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THE IDEOLOGY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE  
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João Camargo
July 29, 2025
Common Dreams [[link removed]]

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_ The AI hype is essentially propaganda, the main purpose of which is
to accelerate layoffs, to fuel financial speculation, and to divert
investment and resources toward a new jump into the abyss by economic
and political elites. _

A double exposure photograph is shown of a portrait of Elon Musk and
a person holding a telephone displaying the grok artificial
intelligence logo in Kerlouan in Brittany in France on February 18,
2025, Vincent Feuray / Hans Lucas via AFP via Getty Images

 

Models of computerization and automation have been developed for over
80 years. A certain sense of the healthy embarrassment led most people
involved in these researches to avoid calling it "Artificial
Intelligence." In keeping with the spirit of our times, the new
techlords Elon Musk [[link removed]],
Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos have poured hundreds of
millions into social media, academia, and the press to promote the
"Artificial Intelligence" hype and normalize this expression. But
their ideological project is not innovative.

AI refers mainly to text synthesis machines (and to a lesser extent,
image and pattern analysis and classification machines for
"autonomous" cars and deepfakes). These machines are incapable of
producing new information; they don't "think" about what they're
writing, using only the probability of what will be written next,
according to the databases they've been programmed with. As such,
there is no imminent awareness or a new entity that wants to destroy
us like James Cameron's Terminator. The AI hype is essentially
propaganda, the main purpose of which is to accelerate layoffs, to
fuel financial speculation, and to divert investment and resources
toward a new jump into the abyss by economic and political elites.

AI's main appeal for the general public isn't even the probabilities
that build generally coherent texts and lists, but the language
enhancement phase, a new coat of paint that produces an almost human
language. They call it "Artificial Intelligence," but the real name is
Large Language Model. The most famous models are ChatGPT, Claude,
Gemini, DeepSeek and MechaHitler (Grok).

Considering the disastrous state of information on the internet today,
language models are already suffering from a kind of Mad Cow Disease.
Just as cows in the 1990s got sick from being fed bone meal and meat
from other cows, so language models are degenerating as they are
programmed based on data from the internet, where there is already so
much data produced by other language models, in particular ChatGPT,
that errors can swell to the point of incomprehensibility. Just as Mad
Cow Disease contaminated humans, AI is definitely contaminating us.

The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at the
expense of those who work.

The promises that the techlords and politicians who have joined the AI
hype have for us are generally false—the good as well as the bad.
Language models are not going to end humanity or replace essential
tasks in societies and do away with useless work. They are actually
creating precarious, underpaid, and hidden work, among other things
for the people who have to check that the answers given by the models
are in polite language and not like Elon Musk's MechaHitler calling
for Jewish genocides and mass rapes. This in no way means that there
aren't already millions of people being fired in the hype that ChatGPT
or another language model may eventually replace them. In many cases
people are then rehired for less pay afterward.

Today's language models don't produce knowledge beyond what is already
inside the databases that programmed them. We hear climate deniers
claim that language models will solve the climate crisis, but this is
redundant. Models based on scientific texts and decades of climate
negotiations know how to solve the climate crisis, which has been
public knowledge for decades—we need to end the fossil industry in
the very short term so solve the climate crisis. Anything else is the
ideology of collapse that has been embraced by capitalists. Models
based on pseudoscience and random content taken from the internet will
spew out garbage in response to any prompt. If what goes into the
programming of the models is bad, what comes out can only be bad. So,
the point is not that an AI will become too intelligent and wipes us
out, the point is that there is no intelligence involved.

But this hasn't prevented language models from being used widely, with
unknown and private algorithms, managing huge amounts of data. It is
guaranteed that there will be misinterpretations of data and requests
that will cause irreparable damage (in health, in criminal data, in
energy systems, in the allocation of social benefits, as has already
happened in several countries). There will be no one to blame for the
consequences, as the billionaires who spread AI outsource their
responsibility for all this with the backing of the political elites.

The dissemination of language models on a large scale corresponds to
an ideological project of the technolords, selling the idea that
humans are just organic versions of computers, reduced strictly to
what they can produce. In capitalism, the main promise of AI is the
abstract possibility of making a series of jobs redundant or
unnecessary. The point is not even to make them redundant or
unnecessary, but simply to create the illusion that they can open the
door to laying off millions, without even having to prove how AI would
replace those people. It's the eternal return to "increasing
productivity," replacing labor with technology in theory. To install
this ideological project on a large scale, widespread data theft and
the end of privacy would have to be normalized, with surveillance
systems and permanent punishment for the poorest. This has nothing to
do with a great technological advance or any global awareness
nonsense. The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at
the expense of those who work.

The scale of the ideological project based on "Artificial
Intelligence" is catastrophic: firing hundreds of millions of people
working in health, education, justice, science, art, public services,
and the press with the vague promise of automation to substitute their
work. This ideological project would also entail a massive expansion
of data centers and network infrastructure, skyrocketing energy and
material needs in the midst of the climate crisis. Techlords and the
deluded politicians who support them care little if AI language models
fail to replace most of the jobs they have already started to destroy.
The techlords' doctors will still be people, just like their teachers,
lawyers, and information services. For most of the world's population,
what could be expected from such a project is more poverty and an
incomparable degradation of any public and private services, handed
over to automated parrots built with databases contaminated by other
automated parrots.

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Joao Camargo is a climate activist in grassroots movement Climaximo in
Portugal and in the Climate Jobs campaign. He's an environmental
engineer and climate change researcher at the University of Lisbon and
the author of two books: Climate Change Combat Manual (in Portugal and
Spain) and Portugal in Flames - How to rescue the forests.

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