Tech website Gizmodo weighs in on how "AI executives have painted themselves into a corner" with their own AI hype [View all]
Last edited Sat Apr 18, 2026, 03:13 PM - Edit history (1)
Gizmodo's article:
The AI Doomers Who Are Playing With Fire
https://gizmodo.com/the-ai-doomers-who-are-playing-with-fire-2000747606
Another important piece on how AI execs wanting to blame anyone critical of AI for the (fortunately) failed attacks at Sam Altman's house recently are ignoring all they've done themselves, for years, to create this situation.
The attacks themselves deserve to be condemned. I made that point when I posted about this - https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221172550 - and later about what AI critic Brian Merchant wrote - https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221174978 - and about a piece on this in the New Yorker: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221177497 .
Violence is not the solution. But the AI bros are themselves responsible not just for making AI a great threat to society, but for telling us - again and again and again - how great a threat it is.
They were mostly doing so as hype to sell it, of course - and as Gizmodo points out. But they want people to believe that hype.
Gizmodo quotes Chris Lehane - a one-time Democratic operative who became a shill and operative for corporations, including the crypto and AI industry - who was interviewed by the San Francisco Standard this past week. Lehane is now Chief Global Affairs Officer at OpenAI.
Lehane isn't stupid, so he knows that's simplistic bullshit. He isn't suffering from amnesia or dementia, so he knows the "very, very negative and dark view" of what could happen with AI has been mostly AI bros using the media to try to hype the importance of the products they're selling.
But he's lying now because he doesn't want his employers, clients and pals blamed for their own rhetoric. He doesn't want their dishonest hype examined too closely.
Gizmodo offers a good analysis of what the AI bros have been doing and why they shouldn't be trusted (including Elon Musk's babbling about a future with AI that will bring us universal abundance and universal high income via government checks).
I hope you'll read this Gizmodo article in its entirety. A few excerpts:
Think about it in any other context. Someone says that they’ve built a weapon that could go rogue and literally end life on planet Earth. Does the federal government just act like the only fix is light regulations that tinker around the edges? Or do the executives at that company get rounded up and tossed in jail for making terrorist threats?
-snip-
Whatever happens, it feels like the AI executives have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve told everyone their product has the potential to destroy everything. They were the doomers, if we want to call it that, at least when it was convenient. And now we seem to be entering a different era where the same people who told us about the dangers of AI try to get us to look exclusively at what they claim are enormous benefits for society; so far, with little to show.
It’s unclear how you put that doomer genie back in the bottle.
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