Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest product will avail. Zuck seems to love dressing up his thought bubbles in Times New Roman for the purposes of LARPing intellect, which I find funny and tragic.
I take an interest in this genre of bad copy not only because of the failure of journalists to report on its inanity, bullshit, and empty promises. I take an interest in it also because I’m writing a book on the relationship between the tech industry and the discipline of history: in particular how the stagist, teleological framing of the past that one finds in Dad History books (you know what I’m talking about: ones with titles like, How Thomas Edison Made the Modern World, or The Swerve) has served the argument that the next “stage” in human development will be led by a given technology invented by or pushed to the extreme of its potential by singular Great Men, in this case, “AI” in all its weird bastard forms. Bad history is the basis for the vision of the future being written by tech CEOS to sell their products.
Anyway, every time I read one of these very unserious sequences of predictable PR, I mentally annotate the nonsense, since journalists routinely fail to do it for all of us, which should be their job. But I had an hour to spare and a big cup of coffee, so, to exorcise this from my system, herewith: How to Read an “AI” Press Release. The title is deliberately ambiguous. Was this digested and regurgitated by a LLM from the massive cache of such press releases disguised as the Deep Thoughts of Visionary Bros? Who can tell? Original text that I’ve annotated is here.
