AI, Charlatans and Intelligence

The fading irrational exuberance

In his book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Professor Michael Wooldridge says that AI has “always attracted crackpots, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen as well as brilliant scientists,” and much of what is published about AI in the popular press is ill-informed or irrelevant. AI hype is a real phenomenon, driven by fervent optimism and irrational exuberance, with big tech CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman being likened to charlatans and snake oil salesmen, and brilliant scientists like Geoffrey Hinton gone mad in believing nice theories automatically become truth; they have become the high priests of the new AI religion.

Here’s Altman, spewing nonsense right before the unveiling of GPT-5, comparing GPT-5 with its immediate predecessor, GPT-4o: “GPT-4o, maybe it was like talking to a college student,” he said. “With GPT-5 now it’s like talking to an expert — a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything any area you need on demand ... whatever your goals are.” This is just bogus, food for the wilfully stupid to consume!  

Over the last 2000 years of history, we’ve seen variations of this story before. Wooldridge classifies AI’s true story as one of “Fall and Rise,” disappointments and limitations, constantly hitting the wall, and repeating boom and bust cycles.

Things have certainly shaped up to this pattern again: the nonsensical belief that it's a given that AI is marching toward AGI, surpassing human intelligence, or becoming a threat to humanity. It all came to a screeching halt on August 7th, 2025. A day of infamy, the AI leader OpenAI released GPT-5, the long-awaited, over-hyped, promise-filled product that would be just steps away from AGI. But it was a bust! “Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming,” said Gary Marcus, an AI entrepreneur and professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, and a well-known AI critic, who has been warning us for years that the AI narrative is all hype and no substance.

“For nearly three years, I have been saying that the pure scaling of LLMs — adding more data and more parameters — would eventually run out, and that it would fail to solve hallucinations and boneheaded errors and that scaling laws were merely empirical generalizations, rather than physical laws.”

“This myth that motivated a half-trillion-dollar industry is dead! 

Alex Hanna, a technology critic and co-author (with Emily M. Bender of the University of Washington) of the indispensable new book “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.” He says, “AI has hit the wall,” and there is no getting around that. “AI companies are really buoying the American economy right now, and it’s looking very bubble-shaped,” Hanna told the Los Angeles Times on August 20th in an article titled, "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash.” 

The AI hype is exponentially more of a mirage than the dot-com era hype, so stock investors will be in for a painful reckoning. Many public companies announced AI investments and claimed AI capabilities to push their stock prices up, like how the “dot-coms” were promoted in the 1990s to gullible investors. Same story, different era.

But the collateral damage to the global economy is more difficult to quantify. AI’s actual penetration and use in corporations and SMEs seems to be more hype than real happenings. And the hype is fading fast.  

According to The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Aren’t More Workers Using ChatGPT? The author Julia Winn says, Despite the transformative potential of tools like ChatGPT, Only a little over 5% of ChatGPT’s user base pays for plus — a small fraction, suggesting a scarcity of users. 

"The AI Con" is truly indispensable for those who want to keep their heads when everyone else is losing theirs. The explain the big lie about “intelligence,” that AI bots only give the impression of intelligence because most people don’t know what intelligence is, intelligence requires consciousness, so without consciousness, there can be no intelligence.

Machines are not human or biological, so they can’t ever have intelligence. However, AI tech bro promoters have hijacked “intelligence,” and we have acquiesced, allowing them to define intelligence.

Therefore, many have allowed themselves to be sucked up into a story and myth! Particularly gullible investors. 

In April of 2023, Goldman Sachs predicted a $7 trillion increase in global GDP attributed to generative AI and lifting productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over 10 years. But in June 2024, less than a year later, GS changed its tune dramatically because the evolving evidence no longer supported those grandiose predictions, producing its June 2024 Global Macro Research report, Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?

Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research at GS, states, “AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.”

JPMorgan states that OpenAI’s “frontier model innovation” is becoming a “more fragile moat,” and it faces a “window of risks” that is widening each day, including “rising talent and litigation risks, as well as strategic uncertainty related to OpenAI’s unconventional organizational structure.” The bank describes OpenAI’s “window” as “quite opaque,” and suggests that its leader, Sam Altman, might be exposing vulnerabilities and may indeed have no clothes. 

Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu, drawing from his research, The Simple Macroeconomics of AI, adds, “AI might automate only an increase of only about 0.5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade.” While many are lured by promises that AI will rapidly transform everything, the macroeconomic facts tell a different story. 

Professor Emeritus Charles Edward Wilson from Harvard Business School says that “Altman is no genius and has little vision beyond his baseless rhetoric and the billions of dollars from greedy or guileless investors.” 

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum said way back in the 1960s, “Once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away.” Later, he wrote, “What I had not realized,” (Weizenbaum wrote in 1976,) “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” Such delusions produce a “simpleminded view of intelligence.” 

This is fundamentally what has been exploited by tech bro billionaire AI promoters. “Claims around consciousness and sentience are a tactic to sell you on AI,” Bender and Hanna write. But the billions and trillions in profits and power go to a tiny few! The rest of us are presumed suckers. 

From the book The AI Con: 

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, says the authors, is a firm “no!” 

This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.

Don’t fall for it, don’t become one of the wilfully stupid, the suckers and useful idiots, a classic con needs to thrive.