muckrAIkers

The Mythical AI Bear

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This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that typifies the genre, they examine how legitimate concerns about code quality, labor displacement, intellectual property, and the erosion of craft get flattened into caricature. Plus: Sam Altman writes ten paragraphs about how unbothered he is by an ad.

Chapters

  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (00:30) - Altman's Super Bowl Meltdown
  • (03:11) - What is "The Bear"?
  • (06:41) - But You Have No Idea What The Code Is
  • (15:44) - But The Craft, But The Mediocrity, But It'll Never Be AGI
  • (24:43) - But They Take Our Jobs & But The Plagiarism
  • (31:21) - Stochastic Parrots & Mythical Bears
  • (42:34) - Outro

    • Critical Links
    Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm.
    • Big Think article - The rise of AI denialism
    • Fly.io blogpost - My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
    • antirez blogpost - Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
    • Emily Bender blogpost - Resistance Isn't Denialism
    • Cory Doctorow blogpost - Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
    • Washington Post article - The AI boom is so huge it's causing shortages everywhere else
    • Business Insider article - Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says AI is 'obviously a bubble'
    • Ipsos survey - Google / Ipsos Multi-Country AI Survey 2026
    • Understanding AI Substack post - AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong
    ...more
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    muckrAIkersBy Jacob Haimes and Igor Krawczuk