means lose control of the all-powerful AI. Wrong.

That which the AI corporations are losing control of is the narrative they’ve worked so diligently to stage. Experts are talking more about how little AI is actually capable of achieving, and businesses are admitting that adopting AI has not improved efficiency or productivity. Citizens are increasingly standing up to oppose the mega data centers that are harming people and communities. Local and state governments are waking up to the reality that they’ve been conned.

The timing of AI leaders’ calls for a slowdown is too convenient to ignore

Top AI leaders demonstrated remarkable timing in their decision to address safety concerns as the industry faces…

finance.yahoo.com

The AI project is a con, a scam. When a carefully constructed sense of credibility starts to break down, the con artists will bail out of the scam. If the AI corporations “slow down,” it will be either to regroup or to cash out and get out of town with the money.

What happens next? We shall see.

* In truth, AI is a product more of corporatism than of capitalism, but that’s a separate discussion.

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A term bandied about lately is “toxic masculinity.” The basic idea is obvious — that some men are so fixated on demonstrating how “manly” they are that they harm themselves and others in the process. I tend to frown on the use of labels, and like most labels, “toxic masculinity” points to something real and serious, but does not illuminate what lies beneath the surface.

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