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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week!), but pretending that "AI" and "Chabot" are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was "turned off" after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
Should they be? No. But that's a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn't change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
What's lost? I can't think of anything.
Words are meant to convey meaning, and I bet you would lose a lot of non-technical people if you tried to explain the intricacies of what makes large language models worse than content recommendation systems, and doing this would be redundant for technical users.
So Corey can safely use the two words interchangeably and communicate with technical and non-technical alike.