Why businesses lie about AI - Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Loading summary

Transcript1 lines

[00:12]
A
Hello and welcome to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. It is a Sunday morning in London and I'm alone in the flat. My wife has gone back to Los Angeles for some work stuff, so it's just me in my male living space at as the subreddit has it. If you want to see me you can dial into a virtual conversation on August 12th on behalf of the Electronic Frontier foundation with Nicole Ozer, EFF's new executive director for something called Effecting who the Machine Serves. If you are in Edinburgh, you can catch me at the International book festival on August 16 for a solo presentation and August 17 for an event with Jimmy Wales in Sydney, Australia. I'm doing three presentations, a panel, a solo presentation and a school presentation at the Festival of dangerous ideas August 23 through 24. And I will be in Melbourne at the wheeler centre at August 25. I think maybe all of those are sold out and there might be some tickets. I'm going to be in Brighton on September 8 with Carol Cadwalader at the Brighton Dome and I'm doing an event for Foyles Piccadilly in London with Riley Quinn on September 9th. That's Riley from no Gods, no Mares and Trash Future. I will be in South Bend, Indiana at Notre Dame on August 6th and in Vancouver, BC on November 12th for the BC Policy Solutions Gala. There are other events coming up that aren't in this, I can tell you right now. There's at least one event in Victoria, bc. There's something in Ottawa, there's something in Toronto, there is something in Vienna, there's Winnipeg, there's Calgary, there's Edmonton, Hudson, Ohio. I'm now booking out a thing in Boston, Cambridge, Mass. So there's a whole ton of other stuff coming up, but those are the ones that are confirmed and that we have calendar links for where you can go and get tickets, et cetera, et cetera. I have spent the last week doing many things, but the thing that's been most enjoyable is starting work on a new novel, a kind of pulpy techno thriller about the origins of techno fascism called Once is Enemy Action. That is of course a tribute to James Bond, a kind of a mangled quote in the original. It's three Times is Enemy Action. So that is going quite swimmingly. 500 words a day, planning to be done by December. Agent is very excited about it and we are going to be taking it to various editors pretty soon I think because it's coming along well. I also had a great planning call for the launch of the Inshidification Paperback in September with Ferrars Press and Giroud, my American publishers. And they were just full of amazing news. There have been several reprints ordered already long before the book is actually even in the stores because the pre orders keep coming in, including, and I was very amused by this from Hudson News. Those are the airport booksellers ubiquitous across America who are historically very reluctant to have a book with the word shit on the COVID and had passed on the hardcover and passed on the paperback and then placed a small order and then a larger order and now a very big order. So it's going to be in lots of places and not just the usual ones, not just bookstores, but some non bookstore venues. Some of that is doubtless being driven by the success of the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, my latest non fiction book that came out in June and just hit its sixth week as the number one best selling nonfiction paperback in Canada, according to the cbc. Thank you to all my Canadian readers for this spectacular run. Holy shit. So as I mentioned, I am alone in London in my R male living space, which is actually very nice. And I've got a big Sunday planned today. I'm going to the gym after recording this to have my daily swim and listen to my audiobook. I'm getting through the entire canon of Travis McGee novels this summer on audio. And then I'm going to go to a market, probably Broadway market, buy a loaf of rye bread so dense that it bends light along with a little brunch. And then this afternoon I'm going to the Everyman screen on the green in Angel Islington to see under the Skin, a kind of science fiction horror movie with Scarlett Johansson I know nothing about. But I saw that screen on the green, had the audio designer from the movie in to give a little introduction as part of a festival they're putting on that I had totally missed they were doing about the role of audio in films. So that's super interesting and cool. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I'm really getting into my local indie movie theaters now that I'm back in London. There had been a movie theater that sat vacant and derelict for like the 15 years I lived in our flat in Hoxton that is now a Curzon cinema, the Curzon Hoxton Cinema. And we've been to a couple, three movies there and it's such a lovely, lovely screen. And just having all these movie theaters in the neighborhood that are literally like a three minute walk away is just such a treat. And now let's move on to the reading. Once again, I'm going to be reading to you a recent pluralistic essay, one that received a lot of critical support and that was picked up by the nerve for reprint there in an abridged version. It's my breakdown of a very, very good article by Nikhil Suresh on the Hermit Tech blog called AI Mania is eviscerating Global Decision Making. And off the back of this I ended up actually talking to Nick for his podcast that's not out yet, but it will be out soon. So if you want to hear us talking about these subjects further and kind of riffing for about an hour and a half, that'll be out. Just watch for Nick's podcast. And so without any further ado, here is from the 1 August edition of pluralistic.net why Businesses Lie About AI. Neoclassical economics Assumes Rationality the corollary of if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Is you're rich, so you must be very smart. Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well compensated CEOs insist that, quote, AI is changing everything, well then AI must be changing everything. But the evidence for this changing everything thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create sovereign AI, no one can really articulate the case for sovereign AI. If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework. Again, contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to kill switch your John Deere tractors, your country would effectively cease to exist. If digital sovereignty means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact. The world is full of people who insist that every AI is changing everything, but who, when pressed, have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources. Maybe they're pretty sure. One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from her at Tech, a consulting firm of, quote, radically ethical data wizards that is Tech consultants. Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives, and more importantly, their subordinates, about what, if anything, AI is doing for business in an essay entitled AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making. Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant frequency Frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay I will piledrive you if you mention AI again. Or possibly from his Contra Tacek's terrible article on AI A stinging rebuttal to Thomas Tacek's widely read My AI skeptical friends are All Nuts. While those are important pieces of AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making, whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through his 6,000 word we're facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they've witnessed. If they cooperate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards or incompetents and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once, there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event. In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has or will radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith. In support of this thesis, Suresh cites, quote, hundreds of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he will, quote, file the serial numbers off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large multi billion dollar companies, make it clear that AI mania is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AMI in corporate circles. Here are a few highlights from this morning's read Moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a holy shit moment. A person worked for a division that pivoted to re engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only 10 users had touched this expensive new technology, they pivoted again to support agentic workflows. Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for agentic quote because every company has to do something agentic. Now. Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500/plus employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted or even spared from being fired were people who professed, quote, religious declarations of faith about, quote, the transformative power of AI. Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs. This has created a situation in which everyone boards executives, employees, vendors and consultants has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Cresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place. Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project. Quote, Every single one we have seen 0% success in a year and a half. Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're, quote, terminally bad at running software projects. Effectively adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem. It just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail. Chatbots don't help the internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data, the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem or. Or when they seem to solve your problem, the solution goes nowhere. Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience. A Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is sure that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car. Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point. Cresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism. AI is changing everything. But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization does not currently use LLMs for anything. And indeed, they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they got some use out of ChatGPT. This sheer AI is changing everything. Quote, well, okay, we're not using AI for anything is so extreme that Cresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI centered strategy for a $2 billion a year business, even though that exec quote had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life. Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career boosting corporate reputation for thought leadership. But many other people, especially non technical people, sincerely believe that AI is about to change everything. As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private, but you can't reason with a true believer. The true believers are in charge Cresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff. But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help. As an aside, I remember the dot com era when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI. Cresh describes workers who feel they have to quote AI wash their work. They just do the work the same way they have for decades and say Claude did it. To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another and then the process repeats itself in reverse for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate token leaderboards. How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Cresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example, Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt on called Cortex that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate. Under ideal circumstances, that is at least 8% of the time it will mislead you, perhaps very badly. Cresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgments, Cresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for a new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable. To their credit, Hermite Tech refused to sell These customers Cortex and stopped doing the Cortex demos altogether. Cresh describes the experience of, quote, the total 180 degrees that shift from ice cold to red hot buying frenzy as deeply unsettling. What's more, the Cortex demos that Cresh and co performed were by his account pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses. This is the situation up and down the corporate org chart. Cresh has a reader whose title is Head of AI at a billion dollar firm who tells him that, quote, their job is totally fraudulent, but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organization. This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies who have publicly announced 100x productivity gains, but who confessed to Cresh that nothing of the sort has happened. Why are companies making these claims because their customers were making these claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100xed its productivity with AI unless you too had 100xed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar with real consequences. Getting enterprise contracts canceled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn't really matter to your organization's mission is a great way to get fired. With the state of the industry dominated by froth lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying totally gamable metrics such as money spent on AI as a means of evaluating employees and divisions between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage. There is now a gigantic market for AI solutions. At best, these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be procuring AI enabled services for the business. This isn't a harmless frippery. Contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made sufficiently AI to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse, every fake AI project that produces real results because it's not really AI adds credibility to the AI true believers who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI. Cresh ends his essay with a long section on how to navigate AI mania, advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully that isn't me. Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little bit on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania? I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're in charge is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're normally in charge of tell you that all of your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal. Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a snowflake database, but unlike Snowflake, Cortex is controlled via conversational plain language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company's snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never backs asses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it. The other question Cresh implicitly raises is how can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work? The answer is that these AI users are centaurs, experienced workers who were assisted by automation on terms they set for themselves. Thanks to skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and more importantly, good uses of code generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker driven automation improves quality, while capital driven automation improves throughput. An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't 100x your code this way, at least not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work, and in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost. That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms to improve their work in ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a token maximization scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't sufficiently AI when they set out to do a project. No one makes them prove that it couldn't be done by AI. As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to. All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword compliance dysfunct from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions, they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage. All right, well, thank you for that. I remembered something I forgot to mention in the intro here, which is to say thank you to John, who is mastering this. So at that meeting about the paperback release of Inshidification with my publishers, we all suddenly realized that I had not recorded an audio version of the substantial new introduction I wrote for the paperback, and that it would be really nice if we could release that with a new version the audio when it comes out. And so I sat down and recorded about an hour of audio, I believe, on Thursday and sent it to John and he turned it around in a day. And so it's now undergoing QA at Macmillan and we'll figure out how to release that. I might just like stick it in the podcast feed or something for people. We're trying to figure out where and how we're going to release that, but John did yeoman work on that, so thank you, John. Next week I will not be recording podcasts. I'LL be in Edinburgh at the festival and the following week I will be in Australia, and the week after that I'm going to be on vacation and the week after that I'm going to be in Warsaw for the Polish launch of Inshitification, and the week after that I may be at home. So September 13th likely your next opportunity to hear me get on my bullshit again. So until then, have a great rest of August. Great September, a great Labor Day if you celebrate and yeah, talk to you later. That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years and anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ourn because we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer, and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.

Summary6 min read

Podcast Summary: "Why Businesses Lie About AI"

Podcast: Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com
Host: Cory Doctorow
Date: August 9, 2026
Episode Theme:
A deep dive into the phenomenon of corporate dishonesty and mania surrounding AI adoption, based on an essay by Nikhil Suresh ("AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making"), interspersed with Doctorow’s commentary and reflections on the motivations and consequences of AI hype in the business world.

1. Episode Overview

Cory Doctorow explores why contemporary businesses exaggerate the impacts and adoption of artificial intelligence, building his discussion around Nikhil Suresh’s trenchant analysis of corporate behavior around "AI mania." Doctorow highlights the difference between the supposed AI transformation in corporate circles and the far more modest reality, while discussing the social, cultural, and managerial factors that drive organizations into this dynamic of deception and self-deception.

2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

AI’s Overstated Transformation of Business

Neoclassical Economics and CEO Faith in AI
- Doctorow begins by satirizing how people conflate wealth and intelligence among business leaders, leading to an unquestioning belief when CEOs proclaim “AI is changing everything.”
  
  “The evidence for this changing everything thesis is thin on the ground.” (16:30)
Digital Sovereignty vs. AI Sovereignty
- There is a global fixation on "sovereign AI," but Doctorow argues real digital sovereignty relates more to control over critical infrastructure (like Office 365 or smartphones), not AI chatbots.
- If all AI chatbots were turned off, little real change would occur; if fundamental tech services disappeared, societies would be paralyzed.
  
  “If digital sovereignty means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact.” (19:40)

Corporate AI Mania: The Suresh Thesis

Executives Locked in Collective Dishonesty
- Drawing on Suresh's observations, Doctorow explains that execs have incentives to exaggerate AI gains:
  
  “If they could all admit the truth at once, there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.” (22:25)
- Telling the truth alone marks one as a troublemaker; only group honesty can break the cycle, but that's structurally impossible.
Promotion of True Believers
- Only employees who profess “religious declarations of faith about…the transformative power of AI” are promoted. Dissenters are sidelined or laid off.
Universal Incentive to Lie
- Vendors, consultants, employees—all have something to gain by overstating AI’s effectiveness.
  
  “Everyone…has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies.” (26:50)

The Reality of Enterprise AI

No Actual Business Impact
- Suresh claims no substantial business challenge would arise if OpenAI disappeared:
  
  “Every single one we have seen 0% success in a year and a half.” (28:30)
Failures of AI Chatbots
- Internally and externally-facing chatbots consistently underperform, often due to poor documentation and integration. A single positive chatbot experience cited by Suresh ended up being a customer service failure behind the scenes.
Corporate ‘AI Washing’
- Employees claim to use AI in their workflows (“AI wash”) or construct meaningless AI tasks (e.g., chatbots prompting each other) just to earn internal “token” points or to comply with buzzword requirements.
  
  “They just do the work the same way… and say Claude did it.” (36:10)

The Role of Demos and Hype

The Mesmerizing Effect of AI Demos
- Demos for features like Snowflake’s Cortex—described as unreliable—nevertheless provoke buying frenzies among execs. Even demos shown to be “unsuitable” inspire customers to purchase.
  
  “The total 180 degrees…from ice cold to red hot buying frenzy as deeply unsettling.” (42:00)
Industry-Wide Mimicry and Escalation
- Vendors must also claim AI success or risk being called liars by clients. The result is a mutual escalation—everyone pretends immense productivity gains to satisfy social pressure.
Metric ‘Gaming’ and Buzzword Delays
- Success is measured by money spent on AI or visible AI involvement, not actual results. Real projects are delayed to reach “sufficiently AI” status.

Fraudulent AI Positions and the Pathology of Compliance

Fake AI Jobs
- Heads of AI at large firms admit their jobs are performative or the “only promotion pathway” available.
Dangerous Substitution
- Companies are not just wasting money; they are actively replacing skilled workers with ineffective AI systems, perpetuating incompetence.

Deeper Causes and Reflections

Why Are Leaders Such Easy Converts?
- Doctorow posits that executives embrace AI mania as a way to avoid challenging feedback from more knowledgeable subordinates—AI, unlike people, never talks back.
  
  “Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back asses you about your foolish questions.” (52:15)
Individual vs. Corporate AI Success
- Skilled technologists (“centaurs”) report improvement because they control automation on their own terms—worker-driven, not capital-driven automation.
  
  “Worker driven automation improves quality, while capital driven automation improves throughput.” (56:00)
Who Benefits and Who Loses?
- The crux: “The most important fact about a given technology isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.” (59:20)

3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Maybe they're pretty sure.” (20:45)
Satirical take on executives convinced that AI will eventually change everything.
“Every company has to do something agentic now.” (27:12)
Ironic statement illustrating herd behavior in tech.
“Their job is totally fraudulent, but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organization.” (47:50)
Revealing comment on performative AI roles.
“These businesses aren’t just wasting billions, they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society.” (1:01:45)

4. Important Timestamps

16:30 – Critique of “AI is changing everything” narrative.
19:40 – Digital sovereignty realities vs. AI hype.
22:25 – The Suresh thesis: collective executive dishonesty.
28:30 – Absence of real enterprise AI success stories.
36:10 – The phenomenon of “AI washing” in the workplace.
42:00 – AI demo effect and mass corporate hypnosis.
52:15 – Why bosses prefer AI: avoiding challenging subordinates.
56:00 – “Worker-driven vs. capital-driven automation” insight.
1:01:45 – AI compared to “asbestos” in lasting societal harm.

5. Language & Tone

Doctorow retains his signature mix of wit, skepticism, and accessible technical discussion throughout the episode, balancing critique with humor and personal anecdotes. He frequently attributes findings and ideas to Nikhil Suresh while coloring the discussion with his own analogies and speculative answers to questions left unaddressed by the original essay.

6. Conclusion & Takeaways

Doctorow concludes that the AI mania in business is unique by its scale and its ability to drive organizations to mass self-delusion, incentivizing the abandonment of expertise in favor of performative compliance. The social, economic, and professional consequences are dire, as companies waste resources, degrade their workforces, and set themselves up for long-term harm—all under the banner of “AI transformation.”

Useful for listeners who want:

A thorough critique of AI business hype
Insight into the social and managerial dynamics of tech adoption
A reality check on the claims of AI-driven productivity
Clarity on the distinction between authentic and performative automation in the workplace

Recommended segments:

16:30–28:30: Explaining the disconnect between AI rhetoric and reality
36:10–47:50: Examples of “AI washing” and fake AI roles
52:15–1:01:45: Doctorow’s deeper reflections on power, ego, and the worker’s role in meaningful tech adoption

Loading summary

Transcript1 lines

[00:12]
A
Hello and welcome to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. It is a Sunday morning in London and I'm alone in the flat. My wife has gone back to Los Angeles for some work stuff, so it's just me in my male living space at as the subreddit has it. If you want to see me you can dial into a virtual conversation on August 12th on behalf of the Electronic Frontier foundation with Nicole Ozer, EFF's new executive director for something called Effecting who the Machine Serves. If you are in Edinburgh, you can catch me at the International book festival on August 16 for a solo presentation and August 17 for an event with Jimmy Wales in Sydney, Australia. I'm doing three presentations, a panel, a solo presentation and a school presentation at the Festival of dangerous ideas August 23 through 24. And I will be in Melbourne at the wheeler centre at August 25. I think maybe all of those are sold out and there might be some tickets. I'm going to be in Brighton on September 8 with Carol Cadwalader at the Brighton Dome and I'm doing an event for Foyles Piccadilly in London with Riley Quinn on September 9th. That's Riley from no Gods, no Mares and Trash Future. I will be in South Bend, Indiana at Notre Dame on August 6th and in Vancouver, BC on November 12th for the BC Policy Solutions Gala. There are other events coming up that aren't in this, I can tell you right now. There's at least one event in Victoria, bc. There's something in Ottawa, there's something in Toronto, there is something in Vienna, there's Winnipeg, there's Calgary, there's Edmonton, Hudson, Ohio. I'm now booking out a thing in Boston, Cambridge, Mass. So there's a whole ton of other stuff coming up, but those are the ones that are confirmed and that we have calendar links for where you can go and get tickets, et cetera, et cetera. I have spent the last week doing many things, but the thing that's been most enjoyable is starting work on a new novel, a kind of pulpy techno thriller about the origins of techno fascism called Once is Enemy Action. That is of course a tribute to James Bond, a kind of a mangled quote in the original. It's three Times is Enemy Action. So that is going quite swimmingly. 500 words a day, planning to be done by December. Agent is very excited about it and we are going to be taking it to various editors pretty soon I think because it's coming along well. I also had a great planning call for the launch of the Inshidification Paperback in September with Ferrars Press and Giroud, my American publishers. And they were just full of amazing news. There have been several reprints ordered already long before the book is actually even in the stores because the pre orders keep coming in, including, and I was very amused by this from Hudson News. Those are the airport booksellers ubiquitous across America who are historically very reluctant to have a book with the word shit on the COVID and had passed on the hardcover and passed on the paperback and then placed a small order and then a larger order and now a very big order. So it's going to be in lots of places and not just the usual ones, not just bookstores, but some non bookstore venues. Some of that is doubtless being driven by the success of the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, my latest non fiction book that came out in June and just hit its sixth week as the number one best selling nonfiction paperback in Canada, according to the cbc. Thank you to all my Canadian readers for this spectacular run. Holy shit. So as I mentioned, I am alone in London in my R male living space, which is actually very nice. And I've got a big Sunday planned today. I'm going to the gym after recording this to have my daily swim and listen to my audiobook. I'm getting through the entire canon of Travis McGee novels this summer on audio. And then I'm going to go to a market, probably Broadway market, buy a loaf of rye bread so dense that it bends light along with a little brunch. And then this afternoon I'm going to the Everyman screen on the green in Angel Islington to see under the Skin, a kind of science fiction horror movie with Scarlett Johansson I know nothing about. But I saw that screen on the green, had the audio designer from the movie in to give a little introduction as part of a festival they're putting on that I had totally missed they were doing about the role of audio in films. So that's super interesting and cool. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I'm really getting into my local indie movie theaters now that I'm back in London. There had been a movie theater that sat vacant and derelict for like the 15 years I lived in our flat in Hoxton that is now a Curzon cinema, the Curzon Hoxton Cinema. And we've been to a couple, three movies there and it's such a lovely, lovely screen. And just having all these movie theaters in the neighborhood that are literally like a three minute walk away is just such a treat. And now let's move on to the reading. Once again, I'm going to be reading to you a recent pluralistic essay, one that received a lot of critical support and that was picked up by the nerve for reprint there in an abridged version. It's my breakdown of a very, very good article by Nikhil Suresh on the Hermit Tech blog called AI Mania is eviscerating Global Decision Making. And off the back of this I ended up actually talking to Nick for his podcast that's not out yet, but it will be out soon. So if you want to hear us talking about these subjects further and kind of riffing for about an hour and a half, that'll be out. Just watch for Nick's podcast. And so without any further ado, here is from the 1 August edition of pluralistic.net why Businesses Lie About AI. Neoclassical economics Assumes Rationality the corollary of if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Is you're rich, so you must be very smart. Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well compensated CEOs insist that, quote, AI is changing everything, well then AI must be changing everything. But the evidence for this changing everything thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create sovereign AI, no one can really articulate the case for sovereign AI. If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework. Again, contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to kill switch your John Deere tractors, your country would effectively cease to exist. If digital sovereignty means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact. The world is full of people who insist that every AI is changing everything, but who, when pressed, have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources. Maybe they're pretty sure. One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from her at Tech, a consulting firm of, quote, radically ethical data wizards that is Tech consultants. Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives, and more importantly, their subordinates, about what, if anything, AI is doing for business in an essay entitled AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making. Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant frequency Frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay I will piledrive you if you mention AI again. Or possibly from his Contra Tacek's terrible article on AI A stinging rebuttal to Thomas Tacek's widely read My AI skeptical friends are All Nuts. While those are important pieces of AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making, whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through his 6,000 word we're facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they've witnessed. If they cooperate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards or incompetents and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once, there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event. In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has or will radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith. In support of this thesis, Suresh cites, quote, hundreds of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he will, quote, file the serial numbers off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large multi billion dollar companies, make it clear that AI mania is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AMI in corporate circles. Here are a few highlights from this morning's read Moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a holy shit moment. A person worked for a division that pivoted to re engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only 10 users had touched this expensive new technology, they pivoted again to support agentic workflows. Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for agentic quote because every company has to do something agentic. Now. Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500/plus employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted or even spared from being fired were people who professed, quote, religious declarations of faith about, quote, the transformative power of AI. Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs. This has created a situation in which everyone boards executives, employees, vendors and consultants has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Cresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place. Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project. Quote, Every single one we have seen 0% success in a year and a half. Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're, quote, terminally bad at running software projects. Effectively adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem. It just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail. Chatbots don't help the internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data, the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem or. Or when they seem to solve your problem, the solution goes nowhere. Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience. A Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is sure that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car. Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point. Cresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism. AI is changing everything. But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization does not currently use LLMs for anything. And indeed, they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they got some use out of ChatGPT. This sheer AI is changing everything. Quote, well, okay, we're not using AI for anything is so extreme that Cresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI centered strategy for a $2 billion a year business, even though that exec quote had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life. Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career boosting corporate reputation for thought leadership. But many other people, especially non technical people, sincerely believe that AI is about to change everything. As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private, but you can't reason with a true believer. The true believers are in charge Cresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff. But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help. As an aside, I remember the dot com era when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI. Cresh describes workers who feel they have to quote AI wash their work. They just do the work the same way they have for decades and say Claude did it. To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another and then the process repeats itself in reverse for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate token leaderboards. How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Cresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example, Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt on called Cortex that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate. Under ideal circumstances, that is at least 8% of the time it will mislead you, perhaps very badly. Cresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgments, Cresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for a new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable. To their credit, Hermite Tech refused to sell These customers Cortex and stopped doing the Cortex demos altogether. Cresh describes the experience of, quote, the total 180 degrees that shift from ice cold to red hot buying frenzy as deeply unsettling. What's more, the Cortex demos that Cresh and co performed were by his account pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses. This is the situation up and down the corporate org chart. Cresh has a reader whose title is Head of AI at a billion dollar firm who tells him that, quote, their job is totally fraudulent, but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organization. This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies who have publicly announced 100x productivity gains, but who confessed to Cresh that nothing of the sort has happened. Why are companies making these claims because their customers were making these claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100xed its productivity with AI unless you too had 100xed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar with real consequences. Getting enterprise contracts canceled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn't really matter to your organization's mission is a great way to get fired. With the state of the industry dominated by froth lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying totally gamable metrics such as money spent on AI as a means of evaluating employees and divisions between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage. There is now a gigantic market for AI solutions. At best, these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be procuring AI enabled services for the business. This isn't a harmless frippery. Contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made sufficiently AI to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse, every fake AI project that produces real results because it's not really AI adds credibility to the AI true believers who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI. Cresh ends his essay with a long section on how to navigate AI mania, advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully that isn't me. Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little bit on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania? I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're in charge is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're normally in charge of tell you that all of your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal. Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a snowflake database, but unlike Snowflake, Cortex is controlled via conversational plain language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company's snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never backs asses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it. The other question Cresh implicitly raises is how can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work? The answer is that these AI users are centaurs, experienced workers who were assisted by automation on terms they set for themselves. Thanks to skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and more importantly, good uses of code generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker driven automation improves quality, while capital driven automation improves throughput. An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't 100x your code this way, at least not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work, and in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost. That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms to improve their work in ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a token maximization scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't sufficiently AI when they set out to do a project. No one makes them prove that it couldn't be done by AI. As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to. All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword compliance dysfunct from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions, they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage. All right, well, thank you for that. I remembered something I forgot to mention in the intro here, which is to say thank you to John, who is mastering this. So at that meeting about the paperback release of Inshidification with my publishers, we all suddenly realized that I had not recorded an audio version of the substantial new introduction I wrote for the paperback, and that it would be really nice if we could release that with a new version the audio when it comes out. And so I sat down and recorded about an hour of audio, I believe, on Thursday and sent it to John and he turned it around in a day. And so it's now undergoing QA at Macmillan and we'll figure out how to release that. I might just like stick it in the podcast feed or something for people. We're trying to figure out where and how we're going to release that, but John did yeoman work on that, so thank you, John. Next week I will not be recording podcasts. I'LL be in Edinburgh at the festival and the following week I will be in Australia, and the week after that I'm going to be on vacation and the week after that I'm going to be in Warsaw for the Polish launch of Inshitification, and the week after that I may be at home. So September 13th likely your next opportunity to hear me get on my bullshit again. So until then, have a great rest of August. Great September, a great Labor Day if you celebrate and yeah, talk to you later. That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years and anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ourn because we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer, and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.