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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
Should they be? No. But that's a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn't change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
I think the comparison is acceptable with maybe a terminology clarification in the footnotes, because "AI" is the false term under which this current bullshit is being marketed.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI are so uneducated that they will probably neither understand the distinction to legitimate AI research, nor bother to read footnotes.
That's exactly the thing. Those who understand such a footnote don't need it, and those who might learn more from it are unlikely to understand it. The above commenters are simply being pedantic.
Pedantic or AI bros ;) I find this new generation of gullible tech users scary. Recently saw someone voice their disappointment with Codeberg's anto-vibecoding stance, and the person was describing themselves as "tech optimist", which I believe is a great way to self-out as being extremely gullible.
What does that mean? Transformers aren't AI? What? I don't think you understand this as much as you think you do.
Think all you want, statistical text prediction has nothing to do with AI. The "intelligent" algorithms are all in the pre- and postprocessing steps that make the output sound good enough to fool gullible people into assumong intelligence.
Is equating chatbots with AI any different than equating a bunch of if/else statements with AI? Is any of this AI considering none of it involves actual intelligence or informed decision making?
Sure AI is more than LLMs, but those are the face of it in the public's eye and is what's driving these trillion dollar corporate valuations, which then lead to every company on earth declaring that their product is "AI!"
What's lost? I can't think of anything.
Words are meant to convey meaning, and I bet you would lose a lot of non-technical people if you tried to explain the intricacies of what makes large language models worse than content recommendation systems, and doing this would be redundant for technical users.
So Corey can safely use the two words interchangeably and communicate with technical and non-technical alike.
As a non-techie: websites are the internet.
Like, I conceptualize the internet as basically just a giant shared network, but the point of it is the websites (for me).
I apologize to anyone I may have just gravely offended.
lol
I don't know how "non-techie" you are, but a good example is online games. When you're playing Fortnite, Roblox, World of Warcraft, etc you're not going to a web page, but you're on the internet.
I straight up almost called it a series of tubes, lol.
Yeah, that’s probably why I do think of it as a shared network, I just don’t play online games, so that’s not what I associate with the internet.
There are other examples but I take your point.
then he has completely failed to understand the concepts for people using him an a information proxy
isnt he supposed to help inform? or is he just an echo chamber to the lowest-common-loudmouth?
Stepping up and doing it better is free.
To busy using AI at work to make everything easier for my coworkers and earn another raise
Good luck when they stop subsidizing the tokens 👍
I also can’t imagine bragging about being so busy doing work for the hope of a raise that I didn’t have time to pursue things I felt strongly about. Recenter your priorities.
I already got two raises in the past 18 months and it brings me joy to see things happening at work more efficiently, all on 20$ claude subscription, that's fine ill pay $100/mo for the same stuff in a year, easily worth it (my employer pays it anyway)
Sorry if it replaced your only marketable skill or something, and we absolutely should have universal basic income for these kinds of cases!