Tag: AI

by James Wallace Harris, 9/4/26

Companies are spending trillions to win the AI race. They believe they will make back their investments and go on to earn trillions. That assumes people are willing to pay for AI. Millions of people are already using AI, hoping to make their fortunes. However, in all cases, for AI to win money, humans have to become economic losers.

This is already causing a backlash. As internet-addicted doomscrollers spend more time and dollars, they are encountering more AI content. Most consider this content AI slop.

Whether you consume news, fiction, music, video, advice, education, philosophy, religion, or even porn, do you really want that content created by AIs?

Yesterday I found a wonderful video of a kitten running in slow motion through the grass. I liked it so much I shared it on Facebook. Then the algorithm showed me several more like it. I thought the first one was real. But after seeing the others, I figured they were AI-created. I was disappointed. Artificial kitten cuteness felt like a con.

I used to enjoy videos of two species of wild animals playing together. Thinking that animals don’t always eat one another was very uplifting. But then these videos became a trend. Now I don’t know if wild animals actually play together. The AI videos make me doubt all animal videos.

The new trend on Facebook and Instagram is AI-generated sexy women. I think real women began the trend on those sites, offering teasers to get guys to find them on OnlyFans. But then real women were replaced by AI women directing users to porn sites. I didn’t follow those links, but I wondered if porn is being replaced by AI too. Will greedy folks with AIs put real humans out of sex work?

My gut reaction is to quit social media. If it’s going to be overrun by greedy people trying to make a buck using AIs, I want to walk away.

I’m already seeing fans of music and books protest AI content. There are young protestors on YouTube advising people to return to the analog world. And one piece of advice is interesting. Buy old stuff. That’s because the only way to know if content was created by AI is to buy content created before AI.

There’s been a flood of websites, YouTube channels, games, novels, albums, software, and other creative content produced in the last year simply because AI lets almost anyone create impressive results.

And some of the AI-generated art is impressive. I love fiction and music. What if AI creates novels and songs I love more than the books and albums I loved over my lifetime?

Doesn’t The Catcher in the Rye move me because J. D. Salinger wrote it? I just read a biography of Salinger, and I love his stories even more. Isn’t On the Road great because Jack Kerouac lived it? Aren’t the songs on Highway 61 Revisited meaningful because Bob Dylan composed the music and lyrics?

What if ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini produced an album that impressed me more than Blonde on Blonde? Is it brilliant because of a machine’s insight?

People who want to make money using AI only want to make money. They aren’t struggling to be creative themselves. As everyone discovers this, I think their greed will destroy AI.

I’m reading How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker. It’s a fantastic book. Stanford is where kids who want to become billionaires go to college. In one of Baker’s classes, the students were asked to raise their hands if they were concerned with ethics when planning the inventions that could make them rich. Only Baker raised his hand.

The people and corporations spending trillions on AI don’t worry about ethics either. Baker’s book shows that so many of these tech bros who claim to love science and technology are really seeking money and power. I got into computers because I loved computers. I assumed a book about the brightest kids going to Stanford would be about kids who loved computers too. But what they really love is money.

This new generation of greed seems inspired not by technology but by billionaires. There are genuine reasons to create AIs, but greed isn’t one of them. It’s like the gold fever of 1849.

For the companies spending trillions on AI to make the money they desire, tens of millions of ordinary people have to become poor. AI might produce another 1,000 billionaires, but it will also create tens of millions of unemployed. Do we really want to back that kind of greed?

I assume most people will say no, and the AI industry will collapse.

But I could be wrong.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, 7/12/26

Rebecca Jennings, writing for the Intelligencer at New York Magazine, tells about how Zuhair Lakhani has created an army of AI tech influencers to promote your online product. This really bums me out. I knew that companies paid people to promote their products through fake reviews, social media testimonials, and endless scams. But the idea of armies of AI-generated agents putting all those desperate humans dreaming of making a quick buck out of work is even more depressing.

Grifters are scummy, but AI grifters are enough to make me go analog.

Using AI to automate the worst of being online is a bridge too far for me. Humans should create AI buyers to pretend to buy from all the AI sellers.

In October, Lakhani announced Doublespeed and claimed it was the only venture-capital-backed bot farm in America when he received an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. “Because why let Russia and China have all the fun?” Lakhani asks in his launch video, in which he peels a digital mask off a pretty young woman’s face to reveal his own, sitting in front of a green-lit stack of phones, a cyberpunk set for an explicitly bleak vision. “Never pay a human again,” reads Doublespeed’s website, which advertises the ability to create AI personas on TikTok like a 62-year-old mother in Phoenix or a Gen-Z skater in Atlanta who will then post about your product. The investment was part of a16z’s three-month Speedrun accelerator program, in which young founders with start-up ideas can receive investments up to $1 million from the firm. Peers included “the world’s first AI-powered credit card,” the “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” and a “Bible-based AI buddy,” which together formed what the tech publication 404 Media called an “AI-generated hell on earth.”

There is so much about the internet I love, but enshitafication is happening faster than I can try to stay cheerful and positive.

I also love watching YouTube, but AI is ruining it, too. I love learning from little documentaries, but it drives me bonkers when supposedly historical “facts” are illustrated with obviously fake photos. I know much of YouTube is created by lone creators, who don’t have the resources of professional documentary makers. But if you don’t have actual photos or videos that match your subject, please don’t generate AI slop. It just makes me cringe.

And I’m so tired of all the natural healthcare testimonials on Facebook and Instagram. If there were easy cures for all those ills, those ills wouldn’t exist.

This is one area where AI is helpful. I’ve found that if you take any claim for a natural remedy and give it to an AI, it will debunk it or explain why the claim has limited positive effects.

The internet is being ruined by greed, hate, delusion, lies, and people trying to validate their personal beliefs by brainwashing others to believe the way they do. It’s all grifting.

AI makes it much too easy for people to become grifters.

Is there any way to fix the internet? I’ve wondered if we should start over with another internet where every user has to be validated with something like a RealID. Leave the old internet in place for people who like to hang out on the dark web and be anonymous, but create another web where every packet has a validated user.

What would the Internet be like if every IP address had a validated user ID attached to it?

For now, I’m just going to start avoiding anything that smells fake, even if it looks fun. If the Internet continues to enshitify, then I’ll go back to the analog world.

JWH