The ordinariness of evil
- ID: 5b2957a8
- 原文链接: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/19/banaility/
- 分类: industry
- 来源类型: article
- 标签: ai-criticism, criti-hype, ai-policy, regulation
- 质量评分: 4/5
- 抓取时间: 2026-08-20T00:00:00+08:00 (fetched via opencli)
中文导读
Cory Doctorow 用 Lee Vinsel 的 criti-hype 概念命名当下主流 AI 批评的姿态：把 Altman 的营销话术原样复读再补一句“(这很糟)”。四个例子：“AI 安全”叙事把工程烂归因于模型太强、反而给 con-man 镀上 super-villain 光环；“有产/无产”二元论让 AI 公司拿到基础设施级政府庇护；“AI 抢工作”恐惧让雇主把 ChatGPT 当裁员合理化工具；“末日”叙事把赌注装帧成文明级 commitment。他的反向建议：把 AI 当 word processor 一样的 normal tech 做 cost/benefit 评估。
为什么值得关注
criti-hype：最流行的 AI 批评其实是把 Altman 的营销复读一遍再加“(这很糟)”
Summary (English)
Cory Doctorow borrows Lee Vinsel's criti-hype to name the dominant posture of AI criticism: repeating Altman's marketing verbatim and appending '(and that's bad)'. Four examples: the AI-safety frame attributes shoddy engineering to model superpower and gilds a con-man with a super-villain aura; the haves/have-nots binary earns AI firms infrastructure-grade government protection; job-loss fears let employers rationalize layoffs with ChatGPT; doom framing dresses the bet up as a civilizational commitment. His counter: treat AI as normal tech - a word processor plus search - and evaluate costs and benefits accordingly.
图片
Excerpt
Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
发布时间: June 4, 2023
原文链接: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/19/banaility/
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/19/banaility/
Today's links
- The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad).
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable.
- Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
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- Colophon: All the rest.
- * *
The ordinariness of evil (permalink)
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.
It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this _terrible_ potential is also a public boast about its _potential_, period.
That's very, very important, because all AI really has is _potential_. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, _if_ you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and _if_ you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI _does_ produce value, that value is comparable to a _plug-in_, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.
That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a _normal_ technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:
Normal technologies are _fine_. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole
The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to _become_ the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI _cannot_ do:
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended
This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that _soon_, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.
_That's_ why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's _destructive_ potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless _potential_. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.
AI _does_ have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again
AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):
https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/
AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:
https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/
_This_ is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:
Just as importantly: we have to _stop_ amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because _this helps them raise more money_ and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will _not_ get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.
We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"
Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as _exceptional_. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.
Treating AI as unexceptional is the _best_ way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally _evil_. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a _basilisk_. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that _induces_ vulnerability, it's something that _triggers_ vulnerability:
[https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/missi
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