Ed Zitron Is Not an A.I. Skeptic

Kelsey Piper, the Argument: At some point, pretending that how people use AI is a complete mystery is just lying to your audience. And at some point, [Ed] Zitron’s “layers of skepticism” attitude — where he is skeptical that AI is a thing at all, that it has any uses, that those uses provide any economic value, that the revenue numbers are real, that adoption is a fad, that training costs are a meaningful R&D expense, that the capital build-out is going to happen at all, that the market could sustain the capital build-out if it happened — leaves one buried in too many impossibility assertions to actually sort them by plausibility. It is radical skepticism, ultimately arriving at “perhaps nothing we see is real,” rather than principled skepticism about the relatively weakest links in the companies’ case for investment. My main problem with this piece is that it acknowledge Zitron’s own framing as an A.I. skeptic when he is not one. A skeptic is someone who asks good-faith questions and…