I feel your frustration, but it’s just normal human behavior, no need for a psyop. A lot of people are emotionally invested in AI being a fad, useless, easily controlled, a capitalist boondoggle, a circular financing scam, a bubble about to explode. The alternative is that we live in an incredibly dangerous time, because obviously if we’re building something smarter than ourselves, we’re building the kitchen where we’ll be cooked.

So you get the normal reactions:

1. Nothing that happens is ever surprising. Navier-Stokes was stolen, HuggingFace was pedestrian and normal, and coding agents that last year could barely write a function and now can do a day’s worth of work in ten minutes will never be able to do anything more, because this is the end of history.

2. The people that say otherwise are lying. Because it’ll make them rich (although they are already rich). Because they are a cult (although regular people asked if we should build machines that are better than us at everything have the same reaction). Because they are marketing geniuses (although suspiciously few companies advertise the lethality of their products).

3. The people who’ve been warning about this the longest are weird and in a sex cult. (Except Alan Turing.) (Except Geoffrey Hinton.) (Except Stephen Hawking.) (You are in this group. You must be, otherwise they’d have to listen to you.)

I do hope they’re right. But their song will never change, and when some misaligned AI kills thousands, they will say that of course AIs were always going to kill thousands, but did you know the guy who told us so also writes fanfic?