In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”

Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.

In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.

It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.

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Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.

All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)

After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.

Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.

Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.

The post Billionaires love Trump’s AI rebrand appeared first on Salon.com.

A few years ago, an experimental McDonald’s drive-thru system became convinced that two customers needed an almost ceremonial quantity of chicken McNuggets. As a video of the exchange showed, the number kept climbing: 240, 250, 260. The customers shouted for it to stop. The machine, unmoved, continued adding nuggets.

The clip went viral, in part because the mistake was so specifically inhuman. Someone wearing a headset might mishear an order for 26 nuggets. But one imagines that, somewhere between the second and third hundred, a person would pause to ask, “You sure you want 260 nuggets, hon?” The machine had no such reservations.

McDonald’s eventually ended that IBM pilot in 2024, after testing automated order-taking at more than 100 restaurants. Now, it’s trying again.

The company’s new voice assistant, Archy, is part of its Google-powered ArchIQ system and can take drive-thru orders in English and Spanish. McDonald’s says its early tests have topped 90% accuracy, with plans to expand the technology as part of a sweeping modernization initiative. The pitch is familiar: Faster service, fewer mistakes and less repetitive work for employees, who will theoretically be freed to concentrate on something more important.

Hospitality.

But another chicken chain is drawing a line. Chick-fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy recently told CNBC that his company has no plans to replace drive-thru order takers with AI, even as it explores ways to use the technology elsewhere. The reason, he explained, is that the chain wants its hospitality to remain “human to human.”

At first glance, this sounds like a disagreement over whether a computer can be trusted to hear “no onions” rather than “more onions.” But underneath that technical question is a more consequential one: Which parts of hospitality do restaurants think are automatable — and which are worth keeping human?

There is, of course, a genuine appeal to frictionlessness.

Sometimes you’re tired, antisocial or running spectacularly late. Sometimes you want to make a substitution to an order without worrying whether it will get lost between the person wearing the headset and the person assembling your food. Sometimes you just want to tell a box that you need fries and trust that fries will appear.

I understand this instinct completely. I’ve walked into plenty of busy restaurants where the prevailing atmosphere suggested human error was the expectation rather than the exception, and a kiosk felt like a little gift.

Nor is there anything inherently noble about making employees spend eight hours deciphering orders shouted through crackling speakers while the ice-cream machine is down and a small diplomatic crisis is unfolding in the PlayPlace. Taking orders is part of the job, certainly; trying to do it while the rest of the restaurant threatens to unravel is another matter.

The optimistic version of AI-assisted service makes some sense: Let the machine handle routine tasks. Give employees more time to solve problems, help customers and perhaps make their shifts a little less frantic.

The less optimistic version is that companies will realize they can run the same restaurant with fewer people.

McDonald’s own financial projections offer some reason to examine that distinction carefully. In its September presentation of the company’s broader “> NEXT” strategy, the chain said Archy could free at least 50 labor hours per week as the technology scales. It also projected that its larger package of restaurant improvements could generate approximately $100,000 in annual gross cash-flow benefits for an average U.S. restaurant, with most of those gains eventually benefiting the bottom line.

Neither figure tells us precisely what happens to the employees who would otherwise be working those hours. But it does reveal how closely the language of hospitality is intertwined with the language of efficiency.

And McDonald’s has experimented with this vision before. In late 2022, the company unveiled a smaller-format restaurant outside Fort Worth, Texas, designed around customers ordering ahead through an app and collecting their food from a conveyor system. Employees still prepared the meals, but the design dramatically reduced the need for face-to-face interaction.

The concept was presented as a more convenient way to get food into customers’ hands. Fair enough. But if the great promise of automation is that it gives employees more opportunities to practice hospitality, it’s worth asking what that hospitality looks like when customers scarcely encounter those employees in the first place.

Chick-fil-A, meanwhile, has made a rather different calculation.

The company has always been unusually explicit about its values, which are rooted in the religious principles of founder S. Truett Cathy. Its restaurants remain closed on Sundays, including locations where that choice may seem commercially inconvenient like airports and college campuses. Its employees are famous for responding to customers with the relentlessly chipper “My pleasure!” The brand talks about service not merely as a function of getting food to customers, but as an expression of care.

That self-image is not without complications. Chick-fil-A has faced years of criticism over its charitable foundation’s past donations to organizations with anti-LGBTQ positions, which it said it would stop funding in 2019. Its public vision of care has not always been received as universally inclusive.

Still, the consistency with which the chain has made personal hospitality part of its identity is instructive.

And it’s not as though Chick-fil-A is technologically timid. At a Georgia location opened in 2024, food travels from an elevated kitchen to employees below on a conveyor system designed to deliver a meal every six seconds. Customers can order ahead digitally or place orders with workers in the drive-thru. The technology is decidedly futuristic, but the company has deliberately preserved a person at the point of service.

That distinction strikes me as meaningful.

Technology can expedite a restaurant’s work without necessarily becoming the face — or voice — of the restaurant itself.

Of course, a scripted “My pleasure!” isn’t necessarily more authentic than a cheerful voice generated by a computer. And anybody who has ever worked in a customer-facing job knows that hospitality, particularly of the relentlessly sunny variety, can involve a tremendous amount of emotional labor.

Employees shouldn’t have to manufacture delight on demand while working short-staffed shifts for inadequate pay, fielding customer complaints about things outside their control. A good restaurant culture takes more than telling workers to smile. It requires adequate staffing, good managers, training, compensation and enough breathing room for employees to exercise judgment.

But I think there’s a difference between demanding that employees perform warmth and creating an environment where warmth has room to develop.

Disney World, for example, has practically made an industry out of carefully cultivated hospitality. The entire experience is choreographed, from the language employees use to the way they interact with guests. Yet some of the most memorable moments happen when an employee notices something unexpected and responds in kind: A bus driver making a tired child laugh, or a character performer taking an extra moment with someone who’s been waiting all morning.

The environment is engineered. The little spark between two people isn’t.

And that’s what makes this debate about AI ordering feel more consequential than the technology itself might initially suggest.

Because hospitality isn’t entirely something a restaurant provides. It’s also something customers participate in.

Recently, I was ordering coffee at a neighborhood café, one location of a regional chain. A woman ahead of me, well-dressed and perhaps in her early 30s, was asked by the barista what she’d like. Instead of answering, she wordlessly handed over her phone. The barista looked confused. The woman sighed, tapped her screen with a fingernail and said, “It’s right there.”

It was a small moment, over almost as soon as it began. Nobody yelled. Nobody demanded a manager. But something about the exchange bothered me. The barista had asked a perfectly ordinary question. The customer seemed irritated that the answer required any effort on her part. The information existed on a screen. Why should she have to communicate it?

We’ve spent years teaching machines to understand human behavior. I wonder whether we’ve also begun expecting humans to behave more like machines.

It’s difficult to shake the feeling that something has frayed in our public interactions since the pandemic. We got used to contactless delivery, app-based ordering, packages appearing at our doors and transactions completed without speaking to anyone. Those conveniences were useful, sometimes essential. Many remain genuinely wonderful.

But I’ve also noticed more impatience. Less eye contact. An increasingly common expectation that the person behind the counter should function as an extension of whatever digital system we’ve already been using.

And perhaps there’s an uncomfortable lesson here for customers, too. We demand personalized service, but don’t always seem particularly interested in the people providing it. We want our preferences remembered, our mistakes corrected and our food ready precisely when promised. We don’t necessarily want to offer much patience, curiosity or goodwill in return.

Service workers have always dealt with difficult customers, of course. There’s no reason to romanticize some vanished golden age of American politeness. But the incremental disappearance of ordinary interactions raises a question worth considering: What happens when convenience becomes the organizing principle of our public lives?

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I keep thinking about the spaceship in Pixar’s “WALL-E,” the Axiom, where every human need has been anticipated and met. Passengers float around in automated chairs, surrounded by screens, food and entertainment. They are comfortable, in the technical sense. They are also profoundly disconnected from one another and from the world around them.

The unsettling thing about the Axiom isn’t that its passengers are miserable. It’s that they don’t seem to notice everything they’re missing.

No one individual convenience creates that kind of world. But taken together, thousands of decisions to eliminate small inconveniences can also eliminate opportunities for connection. And those encounters, however insignificant they seem, are part of how we learn to share space with other people.

A few months ago, I was shopping at Trader Joe’s when I noticed the cashier’s earrings. They looked like tiny illustrations of fish pulled from the label of a particularly fancy tin of sardines, with hooks attached. I told her I loved them. “Shrinky Dinks!” she replied.

It turned out she was a crafter. She pulled out her phone to show me some of her work, which included garments she’d fashioned out of Trader Joe’s tote bags. There were pants. Actual pants, made from the grocery store’s reusable bags.

I was delighted. Here was this woman who liked her job, or at least the store where she worked, and liked making things, and had found a wonderfully weird way to combine those interests. For a minute or two, the checkout lane became something other than a place where groceries changed hands.

It wasn’t a life-changing encounter. I don’t know the woman’s full name; her name tag simply said MB. I couldn’t tell you what I bought that day. But I remember her earrings, and the pants, and how much fun it was to meet someone who was so enthusiastic about something so delightfully specific. I wouldn’t have had that interaction if I’d been scanning my own groceries. And, importantly, I wouldn’t have had it if I hadn’t noticed the earrings and said something.

Neither of us was obligated to participate. That’s part of what made it lovely.

This is the problem with imagining hospitality as another task that can be optimized. The value of an interaction isn’t always apparent in advance, and the most meaningful parts of it often have little to do with completing the transaction.

A machine might eventually take my order perfectly. It might remember my favorite coffee, anticipate the substitution I’m about to request and move me through the line several seconds faster. On certain mornings, I’d welcome every bit of that.

But it cannot offer the particular surprise of encountering another person who has decided, for no reason other than the pleasure of it, to show me something strange and wonderful.

The real danger of automating our ordinary encounters isn’t that we’ll suddenly forget what human connection feels like. It’s that we’ll gradually make fewer opportunities for it, until its absence begins to feel normal.

Communities are shaped by the ways we participate in them. Even at a coffee counter. Even through a drive-thru window.

Sometimes that participation amounts to nothing more than a little patience, an unexpected compliment or somebody asking, Wait, is that really what you meant?

And sometimes that’s where the magic happens.

The post The AI drive-thru wars aren’t really about your order appeared first on Salon.com.

If people don’t widely embrace artificial intelligence out of fear or a godlike savior complex, AI’s biggest champions will try something else: labeling critics “the enemy.” That’s precisely how President Donald Trump described people who don’t like his rebrand via executive order of AI to “super intelligence,” posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” 

As noted by Axios, the White House still uses the term “AI” including on websites like ai.gov, though that website was updated Thursday with “SI.gov” in massive text. “The URL is still ‘AI.gov,’ though, with ‘SI.gov’ leading to an error page,” Axios reported, which Salon confirmed.

Tech billionaires are already embracing the term super intelligence. This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said AI is “no more” and promised to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Peter Thiel, founder of the tech company Palantir that aggregates data used in federal mass surveillance and deportation programs, has gone as far to describe AI’s critics as “the Antichrist.” Apocalyptic eschatology has long been an interest of Thiel’s, who has made the Antichrist a central topic of secretive lectures he’s given behind closed doors. Thiel doesn’t seem to believe in an Antichrist like in the “Book of Revelation,” but rather as a force that imposes a one-world government and stifles technological development.

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In leaked recordings obtained by Politico’s Decoded of Thiel’s speeches in Nashville in late September and published Thursday, the tech mogul claimed former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV only oppose AI to boost their popularity, which is apparently something they would need.

“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI,” adding “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity. The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical … he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.”

Obama recently called for public oversight of AI while the pope’s first encyclical focuses on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

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I couldn’t help but notice some people on social media dunking on a post from @nicksaraev, a self-described entrepreneur helper, who boldly proclaimed on X a few days ago: “I am not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don’t know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago. Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.” He followed it up with “Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen.”

While my feelings are unhurt, and I don’t really know what “infinite personalized music” means or how it could be “solved,” at the same time, I can easily guess what is implied here and I don’t actually want to know more. As one Bluesky user observed, the inherent idea here comes “when you have no concept of how people engage with music.”

Nonetheless, we don’t seem able to escape this trend. I have a friend who has, on a few occasions, sent me AI-generated raps with his name or a joke inserted as the lyrics. They can be technically proficient, maybe even a little funny, but there is always an underlying cadence of the uncanny valley that I still doubt Suno v6 pro et al. or whatever has totally overcome. Please don’t send me examples; I actually don’t care. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of generated art; it’s just that it bores me. I’m having plenty of fun engaging with music made with human ears, hands and minds.

Way back in the Bush II and Obama years, I volunteered at my college radio station in the Music Procurement Department or whatever it was called. Our job was to sort through the massive mailer box of padded envelopes and bubble mailers that came in from record labels, big, small and in-between. It was like Christmas every Wednesday afternoon as we shredded packages and stacked CDs, occasional stickers and vinyl, splitting the spoils and loading them into our computers — by hand even! We made notes about what should get added to the radio catalog as fodder for our aspiring DJs — and what should get chucked out or given away for free at radio events.

If we didn’t already know the band, the way we chose which albums to review was often based on cover art, the promo materials we skimmed, or a sticker on the front that read RIYL: Recommended If You Like. Almost every artist would put something like “RIYL: Jay-Z, Radiohead, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads.” Sure, totally random indie label from Seattle, all of your bands sound exactly like Nirvana. It could be a pretty boring, sometimes horrifying process — I’ll never forget the thrash metal song we received about Shannen Doherty that sounded like it was recorded in a blender. I still can’t get over the inane lyrics: “Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / You’re in my head. Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / I like bread.” I wish I were making this up.

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But the crate digging, which I also did in physical record stores, was always worth it when you found your new favorite band or heard the summer’s hit track long before any of your friends. I was introduced to so many artists, many of whom I still turn to today. Hot Chip, Sea Wolf, Fleet Foxes, to name a few. It taught me to always give music a chance, no matter how ugly the art or how crusty the jewel case. Usually, you can listen to the song up to when the vocals kick in before giving up or listening longer. By then, you usually know if you’re gonna hate it or not.

I still devour new music this way, clocking a daily average of four hours of tunes familiar and novel. It helps me write and focus and relax and otherwise temper my mood throughout the day. I’m always looking for new artists to try. And I hope I always consume — I hate that word, but there it is — music this way, instead of becoming a curmudgeon who only appreciates the tunes from their youth and thinks anything modern is trash. If you think that, you aren’t digging deep enough. 

The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence. It bores the sh*t out of me. It’s not just the lack of discovery, though that is critical, maybe because it scratches those deep primal hunter/gatherer itches. It’s more about the lack of anything personal behind the music. No history, no struggle, no catharsis, no exploration, no humanity. I listen to music because it’s flawed, raw and human, not just noise to fill my day. I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.

 

Yes, I have streamed plenty of AI music on YouTube, often unintentionally when the vaporwave or atmospheric DnB mix I’m vibing to autoplays some slop channel. I can almost always tell when it’s generated. There’s a flatness, like an echo of a song you heard a long time ago, something better. It puts me to sleep and I inevitably switch it off. Maybe it’s gotten better lately. But I still think I’d notice. At any rate, I’d never seek it out.

As a child I was once gifted a “custom” cassette tape with songs “written for me.” Every single track on the album was centered around “Troy,” with my name mentioned as often as possible. I listened to that thing over and over again, until I spilled a bottle of soap in my tape deck and ruined it. But anyway, none of the songs were actually produced with me in mind. It was made by a company called Kidselebration that in 1986 made “personalized” cassette tapes like these for a whole boatload of names. The songs never changed, someone just dubbed in a different name into the song for Kyle, Sarah, Robert, etc. I can’t imagine how much friggin’ work this must have been before Pro Tools, but it was probably just the ‘80s equivalent of a lot of cut-and-paste.

You can listen to the one for “Jessica” here if you really want to. Every time they say “Insert Name,” it sounds totally awkward and weird. But even as a kid, I suspected on some level that this tape wasn’t really for me specifically. Something always felt off. If infinite personalized AI music doesn’t give people the same vibe, maybe they’re not listening hard enough. And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.

The post Please don’t send me your robot music appeared first on Salon.com.

Recently, between medical appointments, I ended up at a grain-bowl-and-salad place in a suburban strip mall, the kind of sleek fast-casual restaurant that looks a little like an Apple Store decided to start serving brown rice and green goddess dressing. There were a few customers in scrubs and two self-order kiosks, both broken. The menu wasn’t posted anywhere else, except via a QR code printed on the back of several glossy takeout menus behind the register, which the cashier repeatedly warned us not to take because they only had a few.

The bowls themselves were fine. Watching them come together was more memorable: the cashier held each plastic container practically at arm’s length as he scooped, two vapes clacking around in his apron pocket, with the air of someone completing a task wholly unrelated to food. What arrived cost about $14 and tasted perfectly acceptable. It was also, somehow, shockingly anonymous.

There’s a word for this feeling now: slop. 

It describes several overlapping anxieties about modern restaurant food, but its prehistory belongs, at least partly, to the ghost kitchen.

In March 2020, as dining rooms shut down, Chuck E. Cheese launched Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, a delivery-only brand operating out of its existing kitchens. The name was technically an Easter egg: Pasqually P. Pieplate is the chef in Chuck E. Cheese’s animatronic house band. 

To anyone not conversant in Chuck E. Cheese lore, though, Pasqually’s looked on Grubhub like a new pizza-and-wings joint. CEC maintained that the pizza itself was different — thicker crust, more sauce — but plenty of customers still felt tricked when they realized the restaurant at the address they’d ordered from was, in fact, Chuck E. Cheese.

The revelation inspired a small genre of internet consumer detective work. “Now I look up the addresses of places on delivery apps before I try something ‘new,’” one Reddit user wrote after discovering that an apparent new Indian restaurant was another business operating under a second name. Elsewhere, someone warned that “Pasquale’s Pizza and Wings on delivery is just Chucky Cheese.” In the same thread, though, came the rebuttal: there were good ghost kitchens. You were simply ordering from the lousy ones.

That argument feels almost quaint now. Ghost kitchens asked diners to accept a peculiar new distance between the restaurant being advertised and the human reality of the meal. What diners surrendered wasn’t necessarily quality so much as a little hospitality, a little transparency and, increasingly, the expectation that a restaurant represented somebody’s particular idea of what a restaurant should be.

From there, the abstraction moved onto the plate.

The “slop bowl” became internet shorthand for the familiar fast-casual mash-up — grains, greens, globally inspired protein, sauce, perhaps an avocado surcharge — assembled with the logic of a cafeteria line and an over-$10 price. The joke has always contained some affection; people like these bowls because they are easy, reliable and customizable. But the name also catches their underlying sameness. There is a reason so much online energy is devoted to “hacking” them: swapping sauces, doubling proteins, gaming the system in hopes of coaxing a little more pleasure from something designed, above all, to be frictionless.

And now the same aesthetic has escaped the bowl. AI slop has begun appearing on restaurant menus, signs and advertisements, offering food imagery that looks optimized for appetite without necessarily resembling anything a person could cook. My digital feed is littered with truly uncanny generated sandwiches, but I’ve only encountered a few in the wild: outside a cafe, a poster for a coffee drink topped with marshmallow “pearls” so perfectly round and iridescent that they looked less edible than cultured in a lab; on the train, hamburger ads where the meat resembled slabs of smooth, steak-rippled marble. The images have the visual grammar of food photography without much evidence that food has ever been involved.

Diners, meanwhile, are already expressing an aversion to the whole thing. Late last year, CNN’s Jordan Valinsky noted that Cava, Chipotle and Sweetgreen — “the big three slop slingers” — were all reporting softer business among younger customers, particularly those between 25 and 35. Some of that was straightforward economics. On Chipotle’s final earnings call of 2025, CEO Scott Boatwright said younger customers weren’t defecting to another chain so much as returning to the grocery store. “They feel the pinch,” he told analysts, “and we feel the pullback.”

Yet alongside that financial retreat, though, there is a more aesthetic refusal taking shape. In one food group I follow, posts about AI restaurant marketing increasingly read like miniature boycott pledges. “If you use AI to advertise your restaurant, market, or anything else,” one person wrote, “I will know that you don’t care about food or the planet and I will never ever patronize your business.” Another was more prescriptive: “Take pictures of your food. Spend a little time and effort to make your own flyer.” 

The complaint isn’t merely that the pictures are creepy. Diners are reading them as evidence: if a restaurant cannot be bothered to photograph its own food, hire an artist or make an ugly little flyer itself, what exactly is being communicated about the care happening elsewhere? 

That inference may not always be fair. Restaurant margins are brutal, and a generated image costs less than a photo shoot. But fairness is almost beside the point. Once diners begin treating evidence of human effort as part of the product, efficiency itself can start looking suspicious.

Which may explain the newest addition to the slop lexicon: PE, or private-equity, slop. The term is less a description of any particular food than a prediction about what happens when the people optimizing a restaurant become increasingly distant from the people cooking in it.

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Consider Los Tacos No. 1. The New York taco shop opened in 2013, earned a devoted following for its al pastor and handmade tortillas, and eventually grew to nine locations. As The Guardian reported, when it announced this September that it had taken an undisclosed investment from private-equity firm TSG Consumer to pursue what a press release called “thoughtful, founder-led growth,” customers immediately began writing its obituary. Social posts predicted “the beginning of the end,” along with smaller portions and worse food. The response became so intense that Los Tacos’ founders issued a reassurance that sounded almost like parody: “No, we’re not going to start charging extra for guac. We’re not switching to horse meat. And no, we’re definitely not messing with the tacos.”

The tacos had not, at that point, been messed with. That’s what makes the reaction interesting. “PE slop” names an anticipatory fear: that somewhere down the line, somebody who has never stood over the grill will notice that a particular ingredient costs slightly more, or a particular process takes slightly longer, and ask whether anyone would really notice if it disappeared.

My colleague Alex Galbraith recently argued that food may be where consumers most easily recognize the otherwise abstract mechanics of private equity. Newspapers can become thinner and health care more Byzantine in ways that are difficult to trace back to an investment firm. Lunch is more intimate. 

Galbraith points to a recent interview with comedian Stavros Halkias who summed it up like this: “Everybody understands that Wendy’s has gotten s**ttier. The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying ‘We don’t want a fresh head of lettuce that costs more money. So, we’re going to give you bagged sh**ty lettuce. I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal, but people will notice.”

I don’t think all these things are “slop” because they’re necessarily bad. I think we’ve reached a point of saturation with food that feels devoid of human authorship. For years, restaurants have been encouraged to become frictionless, scalable, customizable and infinitely replicable. Now diners seem increasingly sensitive to the moment when all that optimization scrubs away specificity.

The opposite of slop isn’t necessarily handmade, independent, expensive or even particularly beautiful. A chain can have it; a bowl can have it; a restaurant backed by investors can have it. It’s simply the sense that something looks and tastes the way it does because somewhere along the line a person said, I like it this way, so I make it this way.

This isn’t an argument for turning every anonymous strip mall back into a village of idiosyncratic mom-and-pop shops. It’s something smaller, and probably more achievable. After years of food designed to work everywhere for everyone, diners may simply be hungry again for evidence that somebody meant it.

The post We’re over restaurant slop appeared first on Salon.com.

Last Wednesday, the head of an AI tech company casually announced, in a long-winded post on X, a discovery that, if true, would represent a major breakthrough in biomedical research. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote that his company’s large language model Claude had found “a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism.” 

So what does this “molecular machine” actually do? No one is entirely sure yet. But that hasn’t stopped tech bros from already upholding it as a new version of CRISPR, the enzyme-wielding tool that cuts up DNA like nobody’s business, sparking a revolution in ultra-precise genetic modification that has spanned research in everything from agriculture to cancer therapy. It’s no surprise its discoverers earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. If an AI program really just made a similar discovery, it would be big news.

Indeed, Amodei goes on to say that this finding could be a step toward developing cures for most diseases in five to 10 years. The company’s press release goes into more detail, but basically says that Claude was prompted to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. “After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT,” the statement reads. Except that nothing about that is so “remarkable,” at least according to numerous people who study and work in this field.

“It is too soon to say that Claude — or the team of human researchers involved has discovered a ‘new CRISPR,’” Dimitri Perrin, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, writes in The Conversation. He goes on to emphasize that what Claude found — a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in viruses that infect bacteria — isn’t necessarily going to be useful. More research is needed, but Perrin explains that for now, the discovery is “CRISPR-like in its architecture, but there is no evidence that it is CRISPR-like in its function.”

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“Claude’s work isn’t even close to being in the same league as DeepMind’s AlphaFold system for predicting protein structure, which is proving to be truly transformative,” Michael Le Page, a senior reporter at New Scientist, wrote. Social media exploded with other examples of people dunking on Anthropic’s PR, with Simon Maechling, a PhD chemist, writing on X, “Claude discovered something in biology. Nobody knows what it does. But we already have the press release. … Finding something interesting isn’t the same as understanding it. Understanding it isn’t the same as showing it works. And showing it works isn’t the same as making it useful.”

Perhaps AI researcher Timnit Gebru summarized it best: “Please see what experts in this field are saying about this ‘discovery’ and not these scammers or press stenographers. This hype DDOS from them isn’t going to stop any time soon and we’ve seen how the mainstream media is doing press-release-as-a-service at this point.”

So it seems like Anthropic is making some pretty bold claims over something that is mildly cool and worth investigating, but at this point, also seems unlikely to revolutionize medicine or science. Why does this matter? A tech company making extreme claims is far from new. Big deal. But contrast all this hype (not to mention the energy spent debunking it) with the buzz just a few weeks ago about how, in just a few years, AI will supposedly gain sentience and kill off humanity. Consider how Anthropic CEO’s Amodei is among those pushing such a narrative, including warning that his company’s tools carry a risk of being used for cyberattacks or terrorism, including developing deadly viruses. Taken together, this presents a false dichotomy: AI will either end disease and suffering or inflict it in untold measure. Might there be a third option?

For anyone who buys the AI spiel, it’s a tool with boundless power. For now, however, the tech companies still rely on an old-fashioned kind of power offered by the state, which is precisely why other tech CEOs were seen sucking up to Chinese President Xi Jinping during his recent U.S. vacation. Amodei missed meeting Xi, for what it’s worth, but had a private dinner with President Donald Trump late Sunday night and later this week joined other tech leaders for a luncheon hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. There — joined by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others — the president signed a “morally binding” artificial intelligence document, which sounds promising, until you hear Trump repeatedly tell reporters that tech companies can supervise themselves. “The self-regulation is very important,” Trump said. The document signed seems to have zero enforcement or legal mechanisms, so in this context, it appears “morally binding” just means “self-policing.” 

 

It’s no mystery why the president — heavily invested in the AI industry as he acridly dismisses any notion of regulation — is cozy with the idea of AI’s alleged abilities. In his latest effort to sell the American public on the coming “golden age” of AI (of course Trump would use that phrase), on Monday the Trump administration both launched America.gov, an AI chatbot powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, and signed an executive order to rename AI “super intelligence.”

As Gebru observed, the grift has no end. All the more reason to pour cold water on outrageous claims about flagging little enzymes in huge databases. (Let’s avoid anthropomorphizing these programs by using the verb “discover.”) The goal of Anthropic’s AI propaganda — because that’s what it is — is to get most people skimming past the headlines to only catch “AI finds new CRISPR” and think a cure for cancer and world peace are right around the corner. All we have to do is hand the keys and all our money to Silicon Valley. Whether it’s utopia or dystopia, that’s the pitch: cede control of this tech to the billionaires in charge. In that sense, blindly swallowing AI’s positive hype can be as dangerous as its alleged existential risks.

The post AI hype promises miracles. That’s as risky as doomsday talk appeared first on Salon.com.

Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.

The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development. 

Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

 

When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading. 

For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right. 

But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration. 

By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts. 

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Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry. 

An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.

This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly. 

On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”

Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.

The post Fox News tries to cool conservative anger over AI appeared first on Salon.com.

Certain obvious questions arise from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this past week, a spectacle that one observer has described as “diplotainment” rather than actual diplomacy. Exactly how much did Donald Trump abase himself in service to a temporary and transactional friendship with the dictatorial leader of a nation that is, at least by conventional standards, America’s principal strategic enemy? 

No one knows; I am tempted to surmise that Trump doesn’t know himself. The man who in sunnier times for his regime enjoyed calling himself “your favorite president” does not seem to be his own favorite president these days. Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!

If we could somehow remove ourselves from the anguish and destruction caused by Trump’s improvised policies (which resemble comic-book versions of Big Brother’s “Two Minutes Hate” from the film version of “1984”) and his aggressively stupid public persona, we might be able to perceive some pathos in his predicament. He cannot escape from a situation he believed he had created and felt he could control: He is the massively unpopular elected leader of a rapidly collapsing superpower, whose downward slide he promised to reverse but has only accelerated, perhaps to the point of terminal velocity.

Trump visibly and hungrily longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the mythological American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock inherited third hand from the more vigorous fascist movements of the last century; the enforced adulation and obligatory public spectacle of a totalitarian regime such as Xi’s China or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade, when he didn’t fall asleep in public or stumble around awkwardly with an unexplained contraption under his clothing.

To consider such matters is not a distraction; it begins to point us toward the larger and more painful questions behind the Xi-Trump pseudo-summit. It surprised literally no one that the two leaders negotiated no new agreements on regulating A.I. (or “Super Intelligence,” in Trump’s self-parodying rebrand), the status of Taiwan, the sporadic trade war between the two nations or ending the war with Iran and restarting the global flow of Middle East oil. No mention was made of Trump’s vaporware claims last May that the Chinese had agreed to buy hundreds of Boeing aircraft and $10 billion worth of U.S. beef and soybeans, but Xi promised to send two pandas from China’s breeding facility to the Atlanta zoo. So much winning. It’s impossible to calculate.

In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”:

China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south.

Contrary to more Sinophobic commentators, they argue that China’s ruthlessly pragmatic leadership is not interested in dominating the world, or at least not in the same way postwar America did. But it does have a long-term agenda, they write, which includes breaking the global dependence on U.S.-centric financial institutions, discrediting democracy and furthering a historical process Xi has described as “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”

I don’t disagree with any of that, but the most important aspect of Bequelin and Wang’s analysis gets a little buried beneath a forest of impeccably organized policy details. Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

It may take generations — if there are any future generations — to measure the scale of America’s self-inflicted damage, which goes well beyond material issues into the realm of psychology or perhaps spirit. (If it’s pretentious to use the Hegelian term Geist, it still fits.) It remains astonishing, not to mention upsetting and enraging, that in the face of a global climate crisis that has already caused millions of deaths and is obvious to nearly everyone on the planet, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to double down on fossil fuels while “China is consolidating its worldwide dominance in batteries, solar, and EVs,” as Bequelin and Wang write. 

Chinese solar panels and batteries, often offered at steeply discounted prices, are revolutionizing transit and energy issues in many poorer countries, beginning to break the expensive and damaging addiction to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. has largely abandoned or dismantled its foreign aid programs aimed at fostering economic development, public health and education, while doing its level best to destroy its own reputation as a multiracial secular republic rooted in the rule of law. Faced with America’s spectacular self-own (which didn’t start with Trump, to be clear), who can blame people in the Global South for beginning to suspect that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?

Despite the widespread anger and disillusionment of Trump’s second term — an encouraging trend, to be clear — it’s still too easy for Americans to duck the biggest and most glaring question of all: To paraphrase one of the greatest works of postmodern angst, how did we get here? It no longer feels remotely adequate (if it ever did) to suggest that angry, vicious people accidentally elected an angry, vicious president who is pursuing a self-destructive and nihilistic agenda, and that at some future date our national sanity and our “indispensable” role in world affairs will be reasserted. 

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We tried that, remember? It didn’t work. Perhaps, from some great historical remove, Joe Biden’s presidency will appear noble and tragic. But it was also doomed, trapped in a vision of the past every bit as delusional as the MAGA fantasy, and nearly as damaging. The Biden regime’s self-appointed mission of enforcing a “rules-based order” involved pretending that the world had not changed, that America was still widely beloved and admired, that our so-called republic had not bred and nurtured Donald Trump and that he did not embody its bottomless greed, its gleeful ignorance, its wounded and flatulent national pride.

And so we arrive at the final conundrum of the Trump-Xi summit, and our president’s stopped-clock tendency to stumble upon hard truths. In his inimitable ass-backward fashion, Trump has discerned that the “free world” has become a meaningless abstraction and liberal democracy is in a state of systemic failure. He is correct about that, at least to a point. But he can provide no answer beyond prostrating himself before dictators and building monuments to himself in imitation of their grandiosity. If China’s repressive techno-state makes a distinctly unappealing candidate to lead the world into the future, America can only offer competing versions of an imaginary past. Hey, at least we got those pandas. 

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A battlefield dominated by fully autonomous drones capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot. And while that scenario has not yet arrived, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has moved modern warfare a notch down that road.

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President Donald Trump is going all-in on artificial intelligence, dismissing growing concerns over AI and data centers as politically motivated “hoaxes” while promising that his administration will not “hinder or stifle” the rapidly expanding industry.

Trump announced Saturday that he is forming an “AI Force,” which he compared to the Space Force created during his first term, and will soon appoint an AI “czar.”

“We will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president provided few details about what the new force would actually do, including where it would sit within the federal government, what authority it would have or how it would differ from existing federal AI initiatives. Trump instead argued that harmful uses of AI could be addressed through the existing criminal and civil justice systems.

His embrace of the technology comes as some Republicans are confronting growing opposition to the data centers needed to power it ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio warned Republican candidates in a memo this week that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.” Fabrizio advised candidates to address concerns about electricity prices, pressure on power grids and water consumption rather than offer blanket support for new construction.

Trump took the opposite tone Saturday, claiming opposition to data centers had “largely failed” because communities discovered they brought “Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets.”

Some Republican candidates have gone further than Fabrizio’s messaging advice. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in his state and called for slowing AI development while the government develops additional safeguards.

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Trump, meanwhile, framed rapid AI development as both an economic imperative and a competition with China, claiming the technology could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product.

His enthusiasm extends even to the technology’s name.

Hours before announcing the AI Force, Trump asked his Truth Social followers to vote on replacing “Artificial Intelligence” with “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence.”

The post Trump thinks AI needs its own “Force” now appeared first on Salon.com.

Humans are probably the only species on Earth that actively fantasizes about its own extinction — and definitely the only one that actively participates in it. Even that whole thing about lemmings running off cliffs is a myth, but we bald-ish primates not only turn existential doom into entertainment (consider the entire post-apocalyptic genre writ large) or religious movements, we constantly invent new ways to derail our global society and put all of us at risk of mass death. 

The latest serious entry to this category is artificial intelligence, which isn’t actually intelligence, nor does it reflect a brand new fear. But the dramatic advancements made in AI over the last several years has finally made it something that scares people almost as much as nuclear weapons or the hand of God. Will AI truly become an agent of mass destruction? Nobody actually knows, but that isn’t stopping people from making some outlandish bets. 

This situation has been made worse by the heads of AI companies warning or threatening the public that the tools they’re developing could do more than just eliminate everyone’s job: it could take out humanity itself. We are drowning in tech-bro manifestos that simultaneously uphold AI as a miracle technology and a terrorist’s wet dream, all of it so steeped in marketing lingo that it’s difficult to parse how threatening or auspicious it actually is.

Meanwhile, our president boasts in all-caps rants that a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” is all we need to regulate this technology, which for most people is literally the opposite of reassurance, as with his insistence that AI apocalypse is a “hoax.” Donald Trump has also been playing the old-fashioned Red card, saying that any attempt to rein in AI, it will only help China get ahead in the race. “Whoever wins with AI wins,” Trump told reporters during his weekend jaunt to Ireland.

What are we trying to win, exactly? That isn’t clear. Is it control of self-replicating armies of autonomous drones, or a cancer-free utopia that hits Type II on the Kardashev scale? For now, both options are well within the realm of fantasy, though the former is much less so. All of this rests on assumptions that the current technology, built on so-called large-language models, will develop into artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer system that surpasses human intelligence in all domains. Keep in mind that there’s no hard evidence that LLMs, which are essentially souped-up versions of the predictive text algorithm on your phone, are going to assemble into something so complex and godlike. 

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The leaps required to go from AI to AGI are massive, nonlinear and still very theoretical. But fearmongers are jumping even further ahead and saying that once AGI exists, it could mean curtains for the human species. It’s wise to be skeptical of hypotheticals stacked on hypotheticals. The argument over what to do about this ranges from doubling down on AI development with zero regulation to burning down all the data centers. MAGA is basically warning us not to let the Chinese Communist Party get its grubby hands on the tech first: Shut up and trust Big Tech, or “Let Data reign!” Plus, the AI boom is totally not a bubble! Don’t even consider that all the adrenalized rhetoric might be about keeping the stock market adrift and less about the actual utility of AI.

Perhaps where one stands on the issue depends on how deeply they internalized “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Regardless, none of us asked to be in this AI race. Why isn’t cooperation with China a bigger consideration? We can imagine algorithms with godlike intelligence but not AI diplomacy? The whole thing smacks of Cold War déjà vu.

Sure, it’s probably logical to dread the future AI could bring, arguably if it leads to the collapse of late-stage capitalism. Maybe it’s past time to examine what we’re actually afraid of and why, rather than making assumptions about what AI can or can’t do, especially in the future. After all, it’s just a technology, a tool — which means it’s also a weapon in the wrong hands. Indeed, AI has already been widely used in warfare, from U.S. strikes on Iran to fully autonomous drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s not hard to imagine this situation getting worse, but don’t forget who’s in control. As my colleague Alex Galbraith has argued, “CEOs can’t take credit for the successes of A.I. while avoiding the negative externalities. They’re both the results of real decisions made by actual thinking people. The blame for any harm the technology inflicts should lay with its creators.”

If tech bros are saying that AI might someday break containment and take down civilization, that sounds like an accountability sink coupled with an investor pitch. Maybe it’s Silicon Valley that should be scared we’ll call their bluff, or imprison their executives, for whatever crimes may someday occur. But why do we latch onto the fears they sell us? Maybe it’s embedded human instinct, an afterglow of developing self-awareness of our own mortality, to consider existential risks. That impulse certainly dates back before the time of Jesus, but with the advent of the atomic era, apocalypse is actually possible, though that prospect has less to do with the nightmare scenarios of the Book of Revelation than with the military-industrial complex. Yet fears about AI dominate the discourse while bigger and more imminent threats go largely unacknowledged.

There’s a strange religious tone to all of this, as pointed out by AI researcher Timnit Gebru in a Wired interview last week. What’s “really existential,” she said, “is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these. The industry has become a mix of cults, a mix of people who are true believers, just like a preacher who says the end times is coming. The singularity has been coming for decades now.”

Considering the massive and growing deadly impact of air pollution, heat waves, freak floods and other disasters, the No. 1 existential threat to humanity remains climate change, which is on track to get much worse by mid-century. Global heating is driven overwhelmingly by the fossil fuel industry, yet in the U.S. we’re regulating that less stringently than ever, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing on Monday the repeal of rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions of coal and gas plants. Of course the AI industry is linked to all that through the destructive appetite of data centers, but if we think that only imaginary killing machines can wipe out most of human civilization, we need to think again. We’re already well on the way to doing that.

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