"The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.
The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.
They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.
AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs
#AI #GenerativeAI #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #Copyright #IP #MassUnemployment #AIBubble #AIHype
2 Comments
remixtures@tldr.nettime.org · 4 pts · 1y
"AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand."
raganwald@social.bau-ha.us · 2 pts · 1y
@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org “Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.”
Very well put.