Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI

If you don’t read Ed Zitron’s newsletter, chances are someone else has forwarded along one of his graphomaniacal (but also very entertaining) rants about how the AI industry is a shell game run by psychopaths. He’s carved out a healthy niche as an unrepentant technopessimist—albeit one who’s still a publicist for mostly tech clients, including some in the AI space. Tommy Cragg wades headlong into this seeming contradiction for an arch, candid, thoroughly enjoyable profile of Zitron (which also happens to feature, courtesy of tech journalist Casey Newton, one of most vitriolic quotes about the subject I’ve ever read in a profile).

Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.” So his analysis may wobble here and there on the abstruse particulars of, say, inference costs. He will not be deterred from his overall message: Judgment Day is just over the horizon. Somewhat lost in all the frog-raining opprobrium is the obvious contradiction of his work, which Zitron doesn’t hide but which he rarely discusses: that he makes a living, in part, from trying to gin up attention for AI companies. Can a flack be a prophet on the side?