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He's also been a vocal advocate about copyright reform and against DRM, and his arguments are coherent and generally well-regarded among the tech crowd. In context, "giving away books for free" is a particularly strong form of putting his money where his mouth is.

Journalists fawn over many people who write for public consumption in some way (book authors, academics, etc.), and who already agree with the point of view the journalists want to promulgate. I don't think Doctorow has particularly more insight about AI than anyone else does, but I also don't think that "insight about AI" is the main reason Ars Technica chose to publish an interview with him - they did this because Ars Technica has an anti-AI editorial position and so they find it useful to promote Doctorow's anti-AI-book. A different group of journalists who did not have an anti-AI editorial position would not have interviewed and published Doctorow, or at least not done so under as friendly circumstances as Ars Technica did.

Is this supposed to be surprising?

Has Doctorow implemented Transfomer from scratch as Lesswrong wants us to atleast pass the smell test?

Hinton is a classic case of an academic making increasingly grandiose statements as they age.