The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.

AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.