#edward zitron

[1000rh]

When you see everything as an outcome — an outcome you may or may not understand, and definitely don’t understand the process behind, let alone care about — you kind of already see your workers as LLMs. 

– Edward Zitron, “The Case Against Generative AI” (2025) Link

[yhancik]

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble

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I hate the waste, the loss, the destruction, the theft, the damage to our planet and the sheer excitement that some executives and writers have that workers may be replaced by AI — and the bald-faced fucking lie that it’s happening, and that generative AI is capable of doing so. (...)

I am worried because despite all of these obvious, brutal and near-unfixable problems, everybody is walking around acting like things are going great with AI. The New York Times claims everybody is using AI for everything — a blatant lie, one that exists to prop up an industry that has categorically failed to deliver the innovations or returns that it promised, yet still receives glowing press from a tech and business media that refuses to look outside and see that the sky is red and frogs are landing everywhere. Other than the frog thing, I'm not even being dramatic. Everywhere you look in the AI trade, things get worse — no revenue, billions being burned, no moat, no infrastructure play, no comparables in history other than the dot com bubble and WeWork, and a series of flagrant lies spouted by the powerful and members of the press that are afraid of moving against market consensus. (...)

I hate that so many people will see their retirements wrecked, and that so many people intentionally or accidentally helped steer the economy in this reckless, needless and wasteful direction, all because big tech didn’t have a new way to show quarterly growth. I hate that so many people have lost their jobs because companies are spending the equivalent of the entire GDP of some European countries on data centers and GPUs that won’t actually deliver any value.  But my purpose here is to explain to you, no matter your background or interests or creed or whatever way you found my work, why it happened. As you watch this collapse, I want you to tell your friends about why — the people responsible and the decisions they made — and make sure it’s clear that there are people responsible. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Andy Jassy have overseen a needless, wasteful and destructive economic force that will harm our economy and the tech industry writ large, and when this is over, they must be held accountable. And remember that you, as a regular person, can understand all of this. These people want you to believe this is black magic, that you are wrong to worry about the billions wasted or question the usefulness of these tools. You are smarter than they reckon and stronger than they know, and a better future is one where you recognize this, and realize that power and money doesn’t make a man righteous, right, or smart.

[landunderthewave]

Even copying another style requires a soul, and the most soulless and depressing copies are those done by someone without their own kind of magic or voice. And I believe there are an alarming amount of people with so little soul, so little being, and so little personality behind their work that chatGPT does seem magical because — just like them — it doesn't have any of its own ideas.

Edward Zitron explores why impersonating a dead comedian and releasing a new show for them and using chatGPT to make "art" more broadly feels hollow and off-putting.

[1000rh]

It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.

– Edward Zitron, "Never Forgive Them" (2024) Link

[1000rh]

We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.

– Edward Zitron, "What We're Fighting For" (2025) Link

[1000rh]

You see, optimism is easy. All you have to do is say "I trust these people to do the thing they'll do" and choose to take a "cautiously optimistic" (to use Roose's terminology) view on whatever it is that's put in front of you. Optimism allows you to think exactly as hard as you'd like to, using that big, fancy brain of yours to make up superficially intellectually-backed rationalizations about why something is the future, and because you're writing at a big media outlet, you can just say whatever and people will believe you because you're ostensibly someone who knows what they're talking about.

– Edward Zitron, "The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism" (2025) Link

[landunderthewave]

Have We Reached Peak AI?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a s

"It's easy to think that tasks like data-entry, or "boring" work can be easily-automated, and when you use ChatGPT, you can almost kind-of-sort-of see how that might happen, even if ChatGPT really can't do these things, all because ChatGPT was, at launch, able to do impressions of things that almost looked useful. [...] I am [...] saying that if AI was actually capable of replacing the outputs of human beings — even if it was anywhere near doing so — any number of massive, scurrilous firms would be doing so at scale, and planning to do so more as models improved. Unless, of course, it just wasn't possible. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable of doing much more than what we're seeing today, and what if there's no clear timeline when it'll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been built, goosed by a compliant media ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?

Every single time I've read about the "amazing" things that artificial intelligence can do, I see somebody attempting to add fuel to a fire that's close to going out."

[1000rh]

In short, reality can fucking suck, but a true skeptic learns to live in it.

– Edward Zitron, "The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism" (2025) Link