Across videos, standup and cartoons, humorists are skewering big tech’s attempt to make AI ubiquitous and inevitable.
At the top of the mountain, he holds up a sign: “Build a datacenter here.”
On the New York subway, posters herald what appear to be AI startups. Asks an ad for Cutlery.ai.
The posters are real, but the companies aren’t; the CEO and datacenter scenarios are social media sketches (though the “great companies” quote is a genuine piece of wisdom from Sam Altman).
The comedy extends across all forms of media: social videos, standup, songs, humor columns, comic strips and art installations.
A March Gallup poll found 79% of Americans believe AI will reduce jobs. In a CNN poll this week, 81% of respondents said they were more concerned than excited about how the technology could “fundamentally change our way of life”. Only 11% of Americans would support the building of a datacenter locally, according to UMass Amherst.
A handful of impossibly wealthy weirdos wander between podcasts and conference stages boasting about their plans to fundamentally alter what it means to be human.
Other comedians parody the user experience: the comedian Aya Huseen, repeatedly popping out from behind a door, personifies tech companies’ attempts to get users hooked on new AI features: “You sure you don’t want to try it with AI?” In the Atlantic, the humorist Alexandra Petri recounts a dream in which everything in her life has pivoted to AI, from children’s books – Goldilocks and the 4.5 Bears – to her cereal, which features “subtle changes in the recipe, such as the nuts now being the hard, metal kind”.