When will you stop listening to them?

Alternative title: “When will you stop advertising for them?’’

Politicians and Big Tech companies make announcements. This is fine, it is what they do, and it is important to communicate to citizens and customers what is going on on the inside and what is coming. Announcements are, however, advertisements, and the claims made in them are proven again and again to be entirely false, stated for the purpose of optics and publicity.

Remember that time when Trump said that the war was almost over and that they were close to a deal? I do! SEVERAL TIMES and for SEVERAL WARS. He said this for Russia/Ukraine, he said this for Israel/Palestine, he said it for Israel+US/Iran (in two separate wars), he said it for Israel/Lebanon.

Every time, my friends and collogues became cautiously optimistic. Many of them have families in effected regions, so I cannot blame them for latching on to the news, but these statements by Trump have LITERALLY NEVER been true.

Every time, the stock markets respond, as if Trump’s optics are a good indicator of the financial successes of companies all across the world.

All of the wars mentioned above are still going on. Sometimes the US administration does hash out a quick deal or ceasefire, but these deals never hold for very long.

Remember that time when Google said you could ask their digital assistant to manage you calender? I do! SEVERAL TIMES. This was the promise of google assistant back around 2016. A few years later that said: no but really this time. Now that we have AI, surely the assistant will be able to manage your calendar.

Every single time, tech outlets and enthusiasts proclaimed loudly about how cool this new feature is, as if the feature already exists and as if the tech demo on-stage is not just that: a demo.

Remember when [INSERT AI COMPANY HERE] said [THING ABOUT BOON OR DANGER OF AI]? Yeah you get the format by now. Every singly claim made by AI companies, whether it is a claim about capability, interaction, or danger is nothing but a publicity stunt. The real usefulness of large language models barely changes.

The real danger barely changes. Yet every single time, friends, collogues, journalists and whomever else is repeating their talking points and doing the advertising for them.

No guys really, Anthropic’s latest gizmo “Mythos’’ is is “too dangerous to release’’ because it could “collapse the whole software world as we know it’’. How do I know this? Well they said it of course. And some guy that is payed by them, or some competitor, or some journalist looking for their big break, or a large anti-AI influencer, or a large pro-AI influencer parroted their talking points.

When will we stop listening to these people? When will we stop doing their advertising for them? Why do my daily conversations have ads in them?!

I mentioned in a previous post that I was talking a break from the news cycle[1], though I do occasionally check in. Every time I do, I scroll through the ‘big’ news stories of the past week or month and see all of these optics-announcements dutifully parroted by ‘reputable’ news sources. When you receive them all in a batch like this, you start to see how ridiculous they are, I recommend trying it.

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