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AI Firms Sold Their Souls to Steal Yours
A new story with an old plot
8 min readJun 20, 2024
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I. Sins and surveillance
Did you know you can map how artificial intelligence companies do things into the seven deadly sins? Look:
- Pride: “No one but us knows how to bring prosperity and abundance to the world. We’ll do that with a weapon of mass distraction and control.”
- Greed: “Let me tell you a tale about machine superintelligence while revenue doubles and profits soar with this thing that pollutes the commons.”
- Lust: “We monetized sex with PornHub; dating with Tinder; and love and loneliness with Girlfriends, Inc. Tell her your secret desires.”
- Envy: “We want to be an anomalously unregulated space, like social media, to collect those convos (unless you turn it off) and exploit factory workers.”
- Gluttony: “We need to feed the entire public internet — tons of data created by you — into these huge AI models so they learn to almost do basic math.”
- Wrath: “If you try to stop us we’ll lobby your entire world, buy press outlets’ loyalty, appoint NSA bosses, and convince your boss to replace you.”